A hollow center, in the form of a decided lack of ambition, lies underneath the colorful candy shell of Escape From Planet Earth, a peppy and at times downright manic animated adventure that eschews much in the way of substance in serving up a familiar story that will connect best with undemanding family audiences and younger viewers. Unremittingly bland conflict and stock characterizations mar what could have been the much more cleverly executed concept of a bunch of desperate aliens who band together to foil the power-grab of a military general gone mad, and get off of an uncivilized Earth. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG, 89 minutes)

A slice of dinner theater torture porn that attempts to mine the inner sadism of regular folks for squirm-inducing entertainment, Would You Rather comes across like a combination of Saw and 1995’s The Last Supper, but without any of the queasy delight that designation might connote. Scripted by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen as a twisted exploration of the titular party game, director David Guy Levy’s movie isn’t wickedly playful enough to qualify as a darkly comedic horror romp, a la the Final Destination movies, and it’s not coiled enough to succeed as a gritty work of macabre tension.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Iris (Brittany Snow) is struggling to make ends meet and also care for her younger brother, who needs a bone marrow transplant when her plight lands her an unusual invitation from a seemingly philanthropic aristocrat, Shepard Lambrick (a showy Jeffrey Combs, one of the movie’s weak links): come to exclusive dinner party and play a game where the winner will be awarded untold amounts of money, and have their life’s problems solved. Iris reluctantly accepts, and arrives at Lambrick’s mansion where she’s joined by Cal (Eddie Steeples), ex-gambler Peter (Robb Wells), sullen Amy (Sasha Grey, playing the Ally Sheedy role from The Breakfast Club), recovering alcoholic Conway (John Heard), wheelchair-bound Linda (June Squibb) and Iraq vet Travis (Charlie Hofheimer).

With the assistance of his henchman Bevans (Jonny Coyle) and depraved, unstable son Julian (Robin Lord Taylor, effectively loathsome), Lambrick sketches out the rules of his game: going around the table, each participant is given two fairly undesirable choices, one of which they must select within 15 seconds and then act upon. Car batteries, knives, whipping canes, firecrackers and other gruesome instruments are trotted out, and tears, arguments and blood-letting naturally ensues.

One of the main problems of Would You Rather is that Schlachtenhaufen’s screenplay doesn’t set up its subjects as convincingly desperate. Ergo, the collectivity of their immediately cowed nature — before the full parameters of the game are revealed, no one leaves when given the chance, even though some super-creepy and suspect stuff has gone down — rings false. The loose-cannon threat of Julian, also, who has major daddy issues, is too quickly resolved.

Mainly, though, Lambrick is just a terribly sketched villain, which snuffs out any flicker of intrigue this constrained narrative offers. In Saw, Jigsaw had a rationalized motivation — and indeed, what might be called an overarching worldview, which became more honed in the franchise’s sequels. In Would You Rather, apart from some half-reasoned mumbo-jumbo (“It’s all about decision-making in its rawest form!”) there’s not enough background to make one believe that Lambrick really gets his rocks off from this stuff, and has the ability to sustain such an enterprise, aides and all. Ergo, Combs’ performance — which comes across like some deranged game show host — isn’t rooted in any sort of reality.

Director Levy’s technical package, achieved on a modest budget, convincingly imparts a claustrophobic vibe, but can’t overcome spotty casting and the inherent limitations of the material as rendered — which peaks about 40 minutes in, and then coasts across the finish line with an ever-diminishing level of cleverness and execution. In addition to its theatrical engagements at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and elsewhere, Would You Rather is also available via digital download and VOD, across various platforms. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, R, 93 minutes)

Director Werner Herzog has lived life as a sort of cinematic pirate, striking out to and fro, and using the medium of film more often than not to satisfy his immense, globe-spanning curiosities, in both narrative features (Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn) and documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). A stirring meditation on the human spirit in extreme conditions, and a work of a certain piece with his nonfiction explorations Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog and Russian co-director Dmitry Vasyukov’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga delves into the lives of trappers and indigenous peoples living around Bakhtia, a remote town of 300 in the wintry plains of Siberia.

An unforgiving expanse one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, where a temperature of 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit is considered a mild day in the winter, the Siberian Taiga is reachable only by helicopter or boat. The movie centers mostly on Gennady, a middle-aged trapper who oversees a 900-square-mile parcel of land, consigned to him during communist times, where he clears snow from his main cabin and outpost dwellings, splits wood to make skis, strips birch tree bark to make a homemade mosquito repellent, and constructs and sets 1,000 traps during the springtime months — all using techniques passed down for many generations.

Happy People was originally birthed by Vasyukov, who, not terribly unlike the filmmakers of Restrepo, lived for over a year with his subjects in remote Siberia, in order to craft a four-hour work for Russian television that captured and celebrated this fading way of life. This film represents Herzog’s edit of that, but it’s no mere unthinking abridgement. Anchored by a characteristically ruminative voiceover from the filmmaker, Happy People also reflects Herzog’s passion and fascination for the often unforgiving nature of the wild.

