An effectively moody and atmospheric chiller about a pair of orphaned young girls who, after years of near-feral isolation in the woods, seem to bring back a spindly demoness with them when they’re reintegrated into society, Mama is a serviceable scary movie that never quite coheres into something special. In his feature directorial debut, Andy Muschietti’s film evinces the same mix of tony psychological horror and sinister fantasia present in some of executive producer Guillermo Del Toro’s own work, but gets tripped up clichés in the home stretch.

Both Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and the young Megan Charpentier are good, but Mama is a bigger lift for Jessica Chastain, and it reaffirms her talents as an actress while also minting her as a star. Apart from the mere different physical look, the film shows Chastain can credibly craft a character within a genre piece, which should go a long way toward keeping her in high demand with filmmakers. For the full, original review of Mama, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 100 minutes)

A tepid autumnal dramedy aimed at aging boomer fans of arthouse fare like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Mao’s Last Dancer and The Full Monty, Quartet represents Dustin Hoffman‘s directorial debut, but it’s shot through with so little in terms of conflict, stakes or even passion as to leave one questioning the very reason for its existence, let alone the legendary actor’s attachment to the material. Though rooted in a true story, the thinly sketched Quartet fails to ignite either much excitement of imagination or identification, resulting in an amiable bore.

The film unfolds at Beecham House, a special British retirement home exclusively for elderly musicians. Under the care of Dr. Lucy Cogan (Sheridan Smith), Cedric Livingstone (Michael Gambon, sporting a series of drapes with sleeves) holds court with his old, renowned colleagues, including genius composer/arranger Reggie Paget (Tom Courtenay), the rascally Wilfred Bond (Billy Connolly) and the ever-hospitable Cissy Robson (Pauline Collins). Their memories and bodies may be variously failing them by degrees, but they find solace in one another’s company. However, the arrival of superstar soprano soloist Jean Horton (Maggie Smith), Reggie’s ex-wife, throws their peaceful and ordered world into disarray. They try to recruit Jean into a staging of one of their more memorable works for a gala fundraising concert that will benefit Beecham House, but she remains stubbornly resistant until her old competitive instincts are finally re-awakened.

Adapted by Ronald Harwood from his own late-1990s stageplay, Quartet unfolds with a respectful and respectable, well-heeled polish, seeming to believe that its admittedly wonderful cast lends it an automatic sophistication which inoculates it against charges of tedium. Cinematographer John de Borman delivers warmly hued scenes that complement the on-screen bonds, and Hoffman’s location staging takes nice advantage of the grounds of Buckinghamshire’s Hedsor House.

The film, though, doesn’t offer much in even the way of programmatic uplift. Mannered to its core, Quartet is meant to be the cinematic equivalent of a refined, mid-afternoon snack of tea and biscuits (no small wonder, then, that Leonard Maltin dubbed it “as easy to take as a freshly baked scone with Devonshire cream”). But its characters are so direct in their emotional reactions, and of a piece in their articulations, that the film takes on the swift, no-nonsense narrative qualities of a small screen serial, absent any sort of life-and-death stakes. There’s some talk about the Beecham House needing money to stay in business, but there is no face of antagonistic opposition given to this loosely defined threat — and in short, no layered motivations or engaging subtleties at all. Quartet offers up a bunch of characters in service to an empty story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A deeply but pleasantly weird sort of Southern Gothic battle royale, The Baytown Outlaws is a boisterous, sweat-soaked mash-up of The Boondock Saints, Smokin’ Aces, Wild Things and Sucker Punch (minus the latter’s material excess). While stipulating that at its core it’s fairly slight — and also constructed of prefabricated parts and characters who, despite their colorful nature, are basically kind of hoary clichés — it’s also hard to deny that director Barry Battles’ zonked-out genre romp, starring Billy Bob Thornton, Eva Longoria and a couple lesser known faces, is an awful lot of fun.

The film reaches a certain point of diminishing return, particularly as it tries to pivot in its third act, and deliver a more reasoned, grounded moment of emotional growth for its titular brothers. The Baytown Outlaws is more successful when it’s just wheeling and dealing, in batshit-insane fashion, through oddball set-ups and gnarly, knotted retribution. Still, the originality on display makes this energetic crime comedy curio worth a look for fans of the actors, certainly, and low-budget genre enthusiasts to boot. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phase 4 Films, R, 98 minutes)

An intriguing little cross-cultural curio that plays like a woozy, jazz-improv riff on romantic futility and destiny, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s In Another Country is a trifling cinematic doff of the cap to French New Wave cinema, but kind of beguiling nonetheless. It’s an arthouse bon-bon all the way, but one that fans of French actress Isabelle Huppert will surely not wish to miss.



