A thinly sketched paranormal thriller starring Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan, The Apparition arrives in theaters stripped almost bare of anything that might provide some color, complication or personality. Even aiming for spookiness more than horror, writer-director Todd Lincoln’s feature debut is a desultory misfire. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 82 minutes)

An old-fashioned, squarely sentimental immigrants’ tale that marries a familiar story of generational rebellion to the New York hipster fusion music scene, director David Grubin’s Downtown Express is a wide-eyed if not particularly adroit charmer. If its awkward cycling through various stodgy subplots and general lack of a more starkly defined contrast and stakes mark it as somewhat lazy and functional on a narrative level, its relative freshness of setting — as well as the fact that its music, from Grammy nominee Philippe Quint and Nellie McKay, absolutely sings — makes the movie a marginal recommendation for those with an interest in musically-focused cinema. It doesn’t reach the heights of Once or even the more experimental, exuberant Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, but arthouse boomer fans in particular will respond positively to the movie’s heart and soul. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center 5, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 90 minutes)

Stories of human connection to the animal kingdom in the modern world are surely not the worst nonfiction film endeavors, but the rather bewildering True Wolf takes what by rights should be the fascinating tale of a Montana couple who raised a wild wolf alongside their dog and turns it into a sincere but hopelessly jumbled mess. Poorly edited, structured and thought through, director Rob Whitehair’s movie is a torturous bore, even at a mere 76 minutes.

True Wolf centers on Bruce Weide and Pat Tucker, a married couple who decide to hang onto wolf pup Koani after a wrapped-up film project leaves him in their custody. Learning by trial and error as much as anything else, they get a dog to provide some quasi-lupine companionship, and pretty much devote their entire lives to raising Koani in a manner that at least accomodates his baser instincts. This means two-hour-plus walks twice a day (tethered by bungee-cord-type tubing), dumpster-diving for some of the more than 1,200 pounds of raw meat their wolf eats every year, and a special “wolf door” that allows free access between outside and a caged-in portion of the inside of their house. For money, they also use Koani as an “ambassador wolf,” taking him around to elementary schools as a teaching tool about wildlife.

Whitehair’s film is ostensibly a didactic tale of the grey area between man and beast, fellow social predators, but it’s also an examination over the debate of the reintroduction of wolf populations into the wild, though one has to mostly suss out that latter part on their own, after a half hour or more of viewing. The film is sketchy about the specifics of how Bruce and Pat came into possession of Koani, and it intercuts footage from lots of different sit-down interviews, so is frequently repetitive. It touches on socialization versus domestication (a crucial difference), but not quite with as much detail as one would ultimately like.

Most inexplicable and impenetrable, however, is a buffet of protest footage — of exactly what, where and when, one is never fully certain — wherein someone actually waves a sign that reads, “Wolf is the Saddam Hussein of the animal world — we don’t want Saddam Hussein!” There’s also an old guy with his arm in a sling who quotes from the Book of Revelation, and a woman who prattles on about Satan wanting to have livestock threatened (presumably by way of reintroduced wolves). Many of these bits are entirely absent any context or set-up (some even seem certain to be re-creations), so it’s hard to grasp what the hell is going on or even what the point is, to be honest.

Weide and Tucker are polite, interesting and well-spoken subjects, but this vehicle is a frustratingly shapeless vessel for their story. Fans of Werner Herzog’s meditative Grizzly Man, as well as other films that examine the difficulties of taking as pets animals meant to be wild, and even wildlife lovers in general may be tempted to take a flyer on this curio. Stick with Teen Wolf instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here. (Shadow Distribution, unrated, 76 minutes)

Cinema has always been marked by the push and pull between art, commerce and technology, but perhaps never more so than with the advent of digital filmmaking, which stands poised to sweep aside more than a century of celluloid technique and history. Directed by Chris Kenneally and anchored by interviewer-producer Keanu Reeves, the superlative new documentary Side by Side seeks to explore this revolution through the eyes of some of Hollywood’s biggest and most respected filmmakers. A wide-ranging and thoroughly engaging treatise that benefits from a broad spectrum of interviewees and perspectives, this is “inside-the-Beltway” cinema, yes, but it’s also a film about film that matters — one that ably sums up an art form, where we’ve been and where we’re going.



