An imaginative, emotionally resonant coming-of-age story about two young kindred spirits who seek solace in one another, writer-director Tom Shu-Yu Lin’s Starry Starry Night, an adaptation of Taiwanese author Jimmy Liao’s bestselling illustrated book, is swollen with genuine feeling. Showcasing the commingled frailty and toughness of adolescents, and the rich inner landscapes that exist apart from whatever tethering relationships they have with adults, Lin’s sophomore effort represents a solid blend of technical achievement and kindhearted portraiture.

The narrative beats are sometimes familiar, and its metaphorical underpinnings rather highlighted, but the movie’s superlative inducement of whimsy ensures that its grip on one’s attention and heart never significantly loosens. While not nearly as overtly comedic as something like Stephen Chow’s CJ7, Starry Starry Night taps into the same sense of fantastical wonderment as that film, as well as the more melancholic tones of movies like Hirokazu Kore-eda’s compassionate I Wish and Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 98 minutes)

A world premiere at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, British import Hollow cashes in on the found footage revival kicked off at least in part by 2009’s Paranormal Activity, telling the story of a quartet of friends who suffer a dark turn of events in a remote village in Suffolk, England that’s been haunted for centuries by a local legend. Solid, largely naturalistic performances and a nice technical package help offset a story whose bump-in-the-night eeriness reaches a certain level of diminishing return long before the end of its 95-minute running time, rendering Hollow a marginal recommendation only for hardcore genre enthusiasts. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 95 minutes)

An uneven action-comedy of unconvincingly forced hijinks, You May Not Kiss the Bride plays like a strange, misbegotten mash-up of The Bounty Hunter, Green Card, Get Shorty and The Big Bounce. The cross-pollinated ensemble story of an arranged marriage, unlikely budding romances and a bunch of criminal mischief and double-crossing, it’s amiable yet still consistently wearying — a movie that never figures out a way to stitch together all of its incongruous elements.

After a mishap involving a customer’s cat, unassuming pet photographer Brian (Dave Annable) is strong-armed into canceling out his debt by marrying the daughter, Masha (Katharine McPhee, late of American Idol), of Croatian mobster Vlatko Nikitin (Ken Davitian), in order to help expedite her immigration. This triggers the wild, hormonal jealousy of Brian’s assistant Tanya (Mena Suvari), who’s convinced that the two of them should be an item. It also puts Brian in the crosshairs of Brick (Vinnie Jones), an ill-tempered henchman of Nikitin set to actually marry Masha for real, after a year passes of the simply-for-show nuptials.

Following a big public wedding, Brian and Masha head off to a secluded Tahitian resort. When Masha gets kidnapped, though, Brian becomes desperate to track her down — enlisting the help of Ernesto (Rob Schneider), a horny, jack-of-all-trades tourist-transportation guy, and Lani (Tia Carrere), a kind-hearted waitress.

You May Not Kiss the Bride begins as a more conventional, if undeniably broad, laffer, and then morphs rather fitfully into an air-quote zany action comedy, with Brick visiting violence upon Brian and others, and chase sequences culminating in explosions and the like. The result is neither fish nor fowl — a movie that has no settled sense of purpose or narrative clarity. The story is expansive enough that it allows for a wide range of recognizable faces, but any and all dramatic payoffs are pat, and the material isn’t snappy enough to truly merit their involvement.

Ergo, You May Not Kiss the Bride, shot mostly in Hawaii, becomes just a series of bits, passing time until declamatory markers are passed. As the amorous, unhinged Tanya, Suvari gives a committed, crazy turn — probably the movie’s best, or at least its most enjoyable — but many of the other performances seem to be on different wavelengths. Writer-director Rob Hedden’s chirpy, DIY production (it’s even billed in the opening credits as a movie by “Hedden and friends”) gets a tip of the hat for its independent production, but the technical execution and oversight aren’t strong enough to shape this muddled comedy into something worthy of recommendation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 100 minutes)

A crisp, procedural-type throwback to 1980s-style financial world thrillers about rich men behaving badly and skirting danger, writer Nicholas Jarecki’s narrative feature directorial debut, Arbitrage, has the benefit of a superb, invested cast and a narrative that’s plugged into the current zeitgeist in a compelling fashion. The story of a billionaire hedge fund manager trying to broker the sale of his company ahead of the discovery of either long-simmering financial impropriety or a tawdry and possibly criminal matter from his personal life, Arbitrage won’t necessarily win awards for originality, but it’s a sleek, engaging and efficient little cat-and-mouse thriller about some darker human impulses, and the lengths to which a man will go to maintain his rewards and style of life.



On his 60th birthday, Robert Miller (Richard Gere) appears to have it all. A Wall Street titan with a successful financial trading and investment company, Miller has a beautiful wife, Ellen (Susan Sarandon), and a brilliant daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling), who is his chief financial officer and heir apparent. He even has a secret mistress, French-born art magnate Julie (Laetitia Casta). What no one else knows, however, is that his company is poised to take a punishing dive — the result of an over-extended financial bet and fraudulent shell game to conceal it.

