Inspired by Philip Shabecoff’s book of the same name, the ambitious documentary A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet takes as its subject the very history of American environmentalism. From the foundings of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club as well as the inaugural Earth Day through the Love Canal disaster, fights for global rain forests and the counter-revolution pushback of industry during the Reagan Administration on to climate change and more, director Mark Kitchell’s wide-ranging yet compelling film — essential viewing for those with a social conscience, and an interest in where we’ve been and where we’re going in the struggle for a better, sustainable planet Earth — showcases a rare and cogent macro-portrait skill unmatched in the arena of this topic since the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run Features, unrated, 101 minutes)

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, the paranormal events at a house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, a suburban tract along the south shore of Long Island, New York, have inspired all kinds of books — most notably Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller — and 10 different movies. Make that 11, now. Director Eric Walter’s new film, however, is a bit different. My Amityville Horror is a documentary look at the events that terrified young Daniel Lutz and his family in late 1975, as told from the perspective and recollection of Lutz himself.

In December of ’75, young Daniel, part of a newly blended family, moved into the aforementioned Dutch Colonial-style house with his mother Kathy, younger brother and sister, and new stepfather George, a burly, bearded ex-Marine. Thirteen months earlier, Ronald DeFeo had shot and killed all six members of his nuclear family in the home while they slept. The Lutzes knew of this before purchasing the home and moving in, and didn’t have a problem with it. Over the next month-and-a-half, though, they would report all sorts of strange disturbances and chilling incidents, from swarms of flies and pockets of cold and overwhelming odors to apparitions, green slime and demonic possessions. In mid-January they would leave, sending a mover for their possessions and never returning again.

Rather understandably guarded by nature, Daniel, now a divorced UPS driver and father of two teens, is a frequently sympathetic figure (“All I walk around doing is protecting that 10-year-old kid,” he says of his memories, and interactions with others). He relates some of his recollections of events with detail, confidence and emotion, all of which certainly underscore his belief in them. And yet Daniel also confesses to a tremendous antipathy toward his stepfather, who would later delight in introducing himself as “that Amityville guy,” only one of many things that disgusted him about George. Daniel also doesn’t seem to connect any of this — the weird and/or supernatural events he describes the entire family witnessing, or his relative state of mind at the time in question — to what he calls George’s obsession with the occult, and skill with telekinesis.

Director Walter flirts around all these bizarre incongruities and coincidences, constructing his film in an unusual tapestral manner. Sometimes he is the off-camera interviewer, asking questions of Daniel; other times it’s a psychologist with whom Daniel isn’t in regular therapy. Still other times it’s a paranormal investigator who investigated the case years ago with the Lutzes. Also interwoven are a couple awkwardly structured roundtable-type chats with various academics and talking heads.

The net result is a movie that tantalizes, but always feels just off its mark. Walter does a poor job in establishing a basic chronological timeline of events, and, time after time, doesn’t follow up on what should be obvious questions — Daniel’s offhand mention, for instance, that he tried to kill his stepfather “many times.” Perhaps needing to kowtow a bit to keep his sensitive and potentially volatile subject in the fold, Walter doesn’t want to put to him hard questions regarding the potential suggestibility of a disaffected and lonely child reeling from “losing” the special relationship with his mother. So many years later, there is probably no easy or pat explanation of all the events in Amityville, but the aforementioned and other details (along with the fact that Daniel’s siblings declined to be interviewed for this project) help contribute to a skeptic’s point-of-view. My Amityville Horror opens this weekend at the Arena Cinema in Hollywood. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information in general, click here to visit the movie’s website. (IFC Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

What begins as a grand concept full of unusual possibilities — twinned, touching planets with opposing gravitational fields — quickly succumbs to a frustrating mixture of pretentiousness and torpor in Upside Down, Argentinean-born writer-director Juan Solanas’ dystopian romance, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess. A gussied-up, threadbare fairytale narrative that unfolds in perpetual pursuit of memorable images over narrative sensibility, this misfire illustrates the axiom that even if not all good ideas are original, all original ideas are certainly not good.



Unfolding against a backdrop of inter-world tension, the basic split on display in Upside Down tracks loosely along the same line as the recent Total Recall remake, except with contrasting gravities — the planet “up there” is a wealthy, business-oriented and exploitative one, while the one below it exists in poverty-stricken servitude. Despite this, Adam Kirk (Sturgess) and Eden Moore (Dunst) strike up an adolescent friendship when they meet at the mountain peaks that almost touch. As teens, it bends toward romance when Adam pulls her down into his world with a rope (visiting the other planet doesn’t release a person from the gravitational pull of their native planet). They canoodle, but when interplanetary border patrol agents attack them, Eden tumbles back into her world.

Flash forward a decade. Adam believes Eden to be dead, but it turns out that she was merely concussed, and has amnesia. In his desperate attempts to gain some face time with Eden, Adam gets a job at TransWorld working on an innovative face-lift cream based on a secret, gravity-neutralizing ingredient that’s been passed down for generations in his family. So begins Adam’s quest — with the assistance of disaffected co-worker Bob Boruchowicz (Timothy Spall) — to both devise a weighted suit to mask his innate gravitational pull and woo Eden all over again, all while maintaining a separate identity.