In Another Country, which played in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in three segments. In each, Huppert plays Anne, a French visitor to a small South Korean beach town named Mohang. In the first, though, she’s a filmmaker visiting a colleague (Kwon Hae-Hyo, above right) and his pregnant wife (Moon So-Ri), who is suspicious and jealous of their relationship. In the second, she’s the well-off wife of a traveling businessman who slips away to rekindle an affair with a Korean filmmaker (Moon Sung-Keun) in turn gripped by his own petty covetousness. In the final story, Anne is a lonelier divorcée traveling with her friend (Yoon Yeo-Jeong), a university instructor. Undercurrents of infidelity and spiritual and romantic settledness factor into each segment, as does a kind of goofy lifeguard (Yoo Jun-Sang) with whom Anne crosses paths.

Hong is considered one of the more established (and prolific) auteur filmmakers working in South Korea today, and with In Another Country he delivers another aesthetically bold work, a movie of watchwork-like moving parts in which characters feel can variously feel three-dimensional and entirely representational. Like many writer-directors, his work often plumbs some of the same themes (neuroses born of relationships) and unfolds in familiar settings (beaches are a favorite). In this regard, In Another Country sometimes feels like a whimsical repackaging of past material.

Huppert, however, gives the movie — Hong’s first work in predominantly English — a fresh and amusing spin. (A scene of her baying at goats is a left-field delight that keeps on giving.) Hong elicits engaging, naturalistic performances from his actors, and in sketching out these different possible lives of Anne he seems to be making a commentary on the ephemeral nature of romance, while also fetishistically indulging his love of the French New Wave. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 89 minutes)

The very jokey forthrightness of its title, Gangster Squad, evokes a kind of disposable pop-art mash-up of The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential, but with the seriousness of an old Saturday morning serial, and that’s just what director Ruben Fleischer’s rendering of screenwriter Will Beall’s period piece crime drama achieves. No thunder-clap piece of cinema, this, but instead a square-jawed movie that more or less works to the degree that one watching it is wishing to be entertained at that very moment and only that moment in time, Gangster Squad is a good-looking showcase for a lot of actors who have in the past done and will do much more nuanced and interesting work down the line.



The story, rooted in some modicum of truth, unfolds in post-World War II Los Angeles, where a straight-arrow veteran, John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), finds himself recruited by Police Chief William Parker (Nick Nolte) to lead an off-the-books team of specialists tasked with taking down an ambitious and bloodthirsty ex-boxer turned gangster, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who has designs on opening a lucrative gambling wire service. Cohen has judges, some higher-up cops and other beneficial parties already all in his pocket and on the take, so O’Mara rounds up the rakish and cynical Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), sharpshooter Max Kennard (Robert Patrick), a brainy guy (Giovanni Ribisi) and the two requisite ethnic types (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña, sorely underused), and starts busting down doors, making life difficult for Cohen’s operation. Fisticuffs, car chases and shootouts ensue, with things additionally complicated by Jerry’s burgeoning yet still secret relationship with Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), Mickey’s etiquette tutor (!) and not-very-committed girlfriend.

O’Mara isn’t much for tactical subtlety; his approach is all-frontal assault, all the time, which kind of mirrors the movie’s goofy, anything-goes-in-the-name-of-entertainment philosophy, where torrents of misplaced cover fire evoke flash-forward memories of 1980s actioners that give Gangster Squad a weird hybrid contextualization. It’s a period piece set in the 1940s but very much paying homage to ensemble buddy action flicks of a different era.

What helps distinguish Gangster Squad is its sense of humor. Beall, a former police officer turned debut but now in-demand screenwriter, writes winkingly self-conscious noir-style dialogue, in which redheaded gals are “tomatoes” and all the men talk about how they didn’t Come Back From The War to let their city turn into the sort of hell-hole Cohen is turning it into. There are a couple fun sequences involving a botched raid, a jailbreak and the planting of a bug device in Cohen’s home. So the movie eschews moral murkiness in favor of programmatic conflict and slick gamesmanship. What’s the big deal, right?

The issue is the characterizations are so thin and its main conflicts and resolutions so familiar, right down to the dialogue exchanges that doom various supporting characters, as to invite mental check-out. And when Gangster Squad has to pivot into meatier dramatic terrain, especially in its final act, that’s a problem. Most of the actors, then, lean back into tough-guy posturing and rawhide-chewing, almost like they’re doing a radio play. Notable exceptions are Mireille Enos, as O’Mara’s pregnant wife Connie, and Gosling, who locates layers of sardonic remove and bubbling-to-the-surface inner decency and conflict in Jerry.