So Miller is already desperately trying to unload his troubled empire when an automobile accident with Julie leaves her dead. With the assistance of Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), an unlikely face from his past, Miller selfishly flees the scene, mindful of both the secrecy of his affair and the trouble messy manslaughter charges could cause for his professional fortunes. As dogged detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth) pursues various leads and zeroes in on whom he believes to be the culprit, Miller’s behavior gets even shadier.

Its basic narrative is essentially a smooth-blended version of Margin Call and a rangier Law & Order episode, but one really gets a sense of Miller’s captain-of-industry sense of entitlement, and also the intelligence and cloistered-world thinking that informs it. Arbitrage exists in a swirling fog of duplicity and overall grey morality — one that pulls a viewer in and binds them to the narrative, however innately familiar, by refusing to allow for the existence of white knights. Everyone here lives in compromise.

If there’s an overarching criticism, it could relate to the movie’s rather needlessly compressed timeline, which basically unfolds over less than 48 hours and requires a few silly leaps in logic. Still, Arbitrage is a competent, slickly made thriller of corruption and immorality — it knows of the noose, and how to tighten it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions, R, 108 minutes)

There’s a familiar saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, which Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s assertively minimalist Francine recalls. An emotionally impressionistic story of a recently paroled woman coping with life on the outside of prison, this character study feels like a less successful riff on Kelly Reichardt’s much more evocative Wendy and Lucy — caught up in its own metaphor, its blank canvas and broadly sketched melancholic tones an empty vessel for those who would like to automatically turn the personal into the political.

There isn’t much in the way of plot to Francine. Oscar nominee Melissa Leo stars in the title role, as a woman who leaves prison and tries to re-acclimate to life in a downtrodden lakeside town. Though awkward around pretty much all humans (she frequently doesn’t respond at all in conversation), Francine comes to life through animals. She gets a couple odd jobs at a pet store and then a veterinarian, taking in felines and other animals until her house begins to resemble an episode of TLC’s hit new show “Crazy Old Cat Lady.” Boozy interactions with other societal fringe-dwellers then ensue.

It’s not that Francine feels phony, necessarily — it just feels tripped up and smitten with the notion that in saying so little it’s actually saying a lot. Francine is a fairly realistic emotionally stunted character, and Leo inhabits her with a deadpan commitment and complete lack of vanity — and not just because of a full-frontal nude scene in which she exits the prison shower. There’s just not enough latent intrigue or outside force upon Francine, and the movie’s elliptical psychological explorations feel half-sketched rather than arty. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Washington Square Films, R, 74 minutes)

 

More high-calorie, low-sense, audiovisual CGI stimulation arrives in the form of Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth and most roundly unsatisfying entry in the previously lithe and fun, $700-million-grossing sci-fi videogame franchise. Slow-motion action and lots of noisy gun battles cannot mask a decided lack of ideas and genuine narrative hurdles in this dispiriting claptrap, which serves chiefly as an inexorable march to the concluding set-up of yet another sequel. Returning impresario Paul W. S. Anderson has written every movie in the franchise, and occupies the director’s chair for the third time here. Rather than bring a unifying vision, however, his imagination and orchestration instead exude the slapdash feel of a hastily assembled, studio-curated greatest hits collection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 96 minutes)

A spare but winning romantic drama that taps into the same talky, intellectually stimulating vein as Richard Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset collaborations with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, The Trouble with the Truth is cinematic catnip for anyone who fancies themselves a student of the human condition. Written and directed by Jim Hemphill, this intimate bauble serves as a great showcase for actors Lea Thompson and John Shea, and a reminder that human desire doesn’t expire at 35 years of age.

On the heels of learning that their 24-year-old daughter Jenny (Danielle Harris) is engaged to be married, middle-aged divorcées Bob (Shea) and Emily (Thompson) get together for a dinner, their first in years. Bob is a Los Angeles-based musician who prides himself on his low economic overhead; remarried and living on the East Coast, Emily is a successful author who’s worried that she’s becoming “dull by osmosis” via her new husband. Over dinner, the pair find themselves reminiscing over what went wrong, and what was right in their relationship. As they slide into an alcohol-enabled haze of nostalgia, the question comes into focus — are they up for a passionate one-night stand, willing to give it another go as a couple, perhaps even both, or neither?

The Trouble with the Truth isn’t as stylistically audacious as Hans Canosa’s 2006 drama Conversations with Other Women, another playful adult love story, starring Aaron Eckhart and Helena Bonham Carter, that kept both leads on the screen for the entirety of its 84-minute running time. Shot on Canon DSLRs, its austerity sometimes gets the best of it. Still, this movie is an actors’ piece, and in this regard it succeeds mightily. Bob and Emily are at a place where they can let down their respective guards and simply let fly with their true feelings, with no worries of how inartfully phrased they may be. They “get” each other — deeply and realistically, in the ways that a couple with a turbulent shared history that spans many years of late twenty- and thirtysomething life truly can.