It all sounds outrageous, I realize, and it is, on a certain level. Yet for the uniqueness of its conceit, there’s a simplicity to the actual story at the movie’s core. The setting may be distinctive, but the narrative is anything but fanciful or unmoored. In fact, it’s kind of a yawn. (Various benchmarks include Another Earth, The Vow, Cloud Atlas, The Adjustment Bureau as well as pretty much the entire filmography of Andrew Niccol.) Solanas is clearly aiming for a sort of less-is-more lyricism. The problem is that Upside Down is loaded down by misstep after misstep.

First, and most crucially, is a lack of honest investment in the putative civil unrest between the worlds. Solanas’ simple little love story has a certain ceiling of intrigue, but what initially comes across as just piddling eventually comes to feel overwhelmingly insipid when the plot begins to revolve around Adam’s universe-revolutionizing formula. Upside Down then asks viewers to believe things beyond the pale — that an almighty and evil corporation like TransWorld can’t conduct a simple chemical analysis, or that they’d eventually be foiled by… having someone beat them to file a patent application (yes, seriously). Later, Solanas shoehorns in a ridiculous stepping-stone-type chase and shoot-out (you know, for “thrills”) that feels grafted on per some weird studio note.

I could go on (and on — don’t get me started on its stupid ending), but even the idea of further dissection wearies me, honestly. Terrible isn’t the right word to use to describe Upside Down, which suffers from a myopia that comes only with the indulgence of a Big Idea; it is a real, top-shelf mess, however. Dunst and Sturgess are fine, and have an OK chemistry together, but the film suffers from having so few supporting characters of note. While Spall brings a wry personality to Bob, he can’t breathe a convincing multi-dimensionality into his character. And, lacking characters, Solanas’ movie is just this strange, enervated mash-up of poorly sketched ideas tossed across an expensive canvas. It’s a tone poem of wobbly, inconsistent pitch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)

An odd little duck of a film, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s If I Were You kicks around enjoyably for quite a while in the same sandbox as some of Woody Allen‘s mid-career farces, before eventually pivoting and skipping off into less rewarding territory. The story of a woman who accidentally learns of her husband’s infidelity and then enters into a strange friendship and pact with his unwitting mistress, this bouncy but meandering comedy would benefit from an editorial haircut that trims down some of its less inspired subplots.

It’s a shock for New York City focus group and marketing manager Madelyn Reid (Marcia Gay Harden) when she stumbles across her husband Paul (Joseph Kell) one afternoon in a restaurant, in a lover’s clinch with his mistress. When he gets nervous and scampers off after an exploratory phone call from her, the young woman, a would-be actress named Lucy (Leonor Watling), is despondent and hysterical. Madelyn follows her back to her apartment, where she foils a bungled suicide attempt.

When her unsuspecting rival opens up to her, Madelyn at first sees an opportunity to seize the upper hand. But Lucy, stressing their shared unhappiness, suggests that they start making choices for one another (“The way to fix our lives is to stop making our own decisions!”). Madelyn slowly accedes, and trips into a contemporized production of King Lear when she accompanies Lucy to an audition. Hijinks ensue, wouldn’t you know — with Madeyln lying to Paul about an affair she’s not having, Paul getting jealous about a co-worker of Madelyn’s whom he believes to be the offending cuckolder, and a handsome and affable stranger, Derek (Aidan Quinn, quite good), popping up at a moment of crisis.

It’s not merely the introduction of the King Lear gambit that makes If I Were You easy to imagine as a stageplay; it’s a fairly hermetic story, with lots of talky one-on-one or small couples scenes. This tack works for a while, but a sense of claustrophobia eventually sets in, aided by the movie’s lack of compelling visual vocabulary. It’s a low-budget offering, understandably, but Carr-Wiggin and cinematographer Bruce Worrall deliver a flat telling, and Aidan Leroux and Sean Breaugh’s spare production design offers little by way of distinguishing features.

If I Were You‘s abundant early charms are built largely around the amusing interplay of the distraught, distracted Harden and the deliciously flighty, simple-minded Watling. But several subplots — including one with married co-worker Keith (Gary Piquer), who’s enthusiastic about Paul’s infidelity, figuring it opens up the door for he and Madelyn to have a fling — aren’t as amusing as Carr-Wiggin imagines them to be. A far tighter focus, and re-imagination of the piece as basically a three-hander, would have given it greater punch and pay-off. As is, If I Were You is only worth a look for hardcore fans of the talent involved, or indie comedies of existential crisis more broadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. If I Were You opens in select theaters nationwide, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. (Kino Lorber, R, 115 minutes)

Horror has always been a popular format for anthologizing, both because of its DIY roots and the fact that certain kernels of elemental discomfort often don’t quite rise to the merits of a full-length story or movie. A massive anthology film rooted in those children’s educational books from days of yore, producers Tim League and Ant Timpson’s The ABCs of Death corrals 26 short movies from 26 different directors — assigning each a letter of the alphabet and then giving them free reign in choosing a word (or phrase) to encapsulate a story involving death. It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but one that never fully congeals or takes flight, owing to the vast qualitative spread of the offerings.