Gangster Squad isn’t terrible, really. In fact, it’s quite watchable for most of its running time. Cinematographer Dion Beebe and production designer Mather Ahmad craft an appealing look for classic-era Los Angeles. The vehicle, however, isn’t a classic. A bit of a tonal mish-mash, it’s a lowered stock car in need of a tune-up and a couple fresh coats of paint. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 113 minutes)

If, as Susan Sontag once opined, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is, then the fever-grip that the intimacy of celebrity tabloid photography exerts is, on a psychological level, an entirely understandable phenomenon. Still, in a society with broad freedoms of expression and the press, the junction of those liberties and personal privacy is a messy, complicated one. The documentary $ellebrity digs into that arguably symbiotic relationship between jostling, freelance photographers and their famous, sometimes unwitting subjects — examining celebrity culture, the increasingly bold intrusiveness of the paparazzi, and the jumbled intersection of authorized and unauthorized image management.

If it sounds empty and salacious, it’s not. And, of course, given the celebrity angle, it’s certainly not academic and boring, either. Directed with aplomb, the film is helmed by renowned rock ‘n’ roll and icon photographer Kevin Mazur, whose legitimacy and connections no doubt helped land the roster of famous actors and musicians who share their thoughts as interview subjects — a slate that includes Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sheryl Crow, Salma Hayek and Kid Rock. A smart, noteworthy socio-cultural snapshot, $ellebrity evinces a surprising depth, charting the history of paparazzi and how new media in particular has helped shape the landscape of entertainment journalism over the last 30 years. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (D&E Entertainment/Run Rampant Productions, unrated, 90 minutes)

A superbly crafted low-boil drama about an East German doctor who must balance dedication to her patients with a potential escape to the West, Barbara represents the latest entry in a continuingly successful working relationship between actress Nina Hoss and director Christian Petzold. A smart, engaging story built on telling details, the film gets its hooks into you the old-fashioned way — through character — and highlights the difficulties and cost of living by principles.



Winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Prize for Petzold, Barbara unfolds in 1980, in a small rural town in East Germany. Idealistic Barbara Wolff (Hoss) used to be a top doctor at a respected Berlin medical facility, but has been banished to a provincial pediatric hospital after applying for an exit visa out of the communist country. Tracking her movements is Klaus Schutz (Rainer Bock), a representative of the Stasi secret police who views Barbara with a personal contempt (“If she were six you’d say she’s sulky”) that seems to extend beyond his tasked surveillance of her.

Even though she ranges from cool to outright standoffish, Barbara’s supervising doctor, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), keeps making attempts to get to know and help her. A delicate dance ensues. Barbara is touched by Andre’s altruism, but suspects, not without good reason, that he’s also an informant charged with reporting on her movements and activities. As she dodges Klaus’ observation and puts up with unannounced, intrusive and humiliating searches, Barbara continues to plot an escape to West Germany with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke). Burgeoning, complicated feelings for Andre, however, throw into relief a looming, difficult decision about what sort of future she truly wants.

The performances here are precise and modulated, like a Swiss watch; small glances and moments of silence are pregnant with quiet meaning. Hoss, whose previous four collaborations with Petzold include the striking Yella and Jerichow, is an actress of uncommon intelligence as well as chameleonic beauty; when she puts up a stern front her inner light can seem utterly impenetrable, and when she drops it the vulnerability can be shattering.

The commingling of the personal and political (also a big part of Yella) on the part of Petzold is impressive. He doesn’t cram in a lot of chronological markers to continually reinforce and remind viewers that he’s telling a period piece story. Instead, he gives his movie a thin sheen of formality that both obscures and heightens a plot which could otherwise be construed as melodramatic, and lets an audience consider and arrive at the allegorical weight on their own terms. But Barbara is never hammy or overwrought. It plays out on an altogether human terrain, marked with recognizable uncertainty, heartbreak and other turmoil. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, PG-13, 105 minutes)

A nonfiction film about hydraulic fracturing aimed largely at debunking Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated Gasland, FrackNation is a slice of agitated environmental pushback, an impassioned but slapdash cinematic rebuttal masquerading as a legitimate investigative documentary.

Directed by right-leaning filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who’s previously taken antagonistic runs at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and environmentalism more generally, FrackNation bills itself as an exploration for the truth about the petroleum and natural gas extraction method known widely by its shorthand nickname of fracking. In much the same fashion as Michael Moore in his earlier works, McAleer casts himself as a crusading journalist wading into the fray for answers, speaking truth to power and demanding accountability from bureaucracy.

Certainly FrackNation is interesting and valuable for the voice it lends to residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania (one of the chief settings of Gasland), who don’t feel any threat to their drinking water or health from mining. It shows, quite capably, the difference of opinion in this town. The problem is that McAleer fancies those espousing environmental concerns as “green extremists,” and by and large treats the fact that both local and national opinions of support for fracking exist as disproving evidence that anyone could have any issues with water potability or other health problems caused by fracking.