In spirit, Hemphill’s movie certainly owes a debt to Linklater’s previously mentioned films, along with My Dinner with Andre and other similar chatty, philosophically-minded flicks; The Trouble with the Truth is a bit like a re-stitched, backward-glance He Said, She Said, in which both perspectives of a relationship are laid up against one another, conversationally. The deeper in a viewer gets, the more its characters matter to them. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Winning Edge Partners, R, 96 minutes)

NOTE: The Trouble with the Truth opens this week in Los Angeles at the Egyptian and Aero Theatres, where Lea Thompson and others will appear in person at select screenings. For more information, visit the movie’s website or its Facebook page.

Stella got her groove back in Jamaica, but there’s no reason to believe mojo can’t be recaptured in decidedly chillier climes, as Hello I Must Be Going aptly demonstrates. A fine and funny film balanced between heartbreak and uplift, this smartly observed tale of a thirtysomething divorcée fumbling toward a young adulthood at once more grounded and independent is anchored by a rich, superlative turn from Melanie Lynskey.



The opening night selection at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Hello I Must Be Going unfolds in suburban Connecticut, where Amy Minsky (Lynskey) has been holed up for three months in the home of her parents, Ruth (Blythe Danner) and Stan (John Rubenstein), licking her wounds over her break-up with her husband David (Dan Futterman). Uncertain over her future, she tumbles into an affair with Jeremy (Christopher Abbott, above left), a 19-year-old actor who has a bit of stage work and a kid’s show under his belt. Things are additionally complicated by the fact that this relationship might endanger a business deal which would allow Amy’s father to finally retire.

Lynskey — who’s made her mark in a wide variety of supporting roles, often being called upon to fill in details and provide a snapshot of a rich offscreen life in but a few moments — has such a subtly expressive visage and engaged, always present demeanor, so it’s great to see her get a chance to put it to even more robust use in a lead role. She’s an ace with unfussy melancholic charm (of which there is still plenty here), but the true gift of her turn in Hello I Must Be Going lies in her full-on embrace of Amy’s fitful inner rhythms. The result is an utter delight, full of interesting choices — tears triggered by happiness, laughter from pain and tension — that convey vivid and recognizable truths about the steely grip of discontent and despair, and the giddy discombulation that can sometimes accompany finally shaking it off.

In fact, the acting is all quite good, and there’s a reason. Penned by Sarah Koskoff, wife of actor-turned-director Todd Louiso (Love Liza), the movie captures humanity and humor in equal measure — but always rooted in its characters, and neither contrived “wacky” situations nor what it believes viewers wish to see. Koskoff and Louiso invest in the differences in the relationships Amy has with her parents, which in turn smartly inform an audience’s sense of the (offscreen) choices that Amy has made that have led her to this particular moment. After about 95 minutes she must be going, of course, but by the end of one’s time with her they’ll appreciate the fact that she stopped by to say Hello. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Oscilloscope, R, 95 minutes)

A vivid and surprisingly emotive exploration of fashion modeling and the refracted reality and cost of the economic opportunities it presents for prepubescent Eastern European girls in particular, the spare but rather superb documentary Girl Model walks a tight-rope adjacent to exploitation, peering down into its caverns, and asking uneasy questions about whether the alternatives for so many young girls are really that much better.



Narrowly focused in savvy fashion, Girl Model interweaves the stories of two subjects who only briefly cross paths. There’s Ashley Arbaugh, an early-30s ex-model turned scout who scours rural Russian open casting calls looking for fresh faces, and one of her discoveries — Nadya Vall (above), a skinny, 13-year-old from a small Siberian town who describes herself as a “gray mouse,” and simple country girl.

Ashley specializes in finding models for the Japanese market (“not too tall, and young is important”), so after she taps Nadya and sends off some snapshots of her for her bosses’ approval, the young girl prepares for a trip alone to Tokyo, where a strict contract that limits her body measurements is supposed to guarantee her at least two jobs and $8,000. Speaking of course no Japanese and only a little English, Nadya (who wears a Teletubbies T-shirt to a going-away party thrown by her parents) is shy and naïve and homesick — all the things one expects of a provincial child. As her optimism about being able to rescue her family from their economic hardship begins to flicker and fade, Nadya’s dreams are contrasted with Ashley’s deep-seated ambivalence about the industry.

Directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin occasionally intercede on Nadya’s behalf (helping bridge a language divide in brokering a ticket adjustment, and at one point loaning her a cell phone to call home), but they mostly just observe. The film eschews traditional sit-down interviews, which likely wouldn’t have been as effective with Nadya anyway. Ashley, meanwhile, is guileless, and her complicated relationship with the fashion industry — something stirringly communicated through the use of self-shot video from her own heyday, in the late 1990s — gives Girl Model both a charged, unsettled quality and a deep vulnerability that runs parallel to Nadya’s story.

The cumulative effect of this masterful interweaving is a sparse, streamlined movie that is expressive without being heavy-handed. Girl Model is a film that comes to its provocation honestly and intellectually, without showiness or false pretense. There’s a surprising sense of tension that bubbles to the surface, over Nadya’s failure to book jobs and rising debt, and Ashley’s intimations and speculation about the slippery slope between underage modeling and prostitution.

Perhaps darkest of all, however, Girl Model doesn’t preach or offer up easy advocacy. One of the Russian talent brokers talks somewhat creepily about the importance of finding girls when they are extremely young, but later shares with Ashley how he endeavors to scare girls straight and set them on a path of financial security. He seems sincere, making the viewer ask tough questions about what constitutes smart and safe choices for those with frequently so little other opportunity for socioeconomic advancement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run Features/Carnivalesque Films, unrated, 77 minutes)

Extra helpings of off-kilter and off-key melodrama sink Michael Biehn‘s bewildering directorial debut The Victim, a nasty little down-and-dirty thriller about a murder, a panicked stripper on the lam, and a trio of guys trying to sort out the truth of her story and protect their own skins. Beset with many of the problems of low-budget indie flicks but none of the narrative cleverness, stylistic fleetness of foot or other mechanisms of coping with them, this grindhouse-type offering may find a certain cult-ish reception amongst longtime fans of the veteran genre actor, but otherwise disappear without a trace. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 83 minutes)

Director Cindy Meehl‘s soulful, Sundance-minted Buck, which told the story of quietly charismatic horse whisperer Buck Brannaman, illustrated just about as well as any film could the unique and poignant connection between man and horse, and how taming wild or otherwise unruly mustangs is a process that often reveals as much about the owner as it does the horse. Following in its nonfiction footsteps (or horseshoe tracks, I guess) is Wild Horse, Wild Ride, an engaging look at a bunch of folks who try to do just that.

As with many other documentaries of sub-cultural curiosity, Wild Horse, Wild Ride builds its narrative around a competition, in this case the Extreme Mustang Makeover Challenge, an annual contest in Fort Worth, Texas, that solicits 100 people to spend 100 days each taming a randomly selected, totally wild horse in order to help get it adopted into a better life beyond federal corrals. Wife-and-husband co-directors Alex Dawson and Greg Gricus select an interesting cross-section of subjects, and then track their progress (or lack thereof) over the course of the next three-plus months.

The framework of the actual competition, which unfolds over the course of two days in front of a bunch of judges and a public that will then be bidding on the horses, isn’t as well sketched out as in movies like Spellbound, Jig or Make Believe: The Battle to Become the World’s Best Teen Magician. There’s not a huge sense of audience emotional investment in the stakes, perhaps influenced by the fact that some of the finalists aren’t included in the movie’s roster of interviewees, and perhaps given the many different reasons the subjects have for tackling this unique challenge.

Regardless, Wild Horse, Wild Ride benefits from a professional technical package that isn’t overly slick to the point of distraction. Its cinematography is attractive, but not overly precious. Dawson and Gricus capture the often intimate, slowly developing bonds between horse and trainer, but also intercut training footage with the requisite sit-down interviews with their subjects.

It’s here that one wishes the movie really stretched its legs and unleashed more of a gallop. Big-hearted if sometimes politely incurious about these disparate motivations, Wild Horse, Wild Ride doesn’t appreciably root down into all the lives of its human subjects. It seems like it doesn’t want to offend by asking tough questions, which is fine but at times a bit unsatisfying. A certain scrim remains, even if the footage of horses and men (and women) learning to trust one another is inarguably often fascinating. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media Films, PG, 106 minutes)

An intensely earnest and subjective documentary look at the career and life story of Australian animator Yoram Gross, Blinky & Me casts a look back at the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust through the eyes of a then-child. This is didactic story, and certainly deeply felt, but it would have benefited greatly from a wider perspective, drawing in other voices to frame Gross’ professional work, and its popularity within Australia. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Smoking Mirror Productions, unrated, 75 minutes)

High-value animation gets wrapped around a slapdash story more suited to a Saturday morning cartoon in Hotel Transylvania, an animated film that tries rather unsuccessfully to meld empty nest anxiety with a curious, half-sketched tale about a getaway resort for monsters. Broad, lazy storytelling sinks producer-star Adam Sandler‘s vehicle, which lacks the snap and distinctiveness of something like the recent ParaNorman. Director Genndy Tartakovsky and editor Catherine Apple serve as taskmasters, driving the movie at a blistering pace. But they’re unable to impress a unifying vision upon the film, either in terms of tone or look, and Hotel Transylvania feels especially beholden to the undisciplined rhythms of Sandler’s more banal comedies, where digressive jocularity is valued above character consistency or narrative clarity. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG, 92 minutes)

Written and directed by Leslye Headland, the New York City-set Bachelorette may have roots that stretch back past 2011’s Bridesmaids, from co-writer-star Kristen Wiig and director Paul Feig. But in almost every conceivable way, shape and form this feels like a rudderless knock-off of that $288 million worldwide-grossing smash hit. Self-consciously raunchy and simply more loud and annoying than funny and insightful, Bachelorette serves as ample evidence that women can do stupid and crude as well as men, if pushed to it.