The footage itself is fascinating, but more in line with something like Interview Project or Darwin: No Services Ahead than the willful aesthetic remove of Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s minimalist Sweetgrass. Vasyukov and Herzog have a keen, intuitive grasp of when to let this material speak mostly for itself — as with the construction of a wooden canoe by one of the last indigenous persons trained in the craft — and when and where to interweave Gennady’s ruminations on his work and life, and its relationship to something like domesticated farming (“In the wild an animal knows that no good can come from me, from man — here, it’s about who outsmarts whom”).

Living in such extreme conditions is part of its story, but Happy People also highlights the dignifying effects that nature has on humans. In this sense, the film’s surprising emotional scope is as expansive as its setting. It’s a mesmerizing portrait of human resilience, but a reminder as well that we remain tethered to the natural world, despite our increasingly wireless existence in a digital age. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 94 minutes)

Forget the tears of a clown as it pertains to the inner psychology of a comedian — what about the rage of a clown? That’s the principal focus of The Bitter Buddha, a documentary portrait of middle-aged stand-up Eddie Pepitone that surfs along the edge of his angry but self-aware shtick and celebrates his standing among fellow comedians, but all without fully and insightfully digging into the deep-seated emotion that informs his existential angst.

Praised as the sort of comedian whom other comedians love (“the Charles Bukowski of comedy, except if you replaced alcohol with Nutter Butters,” says one), the Brooklyn-born Pepitone serves up a dizzying blend of caustic candor. He’s honest about his occasional resentment of young comics, but just as hard on himself (“I get heckled a lot in clubs. It’s usually generic, but accurate, like, ‘Eddie, you suck!'”). It’s this sort of “decades of fear and failure, and learning to deal with that creatively,” says champion Patton Oswalt (one of many other comedians who give testimonials of support), that informs the backbone of both Pepitone’s perpetually agitated professional voice and regular, off-stage personality.

Director Steven Feinartz follows his subject around, and even works in some occasional animation, by Allen Mezquida, which is a nice touch, production-wise. But unlike American: The Bill Hicks Story, another nonfiction snapshot of a cultish stand-up figure, The Bitter Buddha doesn’t fully connect the dots between professional water-treading and the sort of stinging personal rejection that seemingly helps keep Pepitone in a state of under-appreciated arrest. Ostensibly, the movie’s arc builds toward a show Pepitone does in Harlem — his first in New York City in nine years, which coincides with the last time his father saw him perform. And seeing some of their interactions definitely informs a reading of the man.

But The Bitter Buddha, while passably engaging, is too polite and removed to resonate deeply for a wider audience. When Feinartz gets into Pepitone’s feeding of squirrels at a local park, and love of animals more broadly, or his fitful embrace of meditating in lieu of more personal sharing at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, it hints at the pain and latent psychology of its subject, but the movie then too quickly steps away from conflict and tension. The result is a nice glimpse into Pepitone’s private life for fans, but not a worthy introduction for more mainstream documentary buffs. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cheremoya Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

His previous film, the surrealistic dark comedy Rubber, was about a psychokinetic tire that wandered the dusty American Southwest exploding the heads of those who got in its way, so anyone who saw that will not be very surprised by Quentin Dupieux‘s new movie Wrong, which trades in the same sort of absurdist humor. A work of significant playfulness and imagination — it features cinema’s best dog crap joke ever, hands down — Wrong hints at a broader promise of budding, starburst auteurism upon which the film as a whole doesn’t fully deliver. It’s a nice, silly riff that could work better in truncated form, but will strike plenty of folks as merely odd for odd’s sake, even as it connects roundly with a certain subset. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, unrated, 94 minutes)

Crafting a movie around the notion of Charlie Sheen as a louche womanizer experiencing some sort of midlife crisis is hardly the stuff of imaginative brilliance, but as filtered through the prism of Roman Coppola’s mind’s eye, it at least remains intriguing enough to qualify A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III as a playful lark. The first starring film project tackled by Sheen after his very open and acrimonious split with CBS and Two and a Half Men and subsequent public stint as a drug-addled performance artist, Coppola’s first feature behind the camera since 2001’s CQ is a light, and slight, surrealistic comedy of emotional waywardness.



The movie unfolds in a stylized, period-indeterminate Los Angeles. Swan, not unlike Sheen, is a charismatic guy who’s used both his charm and considerable wealth — in this instance from a successful career as a graphic artist — to deflect a lot of his problems but not really solve them. Ergo, he lives in a state of perpetually arrested development, where his eccentricities (Swan owns a toucan and never takes off his filtered sunglasses, even when he shaves) are shruggingly embraced by all around him. When his girlfriend Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) suddenly and angrily breaks off their relationship, however, Swan finds himself caught up in a downward spiral of confusion, self-doubt and reflection.

He’s briefly hospitalized for anxiety, where his visitors include his sister Izzy (Patricia Arquette), his worried accountant Saul (Bill Murray) and his best friend, Kirby Star (Jason Schwartzman), a comedian for whom Swan is overdue on delivery of a cover image for his latest album. Caught up in a tumble-dry cycle of conflicting emotions, Swan eschews advice to move on, and instead sets out to find out what Ivana is up to, and whether you was ever “really” in love with him.