At this moment in time, digital filmmaking and the world of photochemical 35mm exist in tandem, with master cinematographers and directors having a choice between mediums and sometimes switching back and forth between the pair. But the switch-over to much more inexpensive digital filmmaking technology and the subsequent quiet revolution in digital projection — there were only four digital theaters in 1999, for the premiere of The Phantom Menace, 150 three years later, and we’re now hovering around 50 percent nationally — means that 35mm is on its way to becoming a cinematic programming curio.

There are a couple fantastic anecdotes scattered throughout (David Fincher recalls Robert Downey, Jr. leaving mason jars of urine scattered around the set of Zodiac as form of protest over the continuous shooting and lack of mentally refreshing downtime), but Side by Side is mostly a history of digital filmmaking’s transition from black sheep stepchild to mainstream industry embrace. Using the work and opinions of dozens of filmmakers, Kenneally’s movie details films of various groundbreaking types, like Dogma 95 movement debut The Celebration, Sin City, and Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire, the latter of which was the first film shot almost entirely digitally to win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Several directors, meanwhile, posit that celluloid instills a certain level of focus and respect for the filmmaking process, “because you hear money whirring through camera,” as one puts it.

Kenneally has superb instincts about where and how to indulge sidebar historical lessons, but he also goes to significant lengths to chat with many cinematographers and let them voice opinion on how digital filmmaking is impacting the work, relationships and influence. For some, it seems to have eroded their power, since the work of directors of photography can be evaluated more immediately, instead of waiting on dailies. Digital intermediate colorists also have an increased sway over the final look of a movie.

Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, of all people, bemoans the digital revolution and the fact that it opens up new frontiers for would-be storytellers as signifying the loss of a tastemaker, and gatekeeper. Still, with all major manufacturers having stopped developing new photochemical film cameras, the future of cinema over the next generation-plus seems clear. Side by Side provides an amazing snapshot of this transition, at around the halfway point. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information about the movie and its VOD options, meanwhile, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 99 minutes)

Narrated in stentorian tones by Kelsey Grammer, documentary Until They Are Home shines a light on the extraordinary dedication of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military subset that works to locate and identify the bodies of American service members spanning various conflicts — and specifically their search for the missing remains of U.S. Marines killed in the Battle of Tarawa in November 1943 during World War II. Earnest and well-meaning but a bit sludgy and unfocused, this flag-wrapped documentary offering should find a home on PBS or elsewhere as part of future Memorial Day small screen programming.

The attack on the Japanese stronghold of Tarawa — an island parcel of land one-third the size of New York City’s Central Park, and the first major amphibious assault of the Pacific Theater — was designed to wrest control of an important 4,000-foot airfield landing strip that could then be used as a forward base for future operations. Combined, six thousand U.S. Marines and well dug-in Japanese soldiers lost their lives in the heated, three-day battle. American service members felled on the beach were hurriedly buried in mass trench graves. Decades later, the aforementioned Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command travels to the now-developed Tarawa to try to find human remains and bring closure to American families.

Part of the unresolved tension in Until They Are Home seems to result from its uncertainty of focus, in whether to tell the story of the assault of Tarawa more broadly, as funneled through the specific memories of a small band of Marines, or indeed just the charter mission of the JPAC team in general. Steven Barber, who takes the main directing credit, ping-pongs back and forth between different narrative angles, and picks a weird point of entry for his story to boot, resulting in a choppy narrative that struggles to hold viewers’ interest in a manner that it shouldn’t necessarily have to. Until They Are Home tells a solemn story, but just not very well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7, meanwhile, click here. (Vanilla Fire Productions, unrated, 66 minutes)

Set against the backdrop of what’s been coined the Olympics of oratory, nonfiction film Speak takes viewers on an intimate and emotional journey, through the paralyzing grip of the fear of public speaking, and into the Toastmasters International Speech Contest finals, which serves as a reminder that in order to connect on a human level one’s tale need not necessarily be sensational, but merely sincere.

Speak recalls movies like Spellbound, Make Believe: The Battle To Become the World’s Best Teen Magician and ventriloquist documentary Dumbstruck, all of which centered around specific subcultural contests, and tracked contestants through their preparations for the big event. For fans of those films, the enormously sympathetic figures in Speak will create a strong emotional pull. Its half dozen main subjects include an out-of-work father of six with an amputated foot; an architect turned actor with an incurable heart disease; a university professor who pulled herself up out of poverty; a single mom living with lupus; and a retiree who reconnected with his high school crush after more than five decades.