The movie makes the spurious leap of logic that the fact that there are some examples of methane present in drinking water dating back many decades as proof that no drinking water is so contaminated by fracking, and takes as gospel the word of mining companies in regard to the inviolability of their methods. FrackNation addresses the proprietary (read: secret) chemical additives pumped into the ground in massive amounts during fracking only by having a scientist say that the same thing could be true about coffee (!), and it does not address at all the crucially important issue of the storage and disposal of waste water run-off.

FrackNation is emblematic of some of the worst aspects of lazy social-activist filmmaking, both right and left (see also: Top Priority: The Terror Within, a documentary about Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Julia Davis), in that it throws out a bunch of tidbits of information and theories about adversaries’ motivations without much regard to a cogent macro argument. In McAleer’s case, this includes everything from a sourcing allegation about a specific insert shot in Gasland and a weak character assassination on a public official with adjudicating authority on a fracking bill to the assertion that American environmentalists are perhaps somehow in league with a Russian energy mafia determined to monopolize the future of natural gas shale drilling.

Most problematically, however, FrackNation peddles a false narrative. In striking minor nativist chords about how the generations-old livelihoods of rural Americans are at risk by environmental activists, McAleer completely ignores the many other difficult external economic realities facing small, family-owned farms being swallowed up by conglomerates. If a farmer absolutely requires the additional income of leasing his land for natural gas drilling in order to sustain his business, is the primary threat to that way of life those who seek transparency, tighter regulation and/or, yes, even a ban of hydraulic fracturing?

FrackNation is not a totally hackish work, but it does start from a bogus and willfully cordoned off point-of-view, and exhibits a desire to grind axes more than uncover truth. Promulgating the rather ludicrous claim that Big Media — that familiar right-wing boogeyman — has peddled fear-mongering about fracking, the movie wraps itself in a cloak of besieged indignity, content to scream “Fair and Balanced!” rather than engage in a more honest exchange of ideas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Hard Boiled Films, unrated, 77 minutes)

One can certainly enjoy The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” David Bowie‘s “Young Americans” or even, to employ a more recent example, Fun’s “We Are Young” on their own musical terms, in more or less disposable fashion. But for anyone who’s ever felt a stronger kinship to those songs or others because of their sterling evocation of adolescent energy and possibility, nonfiction cinematic equivalent Only the Young is a film for you — a delicate coming-of-age snapshot which locates the unextinguished youth in all of us. The Audience Award winner at the AFI Film Festival, co-directors Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’ film is swollen with sensitivity and sentiment, capturing in moving fashion some of the wobbly first steps of teenagedom.



Only the Young follows the intertwined stories of three Southern California teenagers who live in rundown canyon country. Garrison Saenz is an introspective and polite wallflower; Skye Elmore, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, lives with her grandparents since her father is in prison; and Garrison’s best friend Kevin Conaway, a glassy-eyed, socially awkward and frequently shirtless misfit, is a skateboarding fanatic who would be most at home in Dogtown and Z-Boys. Yet preconceived notions of these kids as aimless and empty-headed “troubled” teenagers evaporate almost immediately, upon first contact. Garrison and especially Skye are committed Christians, and Garrison and Kevin have a mentor/father figure in the form of a proselytizing skateboard benefactor. The film captures the rhythms and nuances of their friendships, and how things change both when Garrison gets a new girlfriend, Kristen Cheriegate, and it seems that first one and then two of the three might have to move away.

In both its dusty, Southwestern setting and objective telling, Only the Young recalls involving nonfiction offerings like Darwin: No Services Ahead and the engrossing web-doc series Interview Project, executive produced by David Lynch. Tippet and Mims, however, make superlative use of editorial cross-cutting to purposefully blur time. Direct-address interviews are blended with thoughtfully framed, gorgeously captured fly-on-the-wall scenes, and arranged in an order with more emotional than chronological fidelity.

Its subjects are engaging narrators of their own lives, and surprisingly perceptive in the manner that teenagers often are, just when one is ready to write them off as lacking any analytical prowess. The movie’s rawness and candor is its strongest selling point, but it’s often funny, too. (“Right, but rats are, like, a lot smarter than you guys,” says Skye, when urging Garrison not to leave food, no matter if it’s locked away in the pantry, in the abandoned house he and Kevin are intent are fixing up as their skate practice crash-pad.)

Only the Young is also notable for what it doesn’t show, and how this shades and impacts its story. Technology is acknowledged but it isn’t omnipresent, which is partially owing to the socioeconomic conditions of its subjects but also clearly an editorial choice. School isn’t shown or even much touched upon, and while family life is discussed, it isn’t the focal point of the movie. Tippet and Mims understand that, almost regardless of individual situation, kids experience and process these variables as fixed givens — incidental details in the grander story of Themselves.