Charles Swan isn’t a comedy, per se. Or, that is, it doesn’t really have a lot of jokes written into the dialogue. Its offbeat sense of humor is mostly located in various flight-of-fancy stagings, and the line readings of supporting players. (Some of the former are spun-off flashbacks or acted-out representations of a story being conveyed, while others, like a dance sequence and a cowboys-and-Indians shootout, are elaborate “death fantasies” in which Swan is martyred in front of Ivana.) This nimble style works well in setting up the movie, and certainly keeping one guessing as to where things are going. But it never seems anchored to much of substance, despite the existential panic of its namesake character. Unlike Silver Linings Playbook, Charles Swan isn’t really deeply invested in the idea of its protagonist having appreciable problems, mental or otherwise.

The influence of Coppola’s two writing collaborations with Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited and the Oscar-nominated Moonrise Kingdom) are very much evident in the film’s rich production design, and it’s this quality — along with an engaging overall visual style — which helps prop up what is otherwise the wan pop- and gender-psychology of a fairly thinly imagined conceit. In addition to his writing and directing duties, Coppola also serves as his own director of photography and camera operator (a tidbit adroitly revealed in the movie’s amusing, celebratory closing credits), and the Zeiss super-speed lenses he uses give Charles Swan a distinct visual signature.

Of the supporting players, perhaps unsurprisingly, the impish Schwartzman has the most fun and connects the most roundly, though Winnick is quite solid as well. Sheen’s presence — the very thing which gives the movie so much of its extra-textual cachet — is also restrictive. An actor with less baggage (and a slightly less haggard visage) would have been able to explore the character’s frailties in a way that Sheen can’t muster. As such, Charles Swan is a colorful, tossed-off ode to romantic uncertainty, but one that doesn’t leave a mental mark to match its sugary coating. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films/American Zoetrope, R, 85 minutes)

Lovingly captured but rather dramatically inert, The Playroom is a slice of 1970s-era familial portraiture, with a special focus on wandering eyes and the secret lives of adults. If The Ice Storm was a band, think of this as the minor-chord, label-unsigned, opening act for the opening act — a boxed-in, presumably autobiographical tale in which a quartet of kids manage their mother’s alcoholism and nice-guy father’s enabling… with imagination! For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film’s theatrical engagements in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, in New York at the Cinema Village and Dallas at the Texas Theater, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing, R, 83 minutes)

The phrase “pharmaceutical thriller” doesn’t exactly mentally elicit the sound effect of ringing cash registers, so distributor Open Road Films has been taking a scrupulously crafted ambiguous tack with the marketing campaign for Steven Soderbergh‘s new film, Side Effects. Fortunately, they have a great product, so the gulf or disconnect between what audiences might be expecting going into seeing the movie and what it actually is not only doesn’t matter, but might actually increase one’s enjoyment of it. A moody, neo-noir-style psychological drama with thick, intertwined veins of tragedy, romantic obsession, legal consequence and revenge, the film unfolds against a compelling backdrop, and in captivating fashion.



After her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) is released from prison following a four-year stint for insider trading, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is hopeful about being able to piece her life back together. A familiar and crushing fog of depression soon returns, however. In the emergency room after deliberately driving her car into a wall, Emily is assigned to Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), an up-and-coming doctor in a successful practice who’s been tabbed to oversee part of a medical trial for which he’s being compensated. He suspects the incident was no accident, but agrees to release Emily from the hospital if she consents to medication and counseling under his supervision.

Emily’s new prescription seems at first to help — she and Martin reconnect sexually, and her anxiety eases — but negative by-products soon begin to manifest, and a tragedy ensues. While Jonathan seeks answers and assistance from Emily’s old psychiatrist, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his own wife, Deirdre (Vinessa Shaw), starts to question the similarity of his current predicament in relation to a past professional incident which he’s kept secret. Desperate and cornered, Jonathan sets out to reclaim his way of life at all costs.

Side Effects‘ milieu is among its strongest selling points; given the modern-day prevalence of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications and other psycho-pharmacological drugs, this convincingly rendered environment makes for a unique, timely and fascinating backdrop. But its plotting is like a Russian nesting doll of confusion and despair, with the motivations of various characters both coming into focus and changing as events unwind.

This isn’t weathervane cinema, though; its characterizations are crisp, and not dependent on long speeches of action justification. Emily speaks in haunted disconnection (“Martin’s thinking about moving us”), like she’s nothing more than a piece of furniture in her husband’s life. Jonathan, meanwhile, descends into his own mad panic that’s smartly informed by his past.

To delve further into the movie’s twists and turns risks ruining too much, but suffice to say that Scott Burns’ script is a thing of spare, streamlined beauty. Side Effects is vaguely reminiscent of Malice, Harold Becker’s deliciously twisty thriller penned by Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank, in that both films spin intrigue and suspense off of a core mystery that itself isn’t what it seems. Trading in chilly yet evocative close-ups that help convey the head space of his superb cast, meanwhile, Soderbergh works with a bracing economy; his compositions have both space and meaning, and there isn’t a wasted or superfluous edit in the entire movie.