There are a couple other interviewees as well — Hardball host Chris Matthews (an ex-Toastmaster member himself), disgraced college TV sportscaster Brian “Boom Goes the Dynamite!” Collins, and Caite Upton, the Miss South Carolina Teen USA pageant participant whose rambling, nonsensical response to a geographical education question achieved an unfortunate national infamy — but these chats are mostly front-loaded, and not particularly well integrated into the movie. Other attempts to explain the Toastmasters organization and its charter come across as at once perfunctory and a bit shaggy and half-considered.

Most of Speak, though, is an uplifting portrait of friendly competition, and it’s when the film identifies this narrative track and embraces as its core mission the illumination of positive thinking and dream pursuit that it really takes off. Co-directors Paul Galichia and Brian Weidling eschew directorial flashiness, and instead double down on the basic human connection of their subjects, almost all of whom have experienced some considerable health problem or other emotional setback.

The competition parameters at this national convention — seven-minute speeches, sans notes, differing from the material that has passed the speakers through various area and regional feeding rounds — are kind of loosely defined, but in the end it doesn’t much matter. Author and would-be professional motivational speaker Rich Hopkins, the aforementioned family man amputee, is an especially relatable figure. In his humble obstinance, one glimpses the heartening strength of American character. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more about the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7, meanwhile, click here. (Tumbleweed Entertainment, unrated, 89 minutes)

The notion of a kiddie horror film may seem or sound like a weird mix, but any moviegoer of appreciable devotion can surely recall a film from their early adolescence that got under their skin a bit in a good way, providing a cathartic jolt. Mostly funny but also plenty scary for the elementary school set, the new 3-D animated adventure ParaNorman, from the makers of Coraline, fits that bill.



A kind of inventive and visually engaging melange of the aforementioned flick, Monster House and A Nightmare Before Christmas, ParaNorman unfolds in the town of Blithe Hollow, whose locals profit from tourism mining the town’s history as the site of a famous witch hunt 300 years earlier. For 11-year-old Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), though, ghost lore and other spookiness isn’t just part of some dusty old history book — he still sees his deceased grandmother (voiced by Elaine Stritch), as well as all other manner of dead people.

This flusters his father Perry (voiced by Jeff Garlin) to no end, but when Norman’s black sheep uncle (voiced by John Goodman) unloads on him the responsibility of halting a centuries-old witch’s curse from coming true, the requisite race-against-time unfolds, with a pack of risen zombies unleashed upon the town. Caught up in the mix alongside Norman are amiable and impressionable classmate Neil (voiced by Tucker Albrizzi); thick-headed bully Alvin (voiced by Christopher Mintz-Plasse); his perpetually exasperated older sister, Courtney (voiced by Anna Kendrick); and Mitch (voiced by Casey Affleck), the school quarterback on whom she nurses a none-too-secret crush.

The film’s exacting stop-motion animation has a fabulous and inviting tactile quality, a bit like The Fantastic Mr. Fox. One wants to reach out and touch the characters, and tumble headlong into their world. Director Sam Fell oversees a funky style, too, with great imagination to the movie’s framing. And with his bacon strip eyebrows, Bart Simpson-esque spiky hair and melancholic, crushed-confidence vocal timbre, Norman cuts a sympathetic figure.

The plot bogs down a bit as the movie shifts gears into its second and third acts — the audience is on the outside looking in on the specifics of Norman’s quest, much like the character himself. A bit more clarity and early revelation here wouldn’t have hurt. And the supporting players — cheerleader, himbo jock, bully and chubby geek — are more functional than deeply sketched, and deployed in a manner that doesn’t really add much, in either assistance or obstacle, to Norman’s journey. But Chris Butler’s script knows how to push the right buttons of squirmy gross-out and slapstick comedy, and features plenty of winning set-ups and jokes.

In its own small way, ParaNorman is also a product of its time, and a salvo against sociocultural nastiness. While it focuses on a misunderstood kid, and again preaches a familiar strain of diversity appreciation and inclusiveness, its parallel moral — indeed, even stated outright by Norman’s mother at one point — is that when people get scared, they’re apt to do terrible and stupid things. It’s not too much of a leap to assign that description to our current political climate. (Focus/Laika, PG, 100 minutes)

Nobody can push buttons of exasperation and pull levers of hair-trigger emotional reaction quite like family — those folks who know all of the faces of the past you’ve tried to shake and shed. That truth is borne out in Julie Delpy‘s witty, winning new comedy of relationships and culture-clash, 2 Days in New York. A nominal follow-up to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris, in which Delpy played the same character with a different love interest, this rather delightful romp eschews complicated plotting to instead luxuriate in and connect via a fresh, fun, wound-up energy all its own.