When Becky (Rebel Wilson) announces her engagement, it stings old high school friend Regan (Kirsten Dunst), an over-achieving, career-driven bitch-on-wheels, but she nonetheless pledges to handle all the wedding planning. The nuptials also reunite Regan with her two other best friends from adolescence — the sarcastic if somewhat self-destructive Gena (Lizzy Caplan), wounded by an unresolved relationship with an ex, Clyde (Adam Scott); and Katie (Isla Fisher), a ditzy party girl and cocaine fiend who loves the good life. Though Becky insists on keeping the bachelorette party low-key, Regan finds her interest caught by another member of the wedding party, Trevor (James Marsden). Much carousing and debauchery ensues, along with a tie-it-together sub-plot about repairing much inadvertent damage to Becky’s dress.

Bachelorette had its premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, which is a bit dispiriting to think about — the fact that some truly independent and undiscovered filmmakers got a rejection slip merely so that this slapdash vehicle, populated with recognizable faces, could bring a bunch of stars to Park City, Utah. The movie is apparently adapted from Headland’s own stageplay, but its willful bawdiness (slang like “cuntgina” is tossed around, and Gena’s outgoing cell phone message chirps, “Eat a dick!”) feels less rooted in character than some fantasy, gender-flipped construct — a women’s studies paper on the subversion of heretofore historically masculine bonding through lewdness.

A few of Headland’s referential riffs connect because of their specificity — analogies to Fast Times at Ridgemont High characters, Gena and Clyde’s shared recollection through the prism of an old pop song, and the name-checking of a somewhat obscure Saturday Night Live sketch — but most of the writing just seems manic and desperate. The movie is basically After Hours cross-pollinated with The Sweetest Thing. None of the depth of insight into female friendships or romantic relationships in general present in abundance in Bridesmaids is on display in Bachelorette. It’s just pointless vulgarity, peppered with some one-liners and channeled through showy, phony characters.

Then there is the acting, which is also problematic. Wilson (a scene-stealer in Bridesmaids, as Wiig’s roommate) generally acquits herself, and Caplan — getting to showcase a more super-charged style than typical — is still a delightful screen presence, finding ways to work in sly bits here and there. Fisher and Dunst, however, deliver shrill, gaudy performances largely devoid of recognizable human traits. One merely wants this terrible Bachelorette party to be over, so that one doesn’t have to see them again. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company/Radius, R, 87 minutes)

A casserole of post-apocalyptic siege/road movie clichés and tropes, The Day tells the story of a band of armed, sick and downtrodden survivors looking for refuge and trying to stay alive. Take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and cross-pollinate it with a couple dozen other more aggressively low-grade genre entries and the result is this very self-serious yet narratively unoriginal offering, which doesn’t have anywhere near the imagination to match the mode of its telling. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay/WWE Studios, R, 85 minutes)

An action movie with confidence, style and unapologetic brawn, Dredd, much like its blunt protagonist, doesn’t invest a lot of energy in oblique sketching of motivation, or playing coy. An adaptation of the popular British comic book focusing on the justice-dispensing character of the same name, this dystopian neo-noir unfolds as a full-frontal assault on the senses, while also carving out enough of a personality to establish a beachhead as a potential franchise for distributor Lionsgate.

Karl Urban ably communicates a steely resolve while still keeping his mask on throughout, and director Pete Travis (Vantage Point) orchestrates a fine array of action set pieces, aided by the fact that Dredd’s weapon is capable of firing six different types of ammunition, allowing for a wide assortment of mayhem and kills. Working with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Travis also makes solid use of the film’s 3-D; the narrative inclusion of a “Slo-Mo” drug fits the effect hand-in-glove, allowing for painterly images that approach art. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 96 minutes)

An appealingly low-key cinematic adaptation of director-star Mike Birbiglia’s autobiographical one-man show, Sleepwalk with Me is an amiable tale of beta-male discovery. Full of shaggy self-deprecation and wistful romantic realization, it serves as a sort of snapshot biography, charting Birbiglia’s first foot-in-the-water success as a touring stand-up comic, even as it comes at the cost of the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and against the backdrop of a rare sleep disorder. The movie’s subtext — of forestalled adulthood, particularly male adulthood, and its relationship to other elements of modernity — could stand to be explored a bit more, either at the cost of some of the movie’s family segments or just additionally, since the film only runs 80 minutes. But Sleepwalk with Me is still a mostly enjoyable little treat — and a reminder that, yes, comedians have real private lives too. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more on the movie, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (IFC, unrated, 80 minutes)