A natural (and popular) selection at both last year’s Fantastic Fest and the Toronto Film Festival, The ABCs of Death features a number of known or critically anointed young genre directors, but also as much as anything serves as a hand-up showcase for young talent. That experiential diversity is reflected in the breadth of the work. Some entries are under-sketched while others, like Jon Schnepp’s aptly named WTF!, are stylistic orgies of pointlessness. Many, like Noburo Iguchi’s giggly-gross Fart, actually have a comedic bent.

Of the spread, though, seven were by my count passably entertaining, and only around five others truly superlative. The cream of the crop share a penchant for experimentation — the lifeblood of short-form film and video. Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s heady, gorgeously shot, investigational Orgasm leaves a mark upon one’s memory, as does Simon Rumley‘s grim Pressure, a slice of kitten snuff porn. Srdjan Spasojevic’s Removed tantalizingly hints at something deeper, while Xavier Gens’ deeply unsettling XXL presents a fat girl’s self-immolation. The best effort, though, may just be Marcel Sarmiento’s slow-motion Dogfight — a twisted, how’d-they-do-that rendering of an underground death match between man and dog.

It sounds perhaps racist to say, but The ABCs of Death could have perhaps benefited from a few more Western voices. A number of entries dote in yawning fashion on weighted topics that are familiar psycho-sexual stand-ins (Japanese schoolgirls, female body taboos), while others — with Nazis, and a girl with a tattoo of the exploding Twin Towers on her breasts — seem designed for empty shock. This compilation lacks some great genre minds, and overall pales in comparison to other recent anthologies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, R, 129 minutes)

Cop thrillers are ubiquitous, but it’s fairly rare to see a movie that takes as its primary focus other emergency responders. That novelty is but one of several factors that help distinguish and elevate The Call, an enjoyably nerve-racking thriller of imperilment that takes as its heroine a distraught 911 call center operator. Solid performances by Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin abet a rigorous, smart packaging from director Brad Anderson.

If much of the enjoyment of The Call is not necessarily in what happens so much as how it happens, the movie still imparts good, popcorn-level tension and thrills. Further adding to its differentiation, The Call also delivers a nice end twist that isn’t so much a wild revelation as just a little spiky add-on of moral ambiguity. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking done right — stirred cocktail of tension, with the ability to also actually spark a conversation. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 94 minutes)

Language of a Broken Heart is exactly the movie that one expects it to be — a frustrating quality for some, perhaps, but smooth medicine for those who trust and like writer-actors’ puppy dog tales that unfold loosely in the vein of the work of Edward Burns. An earnest, uncomplicated and funny-around-the-edges little romantic comedy about a guy on the rebound but still stuck in psychological orbit of his ex, multi-hyphenate Juddy Talt’s movie works best as a showcase for his talents.

The story is paper thin, even by genre standards. Nick (Talt) is a best-selling author who can write eloquently about feelings and love, but can’t ever seem to find a woman that doesn’t cheat on him. (There’s some truth-in-therapy insights about his romantic picker to be tilled, but this isn’t that movie.) When his fiancée Violet (Lara Pulver) suggests a break after a dalliance with another man, Nick leaves New York City and heads home to reconnect with family and friends, including best pal Cubbie (Ethan Cohn) and his mom Mimi (Julie White). A luggage screw-up leads him to meet free spirit Emma (Kate French), who wears berets, shoots a mean game of pool and pushes Nick out of his comfort zone.

Emma is of course a total cinematic fantasy construct — the perfectly made-up girl with beaming white teeth and “dorky hip” glasses who, you know, also manages an unopened antiquarian bookstore she recently inherited from her grandmother. She’s fun-loving and “spontaneous,” and uses words like scallywag. And Nick, as written, isn’t necessarily much better developed; he’s kind of clueless, and a doormat, which doesn’t track with his professional success.

Still, just when one might be ready to either punch themselves in the head or the filmmakers in the nuts over the preciousness of said logline and description, it’s a pleasure to report that Language of a Broken Heart wins out — at least on the margins, for those predisposed to have an interest in laid-track rom-coms — by way of its way of its performances and interplay. It’s kind of nice that Talt doesn’t resort to slapstick-y hijinks or gross-out humor; his screenplay, however functional the characterizations, is at least rooted in the interactions and recognizably human frustrations of those characters. Oscar Nuñez, of The Office, contributes a funny supporting performance as Nick’s therapist, who’s undergoing his own divorce, and there are some smart little well-observed barbs, too, as when Cubbie, in only the manner a best friend can, takes the piss out of Nick by saying, “I read somewhere that depressions effects losers the most — that’s just science.”