In charting the making of Psycho, last fall’s Hitchcock underscored the namesake master filmmaker’s joint recognition of and obsession with the narrative mechanics of storytelling suspense, and how dogged and determined he was to consistently find an idea worthy of pouring the completeness of his cinematic vision into. Were he alive today, it’s easy to envision him having a similar reaction to this material. Relatably rooted in very human feelings of hopelessness and desire, Side Effects is a thriller that would make him proud. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Open Road Films, R, 106 minutes)

A misplaced focus on action hijinks helps sink Identity Thief, a purported comedy that squanders its rich concept, as well as the talents of its two leads. The more physical-minded slapstick of Bridesmaids‘ Melissa McCarthy would seem a good pairing with Jason Bateman‘s slow-burn comedy of temperamental mismatch for this tale of a victim of fraudulent impersonation who tracks down his perpetrator, but a cabal of under-sketched narrative interlopers, an uncertain mixture of tones and, most damningly, a general lack of good ideas and jokes doom this strained offering. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 112 minutes)

A serviceable enough B-feature of the sort that could appropriately induce nightmares in adolescents and arachnophobes, modestly budgeted horror offering Spiders opts for action antics when a bit more creepy-crawly tension and mystery would have better suited its story.

Working from a script co-written with Joseph Farrugia, director Tibor Takacs baits an interesting hook (genetically-spliced mutant spiders crash land in New York City from an old Russian space station), and marshals a decent if eventually much-overused mix of practical and CGI effects. But while the screenplay tries for a bit of clever character inversion, the movie takes all sorts of annoying and stupid short cuts that quickly mark it as an essentially lazy take on a much more interesting concept.

Mainly, though, it’s peppered with all sorts of interesting avenues left totally unexplored, like the notion that by blocking security cameras and hiding the queen these space spiders are actually quite intelligent, and maybe even have some sort of plan. In general, given the movie’s PG-13 rating and its plot, more mystery and less action — which reaches a point of diminishing return in the third act, given the movie’s cramped, quarantined city block, where much mayhem takes place — would have given Spiders more of a chance at achieving something memorable. As is, with its square-jawed familial imperilment and frontal assault fetishism, wherein plenty of spindly legs smash through windows and get slammed in doors, Takacs’ movie is a throwback to enjoyable but forgettable VHS-era creature-feature entertainment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, the movie is available on premium VOD beginning on February 8. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 89 minutes)

A funky and fresh tale of adolescent self-doubt and blossoming young love funneled through the prism of post-apocalyptic zombiedom, Warm Bodies conjures a lovely, commingled tone of wistfulness and witticism. The best, most unique zombie movie since Shaun of the Dead, director Jonathan Levine‘s smart adaptation of Isaac Marion’s same-named novel delivers laughs as well as an unlikely, surprisingly affecting coming-of-age tale centered around the curative powers of passion and hope.



Unfolding in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Warm Bodies takes as its narrator R (Nicholas Hoult, above), a soulful and self-aware zombie who nevertheless can’t remember his name or the specifics of what exactly happened to the world around him, or even really speak. His days are spent mostly trudging aimlessly around an airport, though he shares a few grunts of half-formed thought with his “friend,” fellow zombie M (Rob Corddry). When they cross paths with a band of scavenging survivors, R is so captivated by the fetching Julie (Teresa Palmer) that he instinctively saves her from being eaten.

He does, however, eat the brains of her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco), which gives R insights into the memories, thoughts and feelings of his victim. Taking Julie back to the abandoned airliner he’s taken as his home and filled with knick-knacks, R nervously starts trying to communicate with her (sample inner monologue: “Dont’ be creepy, don’t be creepy…”), and again saves her when she makes an abortive escape attempt. A small gesture of appreciation on Julie’s part seems to further trigger some sort of awakening in R, and later some other zombies as well. This development stands in stark contrast to the bleak worldview of her militant father (John Malkovich), but things come to a head when a bunch of “boneys” — too-far-gone zombies who’ve eaten all of their own skin off — gather to attack both humans and the regular reanimated corpses.

Its conceit sounds rather outrageous, and it is, but Warm Bodies is pitched perfectly, in a manner that invests a certain seriousness in the world it’s presenting. Director Levine (The Wackness, 50/50) has previously shown a knack especially for sly and effective moodcraft, marrying image to brightly chosen pop songs in a fashion that neither hijacks nor sells short the narrative, and Warm Bodies further evidences this. Via R’s narration, Levine’s adaptation of Marion’s novel ports over the bumbling and wry self-loathing that any nominally reflective teenager can identify with, but he also creates a beautifully melancholic backdrop that’s punctured by the contrast of Julie’s beauty and vulnerability. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe has worked in horror before, in The Others, The Road and, most recently, the remake of Fright Night, and has a smart, evocative sense of framing as well as superb sense of muted atmospheric lighting.

Mostly, though, Warm Bodies affirms its talented young leads. Palmer’s rangy performance further confirms what her tough-gal turn in I Am Number Four did — that she’s a star of the future. Hoult, meanwhile, may or may not be a star (he does have a couple big studio films on tap), but he is terrifically talented. I was a bit lukewarm on his performance in A Single Man, but his turn here is whole-hearted and so smartly modulated — carefully revealing new layers and levels of thought and engagement as he becomes more and more human.