French-born photographer and artist Marion (Delpy) lives comfortably with her radio talk show host boyfriend Mingus (Chris Rock) and their two children from previous relationships. But on the eve of a big show — the centerpiece of which is a conceptual piece in which she’s offering up her soul for sale, for $10,000 — Marion gets plenty of extra stress when her family arrives for a visit. This includes her over-sexed sister Rose (Alexia Landau); her sister’s outrageous, weed-obsessed boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon), also one of Marion’s exes; and her merrily bizarre and gregarious father (Albert Delpy), who thinks showers “deplete the immune system.” Falling back into old patterns, Marion starts spinning out of control, and this new glimpse of craziness puts Mingus further on edge.

Delpy collaborated on the script with Landeau and Nahon — each of whom also reprise their characters from Paris — and it’s clear that their offscreen rapport informs much of the rapid-fire bickering and gussied-up misunderstanding that fuels the movie’s comedy. Yet Delpy’s worldview and tone — neurotic, but knowing — also echo a female Woody Allen by way of Lina Wertmüller, funky and funny without tipping over into tedium or speechifying. Much of this balancing act owes to her directorial style, which is light and playful throughout, incorporating photo montages and a bouncy score of her own composition.

The pairing of Rock and Delpy is also a true delight. It gives Rock a chance to stretch a bit and do something different while also playing to his verbal strengths. Mostly, though, 2 Days in New York simply provides a showcase for the unexpected mash-up of Rock and Delpy’s respective styles and rhythms. It’s the same premise, basically, behind Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell’s casting in Bewitched, except that Delpy’s loose-limbed, lived-in movie is actually funny. A couple days with this brood will put a smile on one’s face. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For a one-on-one Q&A chat with Delpy, meanwhile, click here. (Magnolia, R, 91 minutes)

In 2004 Jonathan Caouette made a film, Tarnation, about his tumultuous upbringing with his maternal grandparents and fractured, on-and-off-again relationship with his disturbed mother, Renee, who suffered from psychosis after undergoing shock treatments in her adolescence following a period of time being paralyzed. The movie became something of a media sensation for being edited on free iMovie software on a Mac and having a budget of only a couple hundred dollars (though subsequently brushed up sonically prior to a theatrical release), but it was no parlor trick. An intense and unsettling autobiographical bricolage, the movie had important things to say about psychological abuse and the familial legacy of mental illness.

Walk Away Renee represents Caouette’s follow-up to Tarnation, as it also centers around his 58-year-old mother, now living in a group home in Houston, diagnosed with acute bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. While partially framed around a 2010 road trip to bring Renee to an assisted living facility closer to him, in New York, the film is, more broadly, an achingly melancholic, fairly haunting and inescapably human document that shines a light on some of the less typically discussed dimensions of mental illness.

The mode of its telling conforms to Caouette’s collagist instincts, incorporating digital home video footage, large swathes of photo flashback montage, probing but casual conversational footage, and even a staggering string of answering machine messages from his mother that captures the wild swings of her many moods. During the road trip, Caouette — wearing under his eyes the bags of someone who’s had to spend a lifetime emotionally bobbing and weaving — deals with lost medications and seemingly ad hominem attacks. But what gives this material extra depth and resonance (whether or not one has seen Tarnation) is his skillful touch with tapestral downheartedness.

In a sense, Walk Away Renee is both a love letter and a break-up letter. It shows a deep bond between single mother and only son, but also the limits of this relationship, and the veritable chasm that mental illness represents between those struggling with it and those who love them. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To view the film online via VOD, click here. (Sundance Now, unrated, 88 minutes)

A generally agreeable but perhaps hopelessly meandering documentary snapshot of one young guy’s attempt to hit the road for 31 days and live off the alms of America’s new, digital age thrift store, Craigslist Joe isn’t the first nonfiction film to throw a light on the namesake popular classified advertising website, but it is the first to arrive with the imprimatur of executive producer Zach Galifianakis.