Talt, who sort of recalls Owen Wilson by way of Chris Evans, is an appealing peg on which to hang Language of a Broken Heart, even if it is a well-worn jacket. And French is beautiful and appropriately, engagingly flirty. Apart from a nice time-lapse bit in Times Square, director Rocky Powell delivers a fairly straightforward and blandly shot interpretation of the script. There’s never a real suspension of disbelief here — one always knows they’re watching a movie. But it’s a popular track for a reason, so rom-com fans with an indie appreciation might enjoy just saying, “Play it again, Sam.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the movie’s trailer and more information, visit its eponymous website. (House Lights Media, R, 98 minutes)

Nope, the directorial debut of Jules Stewart, the mother of Twilight star Kristen Stewart, isn’t a flash-forward sequel to James Belushi’s K-9, or the tale of an exponentially high mountain range. Instead, the bewildering K-11, at once intense and archly presented, is a careening updating (send-up? celebration?) of women-in-prison exploitation flicks like Caged Heat. In his Hollywood Reporter review from its Turin Film Festival premiere, Stephen Dalton characterized K-11 as feeling like “a deranged John Waters remake of The Shawshank Redemption,” but a Lee Daniels re-imagination of a gender-indiscriminate Girl, Interrupted might be another appropriate shorthand descriptor of the movie’s looniness.

A pulpy, psychologically hollow and emotionally indiscernible mélange of phony jailhouse intrigue and showy gender-politicking, with a bit of anal rape sprinkled in, Stewart’s film is too ridiculous to be taken seriously and not tightly scripted and purposefully tongue-in-cheek enough to track as parody (behold the photo above). For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its 15-city theatrical engagements, including the Laemmle NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, K-11 is also available day-and-date across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Breaking Glass Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

The ghost of Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer who held the imaginations of television news producers captive for a week several weeks ago when he went on a rampgage, shooting several cops and their family members as part of a twisted statement of grievance, hangs over The Kill Hole, a well meaning indie drama of post-traumatic stress disorder and ex-military account-settling. Despite a fairly convincing evocation of mood by writer-director Mischa Webley, this spare yet affected would-be thriller never ripens past the point of a wobbly character study. It’s a half-developed Polaroid, and as such an artful yet shrug-inducing time-whiler. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (RBC Film Group, unrated, 92 minutes)

The United States of America is celebrated as the land of the free, and heralded as a place of great opportunity for entrepreneurs. While true, there’s also a dark grey lining to the silver optimism of that sunny-faced reading, because for almost every societal innovation that helps change and better the way we live, there’s some tale of an enterprising inventor getting screwed out of credit or otherwise left twisting in the wind due to corporate ruthlessness. The engaging documentary Genius on Hold details one such story, and if its attempts to weld a larger allegorical framework extending both backwards and forward in time onto a more structured familial narrative come across as rather hamfisted overreach, there’s still enough of interest here to generally satisfy alt-history buffs. It’s a movie that underscores that the winners and losers of some battles of capitalism aren’t always confined to a single generation; its shadows are long ones. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing/Top Cat Productions, PG, 91 minutes)

The title of Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey is somewhat misleading. An indulgently apportioned look at the classic rock band Journey and their recent reinvention with Arnel Pineda, a Filipino lead singer found through YouTube, director Ramona Diaz’s film takes what could and by all rights should be a fun, engaging fairytale story and stretches it out to near interminable lengths. Two parts shambling tour document and self-congratulatory biography for every one part cross-cultural coming-of-age story, the sporadically lively Don’t Stop Believin’ is all mic-ed up, but also all mixed up.

This is essentially a glad-handing fan project all the way, which certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world with a bit of clarity of vision. But Diaz’s film — which at 105 minutes could use more than just a little haircut — has no strong editorial point-of-view, and as such it drags and fumbles away one’s attention, like a song on repeat. Truly hardcore Journey fans may well greet it with open arms, but others will stop believin’ in its meaningfulness less than halfway through. (See what I did there?) For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its various, rolling theatrical engagements, Don’t Stop Believin’ is also available on VOD beginning today; for more information on both methods of viewing, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Cinedigm/Docurama Films, unrated, 105 minutes)

A documentary snapshot of American photographer Gregory Crewdson‘s decade-long quest to create a series of haunting, exactingly arranged, melancholic portraits of small town life, director Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a nonfiction affirmation of the latent sorrow and loneliness attached to certain surface images, and in its own way a quiet celebration of that almost telepathic connection. An example of narrowcasting through and through — Shapiro punts on a variety of ways to expand the canvas of his storytelling — the movie achieves a certain hold for those inclined toward psycho-social rumination, but by and large fails to connect its subject’s work to society at large.

Crewdson, perhaps best known, if at all, as the guy responsible for the print ad campaigns for Six Feet Under as well as Yo La Tengo’s album art, is an artist with a vision every bit as meticulous as filmmaker David Fincher. His photographs are essentially vast moviescapes crystallized into a single frame — at their core otherworldly moments of arrested time in the lives of the disenfranchised or quietly desperate, with a barely submerged drama lurking just underneath the surface. This sort of attention to detail helps explain the costs involved, which can often rival an independent film production, as well as Crewdson’s inclination for involving himself in every department of his crew.