A generally well orchestrated sense of moodiness outstrips any of the potential baser genre inclinations of The Possession, a supernatural thriller which tells the story of a young suburban girl in the throes of demonic control. Charting mostly familiar territory, director Ole Bornedal’s wintry chamber piece — based on a 2004 Los Angeles Times article by Leslie Gornstein — aims for a slowly escalating sense of tension before blowing its wad in rather customary fashion.

Recent divorcées Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Stephanie Brenek (Kyra Sedgwick) are making a go of the whole split-household thing in their Northeastern suburban town. Clyde, a basketball coach, has a new home in a community still being developed, and their daughters, Hannah (Madison Davenport) and Em (Natasha Calis), seem to be adjusting okay to their mother’s goofy new boyfriend, Brett (Grant Show), who’s around their old house a lot. When Em becomes a bit obsessed with a mysterious antique wooden box purchased for her at a yard sale by her dad, it at first rings no alarms. When it’s revealed that the box houses a dibbuk, a dislocated spirit from Orthodox Jewish mythology that inhabits and ultimately devours its chosen host, Clyde seeks out rabbinical help, which leads him to the sympathetic Tzadok (singer Matisyahu, in his screen debut).

The film’s focus on religious elements different than the standard Catholic exorcism rites which feed so many of these tales give it a bit of genre differentiation. But it doesn’t ultimately root down deep enough into the specific Jewish sub-cultural factors, and husband-and-wife screenwriters Stiles White and Juliet Snowden never connect the cursed object to the family in any deeper fashion than the coincidental. It becomes just a handy but somewhat shrugging third-act add-on to much religious chanting, screaming and body contorting — hardly an essential part of the narrative.

Instead, working with cinematographer Dan Laustsen, the Danish-born Bornedal (Nightwatch) embraces the narrative clichés of the genre on a certain level, and endeavors to work viewers into a nervous tizzy by virtue of puppet-master technique. This means foreboding slow-motion tracking shots, high-angle shots to underscore human futility in the face of such spirit-world elements, and a score by Anton Sanko that is utilized in effective touchstone fashion. It works, for most of the movie.

The performances are for the most part solid, too, although the scenes become a bit creakier and purely functional when Morgan and Sedgwick eventually have to turn to Matisyahu. Morgan delivers a grizzled, mostly low-key performance that strikes all the right chords of a concerned patriarch. It certainly helps, too, that youngster Calis has some depth and savvy instincts of withholding, to go alongside the requisite make-up that reduces her visage to an unnerving pallor. If one is more apt than not to enjoy a movie of this type, The Possession delivers on more than it botches, to be sure. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Its premise — two twentysomething gals, feeling the economic crunch of the times, partner on a phone-sex-line venture — sounds like a hopelessly broad, gender-flipped cash-grab at some of the raunchy comedy dollars that seem so easy to pry out of teen moviegoers’ wallets, but For a Good Time, Call… transcends the more pat aspects of its story, connecting by sheer force of personality while also indulging in a few unexpected changes in direction. Powered by a fizzy, buzzy energy and slick, funny repartee that channels some of the best female buddy pairings out there, director Jamie Travis’ debut film, co-written by star Lauren Miller, is a genuine treat for gals and guys alike, exploiting for laughs the differences and similarities in male-female sexual attraction and gratification.



A world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, For a Good Time, Call… grounds itself in a classic odd-couple pairing. Lauren Powell (Miller, above right) is smarting from a break-up with her long-time boyfriend Charlie (James Wolk), and needs a place to stay while she waits for her résumé to open up a proper white-collar job. Spunky Katie Steele (Ari Graynor) finds herself in need of a roommate for the Gramercy Park-adjacent apartment she’s inherited from her grandmother. Mutual friend Jesse (Justin Long) re-introduces the pair, who have a prickly past dating back to one unfortunate night in college. Swallowing pride, they shack up and try to tolerate one another.

When the more conservative Lauren learns that Katie is working as a phone sex operator in order to make ends meet, though, she figures her business smarts could earn them both a lot more money. While keeping things from her parents, Lauren grows the business with Katie over the course of a summer. As Katie grapples with feelings for one of her regular callers, Shawn (Mark Webber), and Lauren finally learns of a job opening in her desired field, things get complicated.