The filmmakers do not impress their own narrative agenda upon Only the Young, but instead allow the accumulated significance of certain anecdotal, throwaway tidbits (Kevin is a cutter) to more naturally color a viewer’s interpretation, understanding and acceptance of these characters. The unique result is a stirring portrait of the contradictory innocence and rebellion present in all adolescents, not just these “alt-minded” kids on the fringe. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more on the movie, which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 73 minutes)

A lyrical nonfiction offering that could be viewed as a sort of companion piece to Beasts of the Southern Wild by way of Frederick Wiseman, Bill and Turner Ross’ Tchoupitoulas charts the journey of three young African-American brothers who head out onto the streets of New Orleans to experience the Big Easy‘s kaleidoscopic vibrancy. At once gorgeous and frustrating, alluring and tedious, the delicate movie is an undeniable example that, like physical beauty, the appeal of diffident, removed cinematic art is in the eye of the beholder.

Unfolding over the course of one night, Tchoupitoulas centers on William, Bryan and Kentrell Zanders, a trio of brothers who we first glimpse, pants slung low, bickering at home, in a manner familiar to all. Taking their dog out for a walk in the French quarter, the boys ruminate about Michael Jackson, hot dogs, heaven and their futures, drifting past strip clubs, bars and street proselytizers. After they miss a ferry back home, they knock about some more, exploring the night.

In its own malingering way, the film occasionally illuminates the magical thinking of adolescence (“I would be the first person to get my star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for flying,” says the youngest Zanders). But movies similar in tone and thematic exploration, like David Gordon Green’s George Washington and Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars, all have cleaner through lines, stronger emotional engagement and more of a sense of honed purpose. Excepting its for the most part superlative technical rendering, Tchoupitoulas feels like a cinematic exercise grasping blindly for reason and statement — a beautifully crafted paragraph in search of a topic sentence. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 82 minutes)

After his 2005 smash hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow smartly diversified his holdings as a producer, but chose to center his next effort behind the camera around Freaks and Geeks alum and Virgin costar Seth Rogen. Knocked Up, about a one-night stand between two mismatched twentysomethings and the ensuing unplanned pregnancy, was a bawdy comedy with both hilarity and heart — a movie that was scathingly honest about the panic of early-onset (or even properly timed) adulthood.

Two of the supporting characters from that 2007 film — Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s married couple, meant to serve as the counterbalancing avatars of air-quote maturity to Rogen and Katherine Heigl‘s central, panicked parents-to-be — get their own spin-off in This Is 40, a mid-life-crisis dramedy being billed as “the sort-of sequel to Knocked Up.” It’s hugely disappointing, then, that Apatow’s woolly movie is such a mismanaged mess. It would be one thing if it was just a case of baited expectations unmet. Long of running time and short on laughs, though, This Is 40 doesn’t even have the discipline and focus to locate much by way of bittersweet truth attached to adult relationship drift.

Los Angelenos Pete (Rudd) and Debbie (Mann) are frazzled dad and mom to 13-year-old Sadie (Maude Apatow) and 8-year-old Charlotte (Iris Apatow). He’s the owner of a boutique record label endeavoring to break the latest album of Graham Parker; she owns a trendy boutique where she never really bothers to show up to work, even as her two employees (Charlyne Yi and Megan Fox) spin different tales about the shop’s missing $12,000. The movie at first seems to be about a long-term couple struggling to get along — Pete’s instinctive need to pull away for private time, versus Debbie’s highly emotional reactions — and the difficulties inherent in maintaining both individual personalities and a loving union when also having to juggle the still-present responsibilities of post-diaper-changing parenthood.

It slowly expands, though, incorporating Pete’s money-mooching father (Albert Brooks), himself the new-ish dad of a set of triplets, as well as Debbie’s mostly absent biological father (John Lithgow), who drifts into frame after a seven-year gap for reasons never really explained. Each of these parents contribute in some way to Pete and Debbie’s emotional hedges and dodges, as do normal sibling bickering and the challenges of locating family time amidst the ever-present tethering of electronic connection. When rising financial concerns throw things further into relief, Pete and Debbie’s very commitment is put to the test.

Apatow’s roomy sense of comedy is largely predicated on the law of averages — of simply winding up disparate characters, defining (sometimes loosely, sometimes more concretely) how they’re at odds, and then believing that his actors’ improvisational runs are going to bail him out more often than not. But in This Is 40 the outcome feels more disjointed than ever. Apatow tempers his high fidelity toward topical one-liners (a plus or minus, depending on one’s point-of-view, but certainly a tack that could allow for a more timeless offering), yet doesn’t replace it with much more than a pinch of inside-the-married-mind insight. He nails most readily the latent combination of petulant and whimsical masculine neediness (Pete and his best friend wax philosophical about their spouses passing away, since widowers are regarded as hot and sensitive types to be nurtured, preferably by way of oral sex), but Apatow’s take on Debbie remains frustratingly inscrutable, which is needless to say problematic.