Almost all of Crewdson’s work is done in the same small Massachusetts town, including his “Beneath the Roses” series, which Brief Encounters captures. A friendly if not quite effusive guy, Crewdson talks some about the impact of seeing David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (which has a similar interest in suburban decay), as well as the influence of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock too; though it evolves into something else, one of his photographs even takes Psycho as its leaping-off point. But these shared anecdotes have a certain surface-only quality. It would be interesting to hear more about Crewdson’s artistic inspirations, which seems to draw as well from Diane Arbus and Stanley Kubrick.

As the son of a psychoanalyst — he recalls laying on the ground as a kid with his ear to the floor of his father’s downstairs office, and that being a potent metaphor for his work now — Crewdson has a keen grasp of the myriad inner feelings and impulses that drive his photography, which can’t be said for all artists. He’s also open to discussing them (unlike, say, Lynch). But Shapiro seems to leave a lot of heavy or more probing questions unasked. Similarly, while some of the small town residents who serve as the subjects in Crewdson’s pictures are interviewed, it would give Brief Encounters a nice sense of contrast to further spotlight their thoughts and impressions about his work.

For those inherently interested in photography, and the relationship between images and human feeling, Shapiro’s hands-off tack more or less works. But, somewhat frustratingly, Brief Encounters also presents viewers with all sorts of unexplored side avenues. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, whose exclusive Los Angeles engagement takes place at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 77 minutes)

A lot of movies wash over you, and that’s OK, even — many are almost designed to. Others, however, cast a pall over your day, and stick to your bones. Alex Gibney‘s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is an example of the latter. One case of child sexual abuse is certainly a tragedy, but the stories at the core of this movie are beyond the pale. A gut-punch nonfiction look at the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal as filtered through the experiential prism of a group of victims from a single Midwestern school for the deaf, and their long quest for justice, the Oscar-winning Gibney‘s documentary takes what seems by now to be an almost depressingly proforma tale of outrage and humiliation, and connects the dots to a much larger and systemic international cover-up by the Vatican. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 107 minutes)

A terrifically fresh narrative backdrop and the often delightful interplay of two timing-savvy comedians, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, help give wings to director Paul Weitz’s Admission, an airy and engaging adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of the same name. Evincing a pleasant yet not too demanding sense of depth, this comedy of midlife awakening digs into issues of loss and love but in an ultimately comforting manner, resulting in a crowd-pleasing film that should connect heartily with slightly more adult audiences.

In seriocomic films like About a Boy, In Good Company and Being Flynn, Weitz has tapped into familial rediscovery via stories of adrift protagonists who either struggle with or feel outright that they don’t have anything to offer emotionally. Though shot through with a harried quality which feels like a bet-hedging surrender to the casting of Fey (this could easily have been her stab at Truman Show-type reinvention, if only the filmmakers would have had more courage), Admission slots comfortably in the aforementioned canon of Weitz, as a loose-limbed movie whose nominal sins are of omission rather than commission. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 106 minutes)

An achingly earnest immigration drama whose compelling low-budget artistic vision can’t save it from its overly programmatic dramatic roots and muddled assemblage, Dreamer is the sort of expressive indie film one wants to like and recommend more than one honestly does and can. A recent premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival, writer-director Jesse Salmeron’s movie is loosely in the mold of something like Chris Weitz’s well received A Better Life, from a couple years back — each film showcases the razor’s edge of life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send a hard-working but unfortunate person tumbling into criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise. The problem is, Dreamer isn’t as good, and poignant, as the macro story it’s telling. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Undocumented Productions, unrated, 91 minutes)

Somewhere deep inside The Last Exorcism Part II may lurk an intriguing idea for a character-based horror movie follow-up, but it never manages to quite tease it out. Ditching both the mock-doc framework of the original 2010 possession film (which was inventive but undone by some thunderously stupid editorial choices in the third act), as well as its flashes of dark humor, this technically efficient but wholly pointless follow-up fails to expand on its mooring mythology in as compelling a fashion as in something like the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (CBS Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)

It seems incongruous during a rampant obesity epidemic in the United States, the notion of around 49 million Americans suffering from “food insecurity” — not knowing where either their next meal will come from, or the money for it. But the smart and poignantly argued new documentary A Place at the Table, in assaying governmental farm subsidy policies and other social welfare assistance, casts hunger and obesity as neighbors, not distant and exclusive conditions separated by a yawning chasm. Engorged with feeling, this nonfiction tale leads with its heart, and successfully makes a persuasive case for social investments that offset future “up-stream” societal costs across a wide range of arenas.

Against a backdrop which has seen a 40 percent rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables over the past three decades, versus a 40 percent decrease in the price of processed foods, A Place at the Table puts in its crosshairs agricultural policies (including $250 billion in USDA subsidies since 1995) that underwrite the massive production of in particular corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar — the basic ingredients in many high-fat, high-sodium processed foods — but not other staple crops, or whole grains. It does this mostly by polite cajoling, though, rather than heated hectoring.