Departing Los Angeles with only $200, his laptop and bookbag, a cellphone, tooth brush and the clothes on his back (oh, and a cameraman, whom he of course met on Craigslist), Garner relies on listings — both his own, and those already on the site — for food, shelter and transportation. Via a couple ride-shares, he heads north, to Portland and Seattle, and then finally east, along the way trolling Craigslisted free events (charity gatherings, open-mic nights, breakdancing classes, Hanukkah celebrations) where he can mingle, grab a bit of warmth and try to find a place to crash for the evening.

Garner — who hatched the idea for his feature film debut while serving as an assistant to Todd Phillips on The Hangover — is a pleasant and engaging enough guide for this trip. And as a travelogue litmus test of human kindness, Craigslist Joe is satisfying entertainment, on a surface level. It warms the heart a bit, and certainly proves to be an emotional and enlightening experience for Garner. So watching him achieve some emotional fulfillment and growth emits small pulses of positive energy. But even on just a personal/psychological level the movie lacks a strong enough thesis, definition and stakes, and could benefit enormously from more direct-address confessionals. It doesn’t necessarily need the personality infusion of a chattering Morgan Spurlock, but Craigslist Joe does cry out for more of a sense of Garner’s state of mind during his actual travels.

Craigslist Joe isn’t bad, and will in fact prove quite enjoyable to those utterly bewitched by its mere conceit. But in terms of pure slice-of-life quirkiness, melancholy and Americana, Austin Lynch (David Lynch’s son) and his friends achieved more with Interview Project, a striking series of three-minute shorts they produced traveling across the country. With Garner’s film, one can’t help but feel that it’s also a case of a concept not quite completely cracked — a tech-age experiment entered into with more feeling than thought. For more information on the movie, visit its website. For the full, original review, meanwhile, click here to visit ShockYa. (CLJ Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

The Bourne series is that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genre franchise with downhill, increasing commercial momentum and upmarket critical appeal. Swapping in Jeremy Renner for Matt Damon, and expanding the narrative playing field to tell a parallel story of intrigue and frightened governmental cover-up, The Bourne Legacy doesn’t miss a beat in doling out smart action kicks. It’s a fantastic piece of well constructed pop entertainment that has a certain air of erudite emotional remove, and doesn’t nervously or foolishly rush into revealing twists in order to satisfy or attempt to pander to impatient viewers.

Director Tony Gilroy had a hand in writing each of the previous Bourne films, and his chief value to The Bourne Legacy is as the architect of its expansive, chess board world. Abetted by the steely work of cinematographer Robert Elswit, the movie is of a piece with the other tony, slick, adult-market-minded films, Duplicity and Michael Clayton, on which Gilroy served as director. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 134 minutes)

Years ago, our minds warped by the spectacle of Dennis Rodman, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mickey Rourke appearing alongside tigers and exploding soda machines in Tsui Hark’s certifiably insane Double Team, a friend and I jointly speculated that Hollywood was on a path to ditching any semblance of narrative genre filmmaking and just releasing a movie called Tricks and Stunts. A feature-length indulgence of the same-named stunt spectacular, which used its MTV show in 2009 to spark a string of bestselling DVDs and, eventually, a live show in Las Vegas, Nitro Circus: The Movie 3D is pretty much a realization of that theory.

Using the latest compact camera rigs and other innovations in 3D cinematography, co-directors Gregg Godfrey and Jeremy Rawle provide viewers with bucket-seat and bird’s eye perspectives of much spectacle and mayhem as Travis Pastrana, the decorated freestyle motocross champion who co-founded Nitro Circus and still serves as one of its merry ringleaders, and his cohorts engage in all sorts of bike-, auto- and skate-inspired shenanigans. The roster of stunts includes purposefully flipping cars, ramped jumps into various bodies of water, back-flipping bikes over a chasm between two 60-story buildings, and trying to land an elusive double back-flip on modified tricycles amongst the mulch mountains outside of Pastrana’s Maryland home. For more information, visit the movie’s website. Meanwhile, for my full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Arc Entertainment, PG-13, 80 minutes)

A somewhat sloppy collection of relationship bits and shrewdly observed comedy of gender differences, the Los Angeles-based Celeste and Jesse Forever, which made its bow at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, marks the screenwriting and leading lady debut of Rashida Jones. A rom-com push that coasts along on the accrued goodwill of its game cast, this low-fi offering is built for the self-identifying embrace of mostly urban indie fans, but marked by a blend of sarcasm and end-game sincerity and life lessons that will strike other viewers as too cloying and calculated by half.