The result overall feels less like a panoramic study of modern adult- and familyhood and more like a series of tasked self-reflections for which its creator doesn’t have the stomach. Time and time again, Apatow flinches as Pete and Debbie’s discord and disregard for one another edges up toward something truly nasty, in favor of discrete bits which allow for the movie’s many recognizable supporting players (including Jason Segal, Lena Dunham, Bridesmaids co-writer Annie Mumolo and two of the stars of that Apatow-produced hit, Chris O’Dowd and Melissa McCarthy) to show up and drop some outrageous, modestly curated freestyle.

Since Mann is Apatow’s real-life wife, and their two daughters also star in the movie, it’s fun if a bit unnerving to speculate how much of this stems from real-life angst and issues. But it matters not in terms of the broader picture, since This Is 40 builds so falsely to its shrug-inducing finale. Despite setting up a rich (and easy) opportunity for their appearance, there are no cameos here from Heigl or Rogen — nor ever even any mention of their characters. And it’s perhaps that small factoid that’s most emblematic of the film’s failings. In lieu of cameos that could interestingly and more substantively color and reflect its characters’ journeys, Apatow peppers This Is 40 with random throwaway bits that awkwardly abut familial recrimination which otherwise also lacks the biting observational truth of the best (or even second-best) of James Brooks or Cameron Crowe. Rent Funny People instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Universal, R, 134 minutes)

In her first starring role in more than 15 years, Barbara Streisand tweaks the cheeks of Seth Rogen, starring as his worrywart mother in The Guilt Trip, a good-natured road movie of pantomimed meddling and make-nice closure that doesn’t fully root down into its characters and pay off its revelations in truly substantive fashion. Small stakes and consistently tame inclinations mark screenwriter Dan Fogelman’s effort, which gives off an ambling vibe that would be more at home in an independent production. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 93 minutes)

A well-meaning but rather inert borderland drama about a single Texas mother who, while in the process of trying to reunite with her son, becomes entangled with a young would-be illegal immigrant, The Girl is a decent showcase for the Australian-born Abbie Cornish, which explains its limited, awards-qualifying run in advance of its wider, March 2013 theatrical release. Still, the film is too limited in scope and too predictable to transcend its social-issue movie-of-the-week roots as a tear-jerker designed to play on the feelings of particularly maternal independent film fans. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Brainstorm Media, unrated, 94 minutes)

A warmly captured, wonderfully sketched, 1970s period piece social-issue drama starring Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt, Any Day Now tells the story of a gay Los Angeles couple fighting to at first legalize and then establish the permanence of their adoption of a neglected teenager with Down Syndrome. Engaging performances and a beguiling, unfussy technique anchor this big-hearted tearjerker, which cycles through some familiar territory but also deftly and movingly sidesteps conventional wisdom about where this tale may end up. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 97 minutes)

A very mannered but deadly dull period piece drama of partially upended, stuffy social customs in which things like, “Dolly, dearest Dolly!” are earnestly exclaimed, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is a ruinous vehicle for the incandescence of Felicity Jones. What could on the surface be something lively and spry, a la Oliver Wilde, is instead neither a spirited tale of romantic competition nor a hand-wringing story of fated love. It just lays there, at once familiar and inert.



The story centers around Dolly Thatcham (Jones), an English bride-to-be who spends a good bit of her wedding weekend holed upstairs in her family’s country mansion. This is the source of no small consternation to her tightly wound mother (Elizabeth McGovern), who knows nothing of Dolly’s dalliance the previous summer with the dashing Joseph Patten (Luke Treadaway, above right), who’s shown up to… well, it’s not yet quite clear what. While Kitty (Ellie Kendrick), Dolly’s younger sister, wanders about complaining about the lack of suitable suitors in her life, Joseph tries to make inroads into stealing a bit of private time with Dolly, to suss out whether she still might have feelings for him.

Director Donald Rice, working from a script co-written with Mary Henely Magill, adapts Julia Strachey’s 1932 novel of the same name with a slavish devotion to the literal that borders on suffocation. It certainly doesn’t help that Dolly’s betrothed, Owen (James Norton), is a complete nonentity, both as sketched and rendered; ergo, there’s no sense of proper balance or dramatic tension in Dolly’s affinity for these two men. But Rice and his technical crew also trade in the most obvious shorthand, crafting warm-hued flashbacks that stand in stark contrast to the chilly formalism of the movie’s setting proper.