The film’s rhythms sometimes tip toward the sedate, and while co-directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson succeed in finding articulate and compelling interview subjects, they sometimes have trouble picking effective editorial pivot points and sharpening the spear tip of their arguments, making full sense of their case subjects’ situations. Still, with original music by T Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars, A Place at the Table aims to be a movie with more emotional punching power, which isn’t to say that it’s shoddily researched, just sensitive (perhaps a little too much so) to charges of wonky factorial overkill.

Not unlike Food, Inc., though, it shines a light on just the dispiriting degree to which so many — and especially so many children — are prisoners of a system in which the vast majority of the scope of their diet lies outside of reasonably expected mechanisms of their own control. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the more about the movie, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia/Participant Media, unrated, 86 minutes)

If superhero tales are our modern-day big screen myths, fairytale adventures like Snow White and the Huntsman and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters are attempting to run a certain zeitgeist side game, blending fantasy folk legend with a decidedly contemporary appetite for action swashbuckling, albeit of the sword-and-crossbow variety. Peddling pat celebrations of valor and perseverance, but marked by distressingly humdrum characterizations, director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer arrives as a piece of showcase entertainment for the continued advancement of in particular facial motion-capture, putting its characters through an effects-laden steeplechase that squeezes out some synthetic bedazzlement unattached to much in the way of deep or transportive feeling. Nicholas Hoult, so great in the recent Warm Bodies, acquits himself here, but he has chemistry with Eleanor Tomlinson that can be described as lukewarm at best. Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane and Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, seem hedged in by the prescribed functionality of their characters. All in all, Jack tames, rather than slays. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 114 minutes)

When Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction hit big in 1994, like an open-handed smack to the face of the film industry proper, its stylized noir plotting, fizzy mixture of violence and pop cultural dissection, and in particular its partite storytelling structure spawned a tsunami of imitators. Almost two decades later, that influence can still be felt, most recently in the form of writer-director Leone Marucci’s caffeinated, terminally bizarre The Power of Few. A New Orleans-set tapestral affair whose disparate storylines nominally coalesce over the course of one afternoon, this jumbled mash-up of conspiracy-tinged action and armchair philosophizing is offbeat and unique in some respects but hamstrung by a strange combination of slapdash plotting and its own self-importance.



To say that The Power of Few, produced by co-star Q’orianka Kilcher (above), revolves around the theft and smuggling of the Shroud of Turin — which is what a retired Larry King, playing himself, pops up to bloviate about in a couple televised segments within the movie — makes it sound a lot more interesting and exciting than it actually is. Imagine if, instead of race and socioeconomic class, Crash was set in the Big Easy and more wanly about hope and positivity, and then just had an occasionally mentioned subplot about a stolen religious artifact. Oh, and a few select characters using slightly futuristic technology, to muddy the timeline. Oh, and then the movie was open to fan casting, as well as online editing suggestions in post-production. That seems to be The Power of Few, basically — an independent film casserole in which a mess of ideas are erroneously declared to add up to one big one.

Needing some medicine for his baby brother, a teenager (Devin Gearhart) goes to a store, where he mulls plans to hold up the pregnant cashier (Moon Bloodgood). Dom (Jesse Bradford) is on the run from a couple of gang-bangers (Anthony Anderson and Juvenile) looking to silence him in advance of testifying against their friend, and he finds himself rescued by Alexa (Kilcher), a courier who could be the sister of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character from Premium Rush, except by way of Aeon Flux. While a couple of homeless pals, Doke and Brown (Christopher Walken and Jordan Prentice), serve as the piece’s informal Greek chorus, police agent-types Clyde (Christian Slater) and Marti (Nicky Whelan, giving nice tough-grrrl) zoom around town arguing about finding the “mark” and “package,” which may or may not be an item given to Alexa.

Wound up nicely to music by Mike Simpson, The Power of Few delights for a while simply because one doesn’t know quite what the hell to expect from it. When Walken isn’t obviously reading lines from cue cards about having once gotten his hair cut every 3,000 miles, pegged to his oil change, his other dialogue (“I could eat the ass of a low-flying duck”) just as frequently sounds like the jazz-riff improvisations of a Ron Burgandy acolyte — which kind of works, actually, since his character is supposed to be a former television news anchor. But Slater and Whelan, meanwhile, appear to be in some sort of Southland Tales spin-off, while Tione Johnson — in a small but crucial role as a candy-loving adolescent — seems purloined from some hypothetical Nicole Holofcener dramedy with Catherine Keener lurking just out of frame as an after-school care-giver stricken with white guilt. There’s no tonal consistency or unifying vision to Marucci’s work, in other words.

Cinematographer Reinhart Peschke delivers a grab-bag assortment of styles, which helps give parts of the movie an undeniable pop. But production designer Ren Blanco’s work at times feels chintzy, and Marucci doesn’t have the benefit or editorial vision of smart pivot points to help try to corral his hopelessly careening, free-form narrative. As a result, The Power of Few feels like at least four distinct movies fighting for control of the overall apportioned running time. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Steelyard Pictures, R, 95 minutes)

A nagging sense of missed opportunity somewhat weighs down Dark Skies, an intermittently intriguing and fairly restrained chiller that fails to fully flesh out some of its more interesting and distinguishing narrative elements. Relying less on CGI spectacle than his previous genre efforts, Legion and Priest, writer-director Scott Stewart’s generally well orchestrated supernatural mood piece details a suburban family who find themselves under peril of unfriendly alien visitation.