Twenty years ago, a warped little movie called Groundhog Day released in February — an antidote to the saccharine, a sort of twisted Valentine for the rest of us. An inspired genre mash-up with allegorical underpinnings that’s also just a lot of fun, Warm Bodies is different from that ace comedy in just about every way, shape and form, except for the two most crucial — heart and brains. It has them both. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Summit Entertainment, PG-13, 97 minutes)

Writer-director Don Coscarelli remains best known for his Phantasm films, but the sum of his filmography is probably even more deliciously weird. Because Coscarelli labors in the genre margins, though, and makes relatively few films, he doesn’t really get the credit he deserves as one of the most idiosyncratic yet interesting indie filmmakers working today. His latest movie, the forthrightly titled John Dies at the End, is sort of like if Franz Kafka drunk a bunch of absinthe and then wrote an homage to Sam Raimi, Donnie Darko and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And that’s a good thing.

Adapted liberally by Coscarelli from David Wong’s genre-spanning, time-traveling horror novel of the same name, the movie has a plot about which the less said the better for would-be viewers. But, basically, it’s about a drug, called the soy sauce, which delivers an out-of-body experience that’s also pegged to an otherworldy invasion. The story’s framed around the experiences of a college dropout, David (Chase Williamson), who shares with journalist Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti, also an executive producer on the project) the outlandish tale of the escape of he and infected best friend John (Rob Mayes) from a cop (Glynn Turman) who’s seemingly more interested in covering up the deaths of a bunch of fellow teenagers than getting to the bottom of things. Of course, there’s also a girl — in this case a one-handed lass named Amy (Fabianne Therese), plus a mysterious figure, Dr. Albert Marconi (Clancy Brown), whom the guys can call on for advice. Marauding bugs and a giant meat creature ensue, among many other amusing surprises.

The best of Coscarelli’s work, encompassing both his “Masters of Horror” anthology series kick-off and 2002’s wild Bubba Ho-Tep, starring Bruce Campbell as an aged Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as a man claiming to be John F. Kennedy, has always placed a premium on narrative dexterity and surprise, and John Dies at the End is in this regard no different. The movie surfs along on a cheery, what-the-fuck vibe, and yet nothing about its myriad twists and turns rings phony or contrived.

Coscarelli does a solid job of pulling off the movie’s many special effects on a modest budget, blending practical work with CGI, but the performances are quite good, too. Giamatti, who worked with the director on Bubba Ho-Tep, is great as the sardonic, skeptical Arnie (it’s a role right in his schlubby wheelhouse), but relative newcomers Williamson and Mayes also make strong impressions. Fans of the aforementioned Donnie Darko and last year’s Detention (which didn’t really work for me) will in particular spark to John, which has nouveau cult hit written all over it. True indie fans who may be less familiar with the filmmaker’s brand would do well to take a flier on this wild little flick too, however. (Magnet Releasing, R, 100 minutes)

A whimsical, half-formed paean to criminal fraternity, Stand Up Guys brings together Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin as retired gangsters who, against the backdrop of an impending assassination, reunite for a wild night of drugs, booze and women, with a sprinkle of reflection on aging and loyalty. Its synopsis may summon contemplations of a gangland Grumpy Old Men, but the first produced screenplay of playwright Noah Haidle, unfolding over the course of one night, cycles through too many haphazard and improbable set-ups to amount to anything more than a collection of signed offer sheets in search of a movie. This is the shaggy, cinematic equivalent of a greatest-shtick collection, dragged into watchability only through the lively interplay and accrued goodwill of its leads. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 95 minutes)

After dipping a toe into the pool of arthouse embrace and rejuvenation with James Mangold’s Cop Land, and finding the reception a bit chillier than he would’ve liked, Sylvester Stallone has mostly retreated back into his man-cave of 1980s-style actioners. This is not entirely a bad thing. His reasoned, surprisingly smart and moving Rocky Balboa, from 2006, stands as a compelling drama in its own right, and a worthy bookend to the original film. But this wounded mindset also begat 2008’s Rambo, a sloppy, nihilistic and near-pointless exercise in sadism and explosions-go-boom! theatrics.



The forthrightly titled Bullet to the Head, an adaptation of a French graphic novel set in the Louisiana bayou, would on the surface seem to fall comfortably in the mold of the latter — a block-headed, meat-and-potatoes-type action movie in which nuance is as much the enemy as any on-screen foil. And sometimes… well, sometimes the cover is the most appropriate way by which to judge a book.

Stallone stars as Jimmy Bonomo, an unapologetically direct hitman who, when his partner gets killed after a recent job, is thrown together by circumstance with Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), a by-the-book visiting cop from Washington, D.C. Each targets themselves, Jimmy and Taylor form an uneasy alliance, to try to bring down a shady figure of the criminal underworld (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and the psychotic enforcer, Keegan (Jason Momoa), doing his bidding. When Jimmy’s daughter Lisa (the not-unattractive Sarah Shahi) gets caught up in the mix, it only further stiffens Jimmy’s resolve to finish things definitively.