The lead performances are okay — Jones has a quietly expressive face, and Treadaway a handsomeness that shades and elevates the motivations of an otherwise hopelessly mopey character — but the movie’s entire backdrop, in both its setting and supporting cast of characters, is fruitlessly bland. Some family members chirp and back-bite, others wander around in a haze. Viewers, meanwhile, might wish that the conversation turned to Cheerful Weather, if only so then there would be something interesting being talked about. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC, unrated, 97 minutes)

A surprisingly dark noir heart beats at the center of Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise‘s effort to establish a new franchise beachhead to complement the Mission: Impossible movies. Based on author Lee Child’s series, 18 novels and counting, about an off-the-grid former military investigator turned crusading antihero, director Christopher McQuarrie’s film is a confident, appealing genre piece built on a solid foundation of smartly modulated friction, blending old-fashioned fisticuffs with an engaging murder inquiry that reeks of mysterious frame-up. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 130 minutes)

A vividly sketched documentary of environmental warning which deploys co-producer Jeremy Irons as its inquisitive guide, Trashed sets out to discover the full extent of the world’s waste management problem, and diagnose its dangerous and rapidly increasing consequences for humankind. Directed by Candida Brady, the movie serves as a compelling indictment of modern profligacy, and a call to action for both aggressive macro reforms and sensible but pointed overhauls in individual behavior.



Trashed opens in Lebanon, where Irons, serving as an interviewer/audience escort, not unlike Keanu Reeves in this year’s Side by Side, visits a seaside Beirut suburb where 80 tons of refuse per day are added to a huge garbage mountain. Sadly but predictably, this has had a huge impact on the Mediterranean Sea, where waste and run-off, swept up by currents, reaches as far as Italy. While it dips into the usual big-picture statistics, using them like a fighter’s jab, Trashed continues for most of its running time in much this fashion, offering up discrete, targeted snapshots of lingering and problematic garbage dumps and burn-off pollution. Driven by a rangy ambition, Brady cycles from a look at the North Pacific Gyre (whose unusually intense concentration of man-made debris startled scientists several years ago) to a town in France where dioxin emission levels are 13,000 times the allowable rate, and a special-needs orphanage and child care center in Vietnam where the effects of the rampant use of Agent Orange are still being felt decades later.

Its mode is sometimes a bit on the nose (composer Vangelis contributes a score that,　especially early on, heartily depresses the buttons of ill-omened dread), but lest one think something like Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men was too fanciful, Trashed does a good job in connecting the dots between present-day marine animal problems and a rise in human infertility, as well as the chances for a future tipping point if nothing is done now.

Plastics in and of themselves aren’t the problem, Brady’s film argues; it’s the combination of their ubiquity along with the fact that we’ve accepted, nurtured (and even celebrated) a disposable consumer culture. Hundreds and even thousands of years ago, the earth could be counted on to reliably recycle the sum total waste of human existence, since it consisted chiefly of materials like wood, paper, copper and even iron, all of which would eventually decay. Plastics, however, break down at an exponentially slower rate, and also leach dangerous chemicals — especially in water — that are not found in nature.

While exhaustively researched and compellingly stitched together, Trashed doesn’t expend quite as much energy assaying governmental policies and perspectives on this looming problem, apart from highlighting the dispiriting degree to which big-money corporate lobbying helps set agendas and protect habitual polluters in the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations every bit as much as in the United States. Still, Brady’s film is an alarm that can’t be ignored; socially conscious cineastes would be wise to support it as much as they can.

Trashed opens this week in New York City at the Quad Cinema and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. At the latter venue, director Brady and Captain Charles Moore, an interviewee from the film, will be present for a special Q&A on opening night. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (First Pond Entertainment/Bleinheim Films, unrated, 97 minutes)

A thoroughly unconvincing dramedy about an ex-soccer star juggling the demands of more involved fatherhood and suburban nookie, Playing for Keeps is tonal misfire that attempts to pivot into romantic reconciliation and tap into the same vein of awakened responsibility and maturation as People Like Us. It fails. Seemingly designed chiefly to lionize the irresistible masculinity of producer-star, Gerard Butler, the movie’s lack of commitment to consistent character traits results in an aggravating and wishy-washy combination of treacly sentimentality and male fantasy. What could have been a more complicated and contemporary suburban spin on Alfie feels like a lazy and anonymous daydream postcard of discord and resolution. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (FilmDistrict, 105 minutes, PG-13)

An Earth First! environmental activist who battled the logging industry’s clear-cutting of old forest redwoods in Northern California, Judi Bari was the victim of a 1990 car bomb that left her seriously injured. Then, she and her passenger found themselves under arrest, accused by the FBI and Oakland Police Department of being eco-terrorists who accidentally detonated their own bomb. Who Bombed Judi Bari?, then, is both a document of her eventual exoneration in the wake of a sham investigation and various false affidavits, but also a nonfiction tribute to the steel-spined spirit of Bari and other dedicated non-violent activists who, in standing up for their principles, coped as well with terrible and nefarious push-back from powerful governmental bureaucracy.