Celeste (Jones) is very career driven, the owner of her own media consulting firm, and the trend-analyzing author of pop culture book Shitgeist. Her best friend and husband Jesse (Andy Samberg), however, is less occupationally inclined. In their 30s, the couple has drifted apart — but only to a degree. Though they’re getting divorced, they still live together in a synchronized domestic routine. Their friends (Ari Graynor, Eric Christian Olsen) find this strange, and off-putting, but Celeste and Jesse swear that it works. Until, of course, it becomes manifestly apparent that it doesn’t. When Jesse breaks the difficult news that he’s gotten another girl (Rebecca Dayan) pregnant, it freaks Celeste out, and forces her to reconsider a decision that she previously found mature and progressive. Are she and Jesse meant to be together, or have they truly outgrown their relationship?

While Samberg is the more well known comedic performer, his presence is a bit of a head feint, for a good bit of the movie’s best comedy is actually bound up in Celeste-as-hot-mess shenanigans, as with Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl. Celeste and Jesse bogs down a bit when it shifts its focus away from the mechanics of its relationship dynamics, and tries to fold in life lessons for its lead character by way of Celeste’s professional acceptance of a troubled pop star (Emma Roberts). This and the film’s other shortcomings, however, are mitigated by the fact that Jones is such a spry and immensely likable performer, as well as the fact that she and co-writer Will McCormack have such great ears for pithy dialogue. It’s a credit to their script that even if the trajectory of its fractured romance feels a bit choppy, the characterizations remain recognizably knowable, and more or less worthy of empathetic investment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 91 minutes)

Winner of jury and audience prizes at both the Sundance and Los Angeles Film Festivals, Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man is an unexpectedly fresh nonfiction tale that rustles up deep feelings of a life stolen. Part docu-mystery, part uplifting valentine about the universality and resonating power of music, the movie tells the story of Sixto Rodriguez, an enigmatic, Detroit-based singer-songwriter who in the early 1970s released two soulful but commercially irrelevant albums under his surname, and quickly disappeared into complete oblivion, only to find unlikely reception and fame in a completely different context, half a world away.



In 1968, two music producers went to a smoke-filled downtown Detroit bar to see an unknown recording artist who’d attracted a small following with his affecting melodies and mysterious penchant for playing with his back to the crowd. They were immediately bewitched with Rodriguez, a Mexican-American folk singer whose evocative lyrics seemed a beguiling mixture of wistful regret and dark prophecy. They recorded two albums, and despite superb reviews, 1970’s Cold Fact and its follow-up, Coming From Reality, were unmitigated commercial disasters, effectively marking the end of Rodriguez’s recording career. He disappeared, and all that followed were stories of escalating depression, and rumors of suicide.

But a funny thing happened. A bootleg recording of Cold Fact found its way into South Africa, where its socially plugged-in lyrics found welcome reception with a generation of Afrikaans struggling with the moral failings of their country’s apartheid. Over the next several decades, even though he was banned from government-controlled radio playlists, Rodriguez became a phenomenon (bigger than Elvis and the Beatles, we’re told). Two fans — an ex-jeweler and a music journalist — would eventually set out to try to get the bottom of his presumed death, with surprising results for all involved.

Music is at its core, which gives Searching for Sugar Man a passing familiarity to fellow docs like Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the latter about a troubled singer-songwriter whose mental health struggles precluded any grander commercial breakthrough. The investigative/questing aspect of its narrative, however, is much more of a piece with Mark Moskowitz’s superb but grossly under-recognized 2002 film Stone Reader, which chronicled the filmmaker’s attempts to track down the seemingly vanished author of a striking 1972 debut novel. Unlike that movie, however, which leans on the critical assessments of Moskowitz and other talking heads, viewers of Sugar Man are able to bask in the contemplative melancholy of Rodriguez’s soulful music — a unique and frequently heartrending melding of Bob Dylan’s poetic lyricism, Donovan’s lilting phrasing and delivery, and Marvin Gaye’s pained urban unrest. There are plenty of lazy and unworthy nonfiction lionizations bumping around out there, but this isn’t one of them.

What gives Sugar Man plenty of extra “oomph,” though, are its socio-political heft as well as the engaging mode of its telling. In regards to the latter, plenty of documentaries are presented in staid fashion, as little more than a collection of talking heads; Bendjelloul’s movie, on the other hand, has a much more thoughtfully constructed visual template. Working with cinematographer Camilla Skagerstrom, the director presents an inviting pastiche of sweeping Cape Town cityscapes, and contrasts them in compelling fashion with the burned-out rubble of Detroit, both past and present. This, in turn, reinforces the amazing and unlikely social connection, spanning thousands of miles, found between young, mostly white South Africans and Rodriguez’s stirring poetry of defiance.