Almost all that’s right about For a Good Time, Call… stems from its screenplay, co-written by Miller and her college roommate, Katie Anne Naylon, so it’s hard to hold onto much animosity about the things that it fumbles. Certain story bits (a co-worker introduced and then discarded after being revealed as an impostor) don’t really work, and the script doesn’t fully and convincingly delve into some of the plausible reasons behind or consequences of an amusing character twist it introduces. Still, there’s a somewhat beguiling blend of the prim and lewd here (“Basically, whatever it is, I just tell ’em I’ll lick it,” says Katie of her phone sex technique), and the comedy overall speaks in a forthright manner, in a way few films do, to how so much of our sexual education is absorbed through anecdotes and conversations with friends. No matter that the two leads here are a decade removed from the bloom of adolescence — they each have their own sexual hang-ups and issues, and through their weird and unlikely partnership-turned-friendship, they’re both fumbling toward something approaching self-actualization.

Miller, Seth Rogen’s offscreen significant other, has a natural, girl-next-door beauty, as well as a buoyant charisma that draws almost equally from demure naïveté and a place with more slyness and depth. There’s a nougat center of playful naughtiness under that nice exterior (something to which almost every guy can connect), and the mischievous chemistry Miller shares with Graynor — a gifted comedienne who’s made her mark in supporting roles in movies like Celeste and Jesse Forever, The Sitter, Date Night and Youth in Revolt — is an intoxicating thing. Accept this Call, it’s well worth it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for some soundboard shenanigans, meanwhile, click here. (Focus, R, 89 minutes)

A superbly acted and psychologically complex drama based on true events, writer-director Craig Zobel’s Compliance examines what can be accomplished with one piece of information and the suggestion of power. Unfolding with a screw-tightening simplicity at once disarming and deeply unnerving, Zobel’s film tells a simple story but one with a tentacled, fragile connection to everything from e-phishing scams and modern identity fraud to more monstrous abuses and scandals of the sort that have impacted Penn State University and the Catholic Church.



Compliance unfolds at a suburban Ohio ChickWich, a fast-food chain restaurant managed by the stressed-out Sandra (Ann Dowd). In the middle of a busy day shift, Sandra receives a phone call from a police officer (Pat Healy) telling her that an employee, Becky (Dreama Walker, above), has been fingered by a customer as having stolen money from her purse. Convinced she’s only doing what’s right, Sandra questions Becky, who denies any such theft. Sandra then follows (and tasks others with doing the same) a series of increasingly invasive step-by-step instructions from the voice on the other end of the line, who seeks her cooperation by way of explaining that he can’t yet spare officers to come to the scene.

Compliance is basically a coiled, cinematic mousetrap version of the famous Milgram Experiment, a series of social psychology tests in which obedience to authority figures was measured by having subjects perform acts otherwise out of step with what would be considered their personal consciences. Its roots lie in a case in Kentucky in April 2004, which later exposed more than 70 similar calls throughout the country over a period of nearly 10 years. What, then, to make of this warped but sizably-scaled attempt at manipulation and sexual abuse by proxy?

With the assistance of the ominous cello-and-glockenspiel rumble of Heather McIntosh’s score, Zobel (Great World of Sound) crafts a movie as taut and gripping as it is spare and streamlined. There are but a couple locations used here, which helps feed a sense of claustrophobia and queasy dread that mounts as the film unwinds, and circumstances become more dire for Becky. The characterizations are all crisp, and performances here are superb. Dowd channels the doubt and confusion of a person who strives to please, and avoid confrontation at all costs. Walker, meanwhile, charts a chilling and sympathetic course from bewilderment to sad resignation, most gut-punchingly registered in a telling line of explanation late in the movie: “I just knew what was going to happen.”

Detractors can harp on small details as somehow either indicative of filmmaking faults or “dumb,” unrealistic and/or overly impressionable characters, but Compliance digs down into the marrow in examining the degree to which people crave authority. Its story is wrapped up in sex, abuse, gender association and even generational power dynamics, it’s true, but the brash manipulation on which it focuses is present in everything from advertising to politics, where the “wrong-but-strong” management style of former president George W. Bush was viewed in many quarters as an asset. Compliance strips bare the fallacy of equivalent free will, and exposes the preference if not outright comfort many have for someone else making decisions and telling them what to do. It gets under one’s skin in a manner few films do, but sticks in one’s head the same way all great ones do. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 90 minutes)

A solidly constructed little character study of dark romantic bloom commingled with slipping-knot mental instability, The Good Doctor finds star-producer Orlando Bloom once again attempting to strike out and proactively define a screen personality separate and apart from the blockbuster pin-up status conferred upon him by the Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings movies. The scale and stakes are much smaller than in something like The Talented Mr. Ripley (and the behavioral urges somewhat different as well), but director Lance Daly (Kisses) capably pull strings in a manner that elicits tension and elucidates the impulses of obsession.