The movie is built around deposition testimony from Bari (pronounced “berry”) in a 2002 civil suit, which gives it a nice framing device from which to flash back and forward in time. Darryl Cherney, the other victim of the bombing, is a producer on the project, so the movie obviously has an invested, canted point-of-view. But its evidence is so overwhelming and completely obvious (in addition to being backed up by a $4.4 million vindication in a jury trial in which six of seven law enforcement officers were essentially tabbed as having framed the victims) that dispassionate objectivity is not a tone required for this story.

Besides, Who Bombed Judi Bari? doesn’t aim for an arcing overview of Bari’s homebase organization, Earth First!, in the manner that the recent We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists offers up a fairly comprehensive history of the decentralized online collective Anonymous. It doesn’t have to. In focusing — as its title augurs — more specifically on the still unsolved act of violence perpetrated against Bari and Cherney, director Mary Liz Thomson’s movie tells a story with much more gripping immediacy, and then allows viewers to connect the dots of incompetence, malicious disregard or darker conspiracy in their mind however they might choose.

The most amazing thing is just how focused, articulate and utterly unflappable Bari (and Cherney) remain in the face of such enormous difficulties and pressure. Thomson’s film will make you think, and it will make you mad. It will also make you think about how Bari and Cherney didn’t merely succumb to pure anger, but instead focused and used that energy to work within the justice system and impact change. It’s a positive, important lesson that’s even bigger than the stirring environmental tale at its core. Who Bombed Judi Bari? opens exclusively in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7; Ed Begley and other personalities will join the filmmakers in attendance. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Hokey Pokey Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)

Another descendant of Dogtown and Z-Boys, Stacy Peralta’s influential 2001 documentary about the 1970s rise of popular skateboarding culture and the colorful characters who populated it, Waiting for Lightning details the life story of visionary skater, daredevil and X Games star Danny Way, building up to his 2005 attempt to jump the Great Wall of China. A slick technical package and a willingness to peer at least a bit into the difficult childhood and fractured psyche of its subject give this movie a leg up on a lot of its less inquisitive, like-minded, hagiographic stunt spectaculars, like Nitro Circus: The Movie. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 96 minutes)

Narrated by Catherine Keener, Lost Angels: Skid Row Is My Home provides a poignant, illuminating look at the titular downtown Los Angeles area which serves as the residence to a large portion of the city’s indigent population. Far from just serving as an audio-visual grief mop — prodding viewers with images of despair — director Thomas Napper’s deeply humanistic movie throws a non-exploitative spotlight on people who have both found a way to make a life for themselves within this community of homelessness and also make themselves of greater service.



Skid Row, covering about one square mile, serves as home base for as many as 11,000 Los Angelenos, two-thirds of whom struggle with some form of mental illness, drug addiction or both. In uncompromising fashion, Lost Angels tells its story, funneled through eight inhabitants as well as a variety of advocates and volunteers who man various community outreach service programs. In doing so, the movie lays waste to certain misconceptions about both those who pass through Skid Row (meet Danny Harris, a scholarship track athlete and former Olympic medalist) and some of their reasons for being there, since single-dwelling units on a meager disability stipend are hardly affordable anywhere else (“We’re not here because we’re homeless — just less of home, maybe,” says one woman).

The film also shows the squeeze on the homeless on both sides — how the increased gentrification of the area has coincided with the tail end of changes in the mental health care system and the increased criminalization of behavior (loitering and the like) that is not as strictly policed elsewhere. The latter is sorted through the prism of Los Angeles’ controversial September 2006 “Safer Cities” initiative, a $6 million campaign launched under Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa　and Police Chief William Bratton in which 50 new dedicated police officers were given new mandates for enforcement without the promised expansion of social services.

Both in its focus on those on the margins of society and its frequently artful blend of direct-address interviews and landscape footage, Lost Angels recalls Interview Project, a 2009 web series executive produced by David Lynch. Interviewees like UCLA law professor Gary Blasi　and others provide an articulate (and much more traditional) academic assessment of the different causes of this social blight. However, it’s the Skid Row residents themselves — like transgendered, self-described freak Bam Bam, dedicated street sweeper OG, and stray cat lover Lee Anne and her protector and fiancé KK (above) — whose faces and stories will stick with you. Lost Angels opens this week in Los Angeles for an exclusive engagement at the ArcLight Hollywood. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Cinema Libre, unrated, 75 minutes)

The idea of a wacky, modern German relationship comedy may seem at first unfeasible given the dour reputation of its homeland, but that’s just what multi-hyphenate Matthias Schweighöfer’s What a Man is. An unlikely and generally winning if utterly formulaic blend of male fretfulness and romantic bloom rooted in friendship, the film serves as further ample proof that some fairy tales of amorous connection have universal appeal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox International/Paladin, R, 95 minutes)