The most disappointing things about Bullet to the Head have to do with just how much of a retread it feels like — from the villains, with their master list of all the politicians and cops on their payroll, to even the bizarre, declamatory voiceover narration that opens (“Sometimes you gotta abandon your principles and do what’s right”) and ends the film. Screenwriter Alessandro Camon’s adaptation of Alexis Nolent’s Du Plomb Dans La Tête delivers its exposition in comically chunky paragraphs, and never quite figures out a way to make the targets that Jimmy and Taylor must work their way through seem like more of a viper’s nest and less of an obligatory mortal ladder.

Director Walter Hill serves as a pace-master, and keeps things moving briskly and effectively — even if the staging for one sequence where Keegan walks past a bunch of thugs, loudly murders guys in another room and then returns to the aforementioned room, where said thugs are not ready for him, is thunderously stupid. Stallone and Kang, meanwhile, have a bit of a nice, prickly rapport, even if their conflict seems largely manufactured. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Bullet to the Head isn’t quite insane enough. If you’re going to have a movie with an axe fight, and an Eyes Wide Shut-style drugs-and-sex costume party where topless women tango with one another, then shouldn’t you also not have the incriminating evidence your bad guy is paying to retrieve stored in a folder marked “evidence”? That’s insane, but not in a good way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros./After Dark Films, R, 93 minutes)

A wan, overly precious and self-satisfied psychological thriller that tries to toe the line between gender statement and ambiguity, Girls Against Boys is a kind of junior thrill-kill revenge flick that doesn’t touch the same high points of any of its many inspirations or antecedents. While it eschews overheated sensationalism in a manner that rather belies its most forthright plot synopsis, the movie doesn’t engage in the necessary heavy intellectual lifting to blossom into anything special.

Shae (Danielle Panabaker) is a naïve college student who, after getting dumped by her older married lover (Andrew Howard) and assaulted by a guy (Michael Stahl-David, of Cloverfield) she meets on the rebound, appears to be teetering on the edge of withdrawing into a cocoon. Her seemingly unstable co-worker Lu (Nicole LaLiberte), however, takes Shae under her wing, and suggests a brutal and unnervingly direct plot of revenge. Shae quickly acquiesces, and a number of men pay the price for, variously, their actions, inaction or gender. After a wild swathe of retaliation, though, Lu’s dangerously obsessive possessiveness threatens Shae’s burgeoning relationship with a shy classmate, Tyler (Liam Aiken).

Powered by a sometimes dizzy, sometimes grinding techno-type score that seems to aim for some sort of opaque mood statement not always matched in the movie’s visual vocabulary, Girls Against Boys is a revenge flick, but almost incidentally so. As grim or unsettling as some of the action is, Shae and Lu don’t manifest much reaction during their crimes. All the film’s men, meanwhile, are entirely incapable of reading reactions, which as rendered seems less a gender commentary and more the function of a poor script.

Writer-director Austin Chick seems chiefly to want to stir up a carefully crafted mood-bubble of indistinctness, but his scenes are entirely self-contained, and lack a grander cohesiveness — he doesn’t seem to have the interest, bravery, skill or combination thereof to push past the crust-layer of his conceit and into a truly interesting direction. The lack of deeper explanation here — Shae is too easily “in” with Lu’s plot, and lacking a strongly differentiated personality — gives off a thick feeling of no psychological seriousness. It is of small credit that, despite its premise, the movie doesn’t descend into lowest-common-denominator gore, but Girls Against Boys also has nothing of substance to say about the actions of its characters, so Chick instead has the girls just do things like sing along to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”

Within the parameters of Chick’s narrative, Panabaker and LaLiberte deliver grounded, watchable turns. The former is quiet and introspective — a fact that Chick takes advantage of in the framing of his close-ups — while the latter, with a thousand-yard stare and almost comically large eyes, summons an elemental dread that outstrips the nastiness of her actions. The film, though, doesn’t achieve any of the absorbing backdrop grittiness or deep-rooted character insights of its assorted forerunners, like Lilya 4-Ever, Single White Female, Fight Club, Baise Moi or The Brave One, among others. Girls Against Boys is good at standing in contrast — and not being any of a number of dumb or reductionist things it could be, just based on its story. It’s far less successful making any sort of proactive and persuasive case of its own, however. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 92 minutes)

A genre-bending, psychologically twisty, meta-horror tale, Resolution bears a deceptively simple and straightforward title and logline synopsis for a movie that is anything but. When a well-meaning guy holes up with his old junkie friend in a cabin in the woods and forces him to kick cold turkey, strange events, mysterious visitors and personal demons commingle to intriguing, ambiguous effect. A fresh conceit told with an unfussy assurance, Resolution marks a solid calling card for co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead, auguring good things for their respective futures.

After receiving an email with a video message and a map from his friend, Mike (Peter Cilella) leaves behind his two-months-pregnant wife Jennifer (Emily Montague) and heads into the woods, where finds semi-estranged high school pal Chris (Vinny Curran) holed up in a run-down house. A paranoid crack addict convinced the government is spying on him, Chris is busy shooting at birds and play-acting some fantasy life of indeterminate origin. Mike has peddled his wife a more genteel version of his planned intervention, but once he separates Chris from his gun he tases his friend and uses a pair of handcuffs to secure him to a pipe.