The PG-13-rated Dark Skies may have trouble touching the upper limits of the nine-figure worldwide grosses for Paranormal Activity, Insidious and Sinister, with whom the movie shares producer Jason Blum. Nevertheless, with the easy international translation of its premise, Dark Skies should deliver a handsome return-on-investment, with strong ancillary value and ready-made franchise opportunity. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Dimension, PG-13, 97 minutes)

In 2009, Arab Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda delivered a romance set against a significantly chaotic sociopolitical backdrop in the form of Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig. She imprints a different genre exercise against a similarly tumultuous Middle Eastern setting, though with far less fetching results, in Inescapable, a jumbled mixture of political mystery and questing-father drama also starring Siddig.

The story unfolds in early 2011, before the wider effects of the Arab Spring helped plunge Syria into civil war. White collar Canadian family man Adib Kareem (Siddig, above) finds his blissful domesticity threatened when his oldest daughter Muna (Jay Anstey) secretly travels from Toronto to Damascus to learn more about the ancestral homeland her father never discusses. When she goes missing for several days, Adib fears Muna’s disappearance may be connected to his checkered past in the military police, so dives headlong into the closed and paranoid autocratic state, enlisting the assistance of ex-fiancée Fatima (Marisa Tomei), former friend and colleague Sayid (Oded Fehr) and Canadian consulate official Paul Ridge (Joshua Jackson). Putative intrigue ensues.

A gala presentation at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival, Inescapable has the logline and “give-me-back-my-daughter” single-mindedness of a slightly classier, mid-career Mel Gibson revenge flick, albeit with the add-on of ethnic specificity. It certainly bears many of the marks of a thriller — a car chase, a shootout, lots of people telling Adib to leave the country — but all its details and scenes seem haphazardly arranged, and don’t cohere into anything meaningful. With the fictionalized story attached very personally to the experiences of her father, a Canadian immigrant, Nada opts for strange points of focus (Adib engages in some intense beard trimming) without bothering to elucidate any deeper meaning.

The film’s cultural and political exploration tracks wholly on a surface level, too. Cairo Time, in its delicate detailing of a burgeoning middle-aged romance certainly frowned upon and even made dangerous by surrounding sociopolitical realities, felt smart and of the moment. Inescapable, by contrast, is clumsy and nonspecific, even as a prologue snapshot to the current violence and unrest in Syria.

Siddig has a stately, almost regal presence, and commands a certain amount of attention. And Tomei — as a woman who learned English as a second language in the long-dashed hopes that her beloved would eventually send for her — is surprisingly good, and almost unrecognizable. Any qualms about her portraying a Syrian are quickly laid to rest. Unfortunately, the inert Inescapable never otherwise proves its merits — getting bogged down in phony issues of loyalty and cloak-and-dagger recrimination while ignoring the much more interesting human contours of its relationships. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Inescapable will also be available on VOD beginning February 25. (IFC Films, R, 92 minutes)

A vibrant, fun, cross-cultural romantic comedy with echoes of Jerry Maguire, writer-director Daniel Hsia’s Shanghai Calling tells the story of a multimillion-dollar business deal gone sideways, and a type-A, on-assignment American lawyer scrambling to make things right while also incrementally, almost subconsciously, experiencing an attitudinal shift in priorities. Offbeat scenarios, a fresh backdrop and warm performances enliven this surprising, Chinese-shot treat, which makes great use of its cast without ever sacrificing the integrity of its characters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Shanghai Calling opens in Los Angeles at the Mann Chinese 6 and at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, and is also available across VOD and digital platforms, including iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, Google Play and more. To view its trailer, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (China Film Company/Americatown, unrated, 101 minutes)

I’m not sure what’s more depressing about A Good Day to Die Hard — its gassy qualitative failings, or the fact that star Bruce Willis, never particularly shy about what he deemed some of the shortcomings of the second and third movies in the series, thinks that this is what audiences want to see from beleaguered police detective John McClane. Unquestionably the worst entry of the once-great 25-year-old action franchise, this fifth film has the look, feel and defunct personality of an anonymous 1980s actioner. Drained of the spirit, charm and meticulous smarts that made the original movie such a breath of fresh air within its genre — and indeed, elevated it to a piece of great filmmaking, period — it’s an across-the-board dud.

Directed in mostly plodding fashion by John Moore, A Good Day to Die Hard plops McClane (Willis) down in Moscow, where he’s headed on some sort of impromptu diplomatic make-good mission, to try to assist his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney, the top villainous henchman of Jack Reacher). Jack’s been charged with trying to kill a scientist, Komarov (Sebastian Koch), on behalf of Chagarin (Sergey Kolesnikov), a former partner who has political aspirations and is eager to eliminate anyone who can testify to his dirty past. Little does McClane know, however, that his son is actually an undercover CIA agent, and in reality tasked with breaking Komarov free and protecting him in advance of American bureaucratic extraction. When things immediately get a little blow-uppy, John and Jack find themselves on the lam with Komarov and his daughter, Irina (Yulia Snigir), trying to stay out of the crosshairs of Chagarin’s henchman, Alik (Rasha Bukvic).