Bloom stars as Dr. Martin Blake, an ambitious but insecure young doctor in the early days of his residency. Already nervous about making a good impression on his supervisor and would-be mentor, Dr. Waylans (an excellent Rob Morrow), and concerned with the impact of a minor slip-up on his chances at an end-of-year fellowship, Martin lives each day with an electrical storm of anxiety and quiet contempt for others raging in his head. He looks down his nose at Jimmy (Michael Peña), an admittedly less-than-professional orderly, and takes disproportionate offense at the slights of Theresa (Taraji P. Henson), a nurse whom he feels doesn’t show him the proper deference and respect.

When a teenage patient, Diane (Riley Keough), is admitted with a relatively minor kidney infection, Martin gains self-esteem from aiding in her recovery, and strikes up a friendship with her. Martin’s interest soon becomes warped, however, and when Diane’s condition improves he begins tampering with her treatment in order to bring her back into his life. When Jimmy later discovers evidence of this, it further compromises Martin’s professional future.

The Good Doctor effectively threads the needle between intimate character study and psychological thriller. Working from a script by John Enbom, Daly delivers a spare portrait of howling neediness that unfolds in a world without a lot of extra flourishes in setting or scope. There’s a compact focus to the movie (even the specific city in which it unfolds is meaningless, apart from a coastal connection) that puts an audience right alongside Martin, and believably in his head, while still allowing for slight modulations in tone. It’s a different animal from something like Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, but similar in that it is both at home with and achieves intrigue, dark comedy and a slowly escalating tension and uncertainty about how things will play out.

The precision of Daly and cinematographer Yaron Orbach’s wide frames abet the actors, allowing for a rich and subtle interplay of action and reaction. Morrow is superb, Keough is radiant and enchanting, and Peña is amusing as a smarmy, weaselly clock-puncher looking to capitalize on his bit of informational leverage. Bloom’s performance is very occasionally a bit self-conscious (he seems an actor always aware of the camera’s position) but also restrained. He succeeds in tapping into Martin’s vulnerability and self-delusion in equal measure — no small task.

The fairly late introduction of an investigating detective (J.K. Simmons), while meant to ratchet up the stakes, feels a bit like a rushed gambit to bring closure and finality to the narrative. Still, The Good Doctor doesn’t opt for a pat conclusion or render a moral judgment writ large. Its open-endedness is an enchanting conversation-starter — and bound to conjure up speculation about the out-of-office lives of your own care providers during your next doctor’s appointment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Finally arriving in American theaters almost two years after its Toronto Film Festival premiere, generational ensemble dramedy Little White Lies, from French filmmaker Guillaume Canet, proves itself a bloated, melodramatic and ultimately emotionally impenetrable affair. Centering around a collection of close-knit Parisian friends whose bonds are tested over the course of a summer holiday when one of their group is involved in a horrible automobile accident, the movie feels a bit like a French-flavored all-star tribute to Lawrence Kasdan, given the roster of notable performers. But its insights are meager, its whimsy too fleeting, and moments both large and small ring false — undone by Canet’s indulgence of overplayed emotion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Media Group, R, 154 mintes)

An enormously empathetic documentary that highlights the diversity and range of experience within the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Of Two Minds roots down into the stigma attached to mental illness, in a very human, relatable manner. Co-directors Doug Blush and Lisa Klein put an authentic human face on the disease, elucidating its physical and mental tolls without coming across as overly didactic or reductive. This is a movie swollen with natural feeling, and one in which any viewer of uplifting nonfiction can find welcome catharsis.



More than an estimated five million Americans are living with bipolar disorder, and with it the manic highs and crushing, enervated lows that it brings. While depression and mental health in general still have their own weight of shame attached to them, the boom in psychiatry and relationship counseling has made those topics more conversationally acceptable. Bipolar disorder, on the other hand, because of the unpredictability it often manifests, seems to have a deeper and more stuffed social closet.

Of Two Minds includes some interviews with doctors, but mostly chronicles the disease through those who live with it — including a 67-year-old architect and artist, Carlton Davis, whose illness plunged him into crack use, a cross-dressing alter ego and “trying to get AIDS,” as he puts it. Most symptomology isn’t quite that radical, but thoughts of self-harm and suicide are common at the lowest points. One sufferer, an author who’s written books about her struggle, describes it as “like having a constant flu in your mind.”

The film’s most luminous, emotionally connective strand, though, follows 37-year-old Los Angeles-based make-up artist Cheri Keating, who wasn’t properly diagnosed until she was 31. She enters into a relationship with a new boyfriend, Petey Peterson, only to have him eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder as well. In touchstone fashion, Of Two Minds charts the ups and downs of their off-and-on relationship. “I don’t even go for happy anymore,” says Petey at one point. “I just don’t wanna feel like this.” They’re words that sting, but also hold a connection and moving mini-epiphany for anyone tethered to the pain of a continued interpersonal struggle, whether their own or that of a family member or loved one. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more on the film, meanwhile, click here. (Mad Pix Pictures, unrated, 89 minutes)