The plan is to hang out for a week of forced detox. Soon, however, a series of weird incidents and contacts — involving everyone from two of Chris’ dirtbag drug buddies (Kurt Anderson and Skyler Meacham) and the Native American land owner of the house in which they’re squatting to New Age cultists and a traveling con man of some sort — upsets Mike’s mental stability. Discovering bizarre journals and audio recordings of telekinetic researchers further puts him edge, and then pictures and video of he and Chris start showing up. Are Chris’ rantings not so delusional, or is Mike perhaps suffering some sort of mental breakdown himself?

Benson and Moorhead’s collaboration is a fruitful one, evincing a well planned look and feel for the film. The latter serves as cinematographer, and the pair also edited the movie together, resulting in a spare but smart mystery that straddles the line between literalism and a metaphorical tone poem. Variously, Resolution evokes Christopher Nolan’s Memento (an obvious inspiration) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, as well as more nominally straightforward genre offerings like Pontypool and Bellflower, which each possessed rich veins of warped, unsettling jealousy and ominous vibes that come at viewers sideways.

Resolution is honest about the impulses of addiction (“I never enjoyed life before I did drugs” is a gut-punch line of dialogue, from Chris), but could stand to have its core interpersonal conflict sharpened up some without sacrificing any of its overall narrative ambiguity. Regardless, the movie invites at least a couple different interpretations, the heady guesswork of which makes for a rewarding experience for genre enthusiasts with an additional indie predilection. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 93 minutes)

An across-the-board comedic misfire that lamely tries to hitch its trailer to the $17-billion-a-year videogaming industry, Noobz trades entirely in familiar road movie and competitive-event flick clichés, and seems to regard its mere existence as a triumph that should be shared by all. A wearying stinker unredeemed by a handful of brave, game, small supporting turns (namely from Zelda Williams and Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Gries), multi-hyphenate Blake Freeman’s film is kind of like a cross between Road Trip, Empire Records, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the modern-day videogame comedy that Kevin Smith’s third cousin never got around to writing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Big Air Studios, R, 100 minutes)

Beware of Mr. Baker opens unlike any other documentary I can immediately recall, with its subject physically attacking its director. That the by turns sad and darkly comedic but never less than mesmerizing nonfiction tale manages to then still humanize Ginger Baker, virtuoso jazz and rock ‘n’ roll drummer of Cream and Blind Faith and generally certified madman, is a rather amazing accomplishment.



Renowned amongst contemporaries and celebrated by later generations of drummers as the “hammer of the Gods,” Baker was born in South London just before the outbreak of World War II, and lost his father to the war effort when he was but four years old. In a film that retraces his life in more or less chronological fashion, Baker comes across as an irascible junkie bully, given to capricious fits, serial irresponsible behavior (the second of his four wives was at the time of their nuptials the teenage sister of his daughter’s first boyfriend) and a generally nasty disposition. He more or less remains the same, even at 73 years old (“Go on with the interview, stop trying to be an intellectual dickhead,” he barks at one point).

The basic story arc here — sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — is the same one that informs virtually every episode of VH-1’s Behind the Music. And the movie, which garnered the Grand Jury prize at its South By Southwest Festival premiere last year, only scratches the surface of Baker’s scarred psychology (a sealed letter from his father that he opened at age 14 seems to have coincided with the onset of puberty and rebelliousness). So what gives Beware of Mr. Baker, which gets it title from a sign posted alongside the driveway of his gated South African estate, its pop, its connective resonance?

In a word, Baker himself — because a moving and morally conflicted portrait of a true questing spirit emerges. With footage of his drum-offs against Phil Seamen and the like, and interview footage with Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Steve Winwood and others, the film makes an easy case for Baker’s full-spectrum music knowledge — as an innate gift further honed by tunnel-vision obsession. And yet Baker also had three kids, was by all accounts a terrible father and husband (at one point he moved to Africa for five-plus years, telling his wife he was in prison), and his own worst enemy, professionally. All the contradictions (including his weird love of polo, for instance) make for a fascinating case study in self-destructiveness. Throughout his life, Baker has exhibited an intense aversion to being alone, combined with a habitual tendency to push away those closest to him.

With Baker’s (apparent, pre-attack) blessing, Bulger has access to plenty of amazing photos and private home video footage that give Beware of Mr. Baker its spine, but he also intersperses his movie with crude but captivating animated segments, a la The Kid Stays in the Picture. Of course, Baker himself is the main star, narrating his own story and lashing out at Bulger along the way. A couple years back, Anvil! The Story of Anvil told the story of a marginalized rock group beloved by other musicians. Baker achieved much more success and fame, of course, but his story echoes these two movies, along with a pinch of The Devil and Daniel Johnston and Werner Herzog’s nonfiction portrait of Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend. It’s a fascinating snapshot of artistic fitfulness, and a reminder that the flame of creativity can be unpleasant to experience up close. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (SnagFilms, unrated, 90 minutes)

A loving tribute to European silent films of the 1920s, writer-director Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves repurposes the classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Snow White, telling the tale of an oppressed daughter of a great toreador who runs away with a circus to find her destiny. The Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award submission from Spain (its intertitles come in subtitled Spanish), Berger’s fetching film is a reminder that cinema need not be constrained by words — that there is a universality to images, and stories can just as readily be told via a skillful ordering of those.