The vulnerability of McClane — physically, with his bare feet, but also emotionally, with his fractured marriage and two young kids — was a huge part of what made 1988’s Die Hard so special, and made the character’s wisecracks, alternately self-effacing and panicked, so swollen with legitimate feeling. In stark contrast to the hulking physicality of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, Willis’ character, his first starring big screen role, was a true Everyman — outnumbered and most of the time physically overmatched, but possessing of an indefatigable will and an inherent sense of wrong and right.

In A Good Day to Die Hard, McClane stills has quips, but they’re empty, pointless action movie rejoinders, and the manner in which he acts — at one point punching out an innocent guy after a car accident, in order to take his vehicle — feels like an utter betrayal of the character. When, late in the movie, he says he and Jack should be “doing our thing, out there killing scumbags,” it rings false, because that’s never what McClane, a reluctant hero, has been.

Instead, the screenplay, by Skip Woods (Swordfish, Hitman, The A-Team) and Jason Keller,
tries for a bit of parent-child reconciliation parallelism in the form of the McClanes and Komarov and Irina, though this is so half-sketched as to hardly matter. While missing some easy and potentially smart franchise callbacks (the notion of McClane as a nervous flier, and a chance to “shoot the glass”), it instead crams in a couple nods of homage
to the original movie (some helicopter stuff, a villain’s fall) which
seem especially awkward and forced. And while there’s a requisite twist, the villains and their plot — concerning some loose nuclear material from the Chernobyl disaster — are so colorlessly shaded as to invite complete disregard. In fact, the script lacks so much in the way of intelligence that it falls back on old cliches like having its villain eat theatrically (in this case a carrot… yes, seriously) whilst rhapsodizing about how much he hates Americans.

At its core, there is a chasm between the filmmakers of A Good Day to Die Hard. Its insistent editing — full of zooms and pulses — headlines a technical package that evinces no confidence (and rather justifiably so) in its actual narrative. An early chase sequence anchored by practical effects and the destruction of lots of automobiles offers some undeniably pulse-pounding thrills, but it’s all downhill from there. The film’s conclusion, awash in murky greys on a cheap-looking set, feels downright made for television. Even on the small screen, however, this Die Hard doesn’t represent a good day of work for Willis or anyone else — and certainly not a good time for viewers. (20th Century Fox, R, 97 minutes)

An unusual blend of  nonfiction recollection and rather tranquil dramatic re-enactment, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files attempts to disassemble and reconstruct the ordinary-guy façade of a necrophiliac murderer by way of testimonial from three people whose lives intersected the notorious Milwaukee serial killer. The result, while intermittently engaging, feels less cinematic and more suited to television news magazine programming of the sort one might see on A&E or MSNBC during any given weekend.

Dahmer, for those perhaps too young to remember, was arrested in the summer of 1991 when a man’s head was found in his refrigerator, and he was eventually charged with killing 17 people, dismembering their bodies in gruesome ways, saving various trophies and in some cases even eating them. Originally titled just Jeff, director Chris James Thompson’s movie intersperses archival footage with the remembrances of a unique trio — the police detective, Pat Kennedy, who first queried Dahmer and took his confession; the city medical examiner, Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, who processed the crime scene and handled much of the testing that helped identify the victims; and Pamela Bass, a neighbor of Dahmer’s who lived in the same apartment complex and befriended him.

Taken together, these interviewees weave a fairly compelling tale, including their reactions to Dahmer’s death in prison two years after being sentenced to 957 years incarceration. Kennedy in particular is a somewhat theatrical character — his slightly-too-big-for-his-face moustache makes him seem like a cross between Harry Reems and Tom Crean, ready for a rodeo — and his ruminations give the movie its spine. In fact, Kennedy’s memories and anecdotes (it was clothes from his high school-age son that Dahmer borrowed to wear to his first public hearing) are often almost as fascinating for his processing and feelings regarding them as some of the content itself.

It’s a shame, then, that The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, which otherwise benefits from a subtle yet strong score by composer Robert Mulrennan, seems so restless and rudderless. The film’s recreations — starring Andrew Swant as Dahmer — are far from exploitative or gruesome; they mainly consist of everyday routines, and quiet scenes of him buying items he would use in his killings, like a barrel, security cameras and acid. Yet they add little to the collective punch of the movie, and are further undermined by the ill-reasoned use of archival footage featuring the real Dahmer.

Thompson tries to thread a too-fine needle with this already spare experiment, which clocks in at just over 75 minutes. It’s an art collage project that unnecessarily obscures its sizzle and raison d’être when a more straightforward tack would have worked better. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is also available across various cable VOD platforms, as well as iTunes, Xbox and Sundance Now. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (IFC Films, unrated, 75 minutes)