Unfolding in a romanticized Seville, Blancanieves opens on beloved and talented bullfighter Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho). When his career is cut short and his family upended, he remarries Encarna (Maribel Verdu), who slowly but surely cuts off his daughter from Antonio. Years later, the now-grown Carmen (Macarena Garcia, above) escapes and joins a motley troupe of traveling, bullfighting dwarves, where her latent talents and natural beauty attract attention and, eventually, bring her back into contact with her stepmother.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Blancanieves is destined to be dogged by comparisons to The Artist, nevermind that Berger’s film was scripted around eight years ago, not long after the completion of Torremolinos 73. In actuality, though, excepting the macro similarities, the two movies are actually stylistically quite different. There’s just a pinch of almost subliminal S&M kink to Berger’s vision, to go along with its cultural specificity.

Working with cinematographer Kiko de la Rica, whose black-and-white frames achieve a captivating luminosity, Berger has a clever and playful sense of visual storytelling — match cuts from a moon to a communion wafer, for example — that renders the lack of dialogue a moot point. Fernando Franco’s slick, smart editing additionally greatly benefits the picture, and Berger furthermore matches it a winning score from composer Alfonso de Vilallonga.

The performances, too, are engaging. Garcia, who sort of resembles a cross between Claire Forlani and Alanna Ubach, has a beautiful and naturally sympathetic visage, and Verdu shines as the sinister, scheming Encarna. This isn’t a movie for everyone, but arthouse cineastes and others who took a flier on The Artist last year should seek out the rich, rewarding Blancanieves as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Required Viewing/Cohen Media Group, unrated, 90 minutes)

A solid, smartly wound little psychological drama that digs into some of the knotty qualities of mid-life adult relationships, when old acquaintances best left forgotten can drift into a life and bring unexpected turmoil, writer-director John Daschbach’s Brief Reunion is a spare but engaging examination of personal character, and the vacillating nature of right and wrong.



The ordered, rural New England existence of Internet entrepreneur Aaron (Joel de la Fuente, above left) and his wife, Leah (Alexie Gilmore), starts to unravel when an old college classmate, Teddy (Scott Shepherd), shows up. Prior to his arrival, Teddy has tried to befriend Leah and others online — a sign that prompts a couple of Aaron’s friends to advise a strict “zero tolerance” policy of non-engagement. Teddy is, it turns out, is a morally dubious and socially awkward hanger-on, the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.

But Teddy runs into Leah and worms his way into Aaron’s birthday party, where he brings along his girlfriend, Simone (Kristy Hasen). It doesn’t end with one uncomfortable evening, however. Soon Teddy is popping up at Aaron’s work, and posting online old photos that Aaron would rather he not. Hinting that he knows about a dark secret related to the success of Aaron’s initial web venture — something that Aaron himself is uncertain of — the resentful Teddy tries, in his own passive-aggressive way, to re-litigate the past and pry some money for an investment opportunity from his old acquaintance. Arguments and threats ensue, and a woman (Francie Swift) from Aaron’s past pops up as well.

Unlikely as it seems, Brief Reunion tangentially recalls Lawrence Kasdan, actually — The Big Chill by way of Dreamcatcher, maybe, minus any science-fiction. It’s on the surface quite different than those films, of course — more streamlined, and not as chatty. But its basic interest in the gap between hidden and stated feelings, and how that distance swells or contracts accordingly, based on company, is the same as Kasdan’s. Daschbach’s focus is more tightly trained on a single, collapsible dilemma, but he’s interested in the human condition. To go into much further detail would ruin some of the movie’s twists and turns, but when one character spits, “I’m not going to prison for that [person],” it reveals how often scruples are dependent on extra variables, and not some fixed absolute.

The low-budget Brief Reunion is spare but attractive in its construction. Daschbach and cinematographer Joe Foley settle on a muted color scheme and stark lack of extras that complement the movie’s slowly ratcheted up claustrophobia, while still finding some ways to give their movie some production-value pop. Daschbach’s cast also turns in solid performances; especially noteworthy is Shepherd, who captures the weasely nature of a guy whose misreadings of personal space and connection goes beyond confounding and into the realm of borderline pathological — to the point that dealing with him arrests and erodes one’s sanity.

The phrase “character study” gets bandied around a lot. Decades ago this movie might have been the type of major studio release new talent cut their teeth on before tackling some highbrow genre offering or literary adaptation. Now Brief Reunion, in its uncomplicated complicatedness, is the type of film Hollywood has mostly ceded to independent filmmakers. That is of course a fairly unfortunate thing on many levels. Daschbach, though, makes it seem not so bad, at least for an hour-and-a-half. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Striped Entertainment/Kagami Films/Triboro Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)