As more details regarding his life and family come into focus, a heart aches and swells for Rodriguez. Still, Sugar Man doesn’t offer up much in the way of definitive insights about its subject. Rodriguez remains a rather enigmatic, almost shamanistic figure. As well, given the manner in which he raises it and the strong feelings in viewers it evokes, Bendjelloul would also be better served addressing more substantively the issues of artist royalties, and the money trail leading to Clarence Avant, the onetime impresario of the label which held Rodriguez’s overseas rights.

That said, Sugar Man is still a little gem — an engaging rumination on fame and inspiration, swollen with feeling. It shows the world to be a wide place, and yet a hearteningly small one as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To purchase the movie’s soundtrack, meanwhile, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, unrated, 85 minutes)

Kind of loosely of a piece with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip, by way of The Hangover or Bad Santa, Scandanavian import Klown is another comedy that wrings most of its laughs from the premise that in the absence of a civilizing female presence males are apt to revert to despicable and idiotic behavior. A raunchy road movie starring Danish comedians Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen as exaggerated versions of themselves, director Mikkel Norgaard’s film is crisply acted and peppered with enough legitimately funny set-ups to win over the subtitle-averse, even if toward the end it seems to compromise the nature of some of its characters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, R, 89 minutes)

A wearying, lackluster sci-fi comedy about a group of suburban men who form a neighborhood watch group in the wake of a murder, and then get caught up in defusing an alien invasion plot, The Watch is a premise in search of a compelling story, and an exemplar of indulgent improvisation gone wrong and too long. Reteaming Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn for the first time since 2004’s Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, the movie is a collection of small handful of ideas strung out into set pieces, and a superb example of the pitfalls of Hollywood studio comedy-by-committee. For my full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, R, 101 minutes)

A winning deconstruction of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl subgenre by way of Stranger Than Fiction, the beguiling, effervescent Ruby Sparks is a movie with both charm and a certain psychological heft. The screenwriting debut of costar Zoe Kazan — the daughter of screenwriters Robin Swicord and Nicholas Kazan, and the granddaughter of director Elia Kazan — this fun, enticing little curio deftly juggles disparate tones in a manner reminiscent of (500) Days of Summer, existing at a fanciful intersection of romance, literary invention and self-delusion.



Beset by writer’s block, Los Angeles novelist Calvin Weir-Field (Paul Dano) is coasting on the fumes of his celebrated first novel. After being given an assignment by his therapist (Elliott Gould), Calvin has a breakthrough, diving into yarns of rhapsodic prose about a girl, Ruby (Kazan, above right), who visits him in his dreams. Then she shows up in his living room, every detail as he wrote. Certain he’s gone mad, Calvin confides in his older brother Harry (Chris Messina), the only person to have read his manuscript pages on Ruby.

It’s then that Calvin discovers this wild, unlikely power isn’t yet capped. He’s conjured Ruby into existence, but can also still change her by simply sitting down at his typewriter and adding to his story — something he swears not to do. As the idealized glow of Calvin’s relationship with Ruby begins to fade, however, he tinkers with her character around the edges, which has consequences in the real world.

Its premise is set up for broad farce, but there’s a pleasant tenderness and intimacy to Ruby Sparks, as well as a blistering immediacy. As helmed by Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, it’s a movie that feels alive and caffeinated in every frame, but not in a showy, look-at-me sort of way. It’s cute in a bit of a mannered, bohemian way, yes, but its ideas are much more fruitfully explored and cast into relief in this budgeted telling than they likely would be in a grander, big studio re-imagination of the same conceit.

Kazan comes at the concept from a literary perspective, exploring the notion of a writer who pens the lover he thinks he wants — a bundle of “adorkable” qualities whose messy past make her endearing, but also a girl who Harry assures Calvin doesn’t exist in real life — and then finds himself threatened by the live-in complexities of those very same traits, and the chaotic problems to which they lend themselves. Somewhat common characters are also rendered far less so by the fact that Kazan knows she’s playing around with a couple archetypes, as well as the depth and skill with which she sketches them.

Like the more swooning, romantic portions of last year’s Like Crazy, Ruby Sparks movingly captures the bloom of young love. Dano and Kazan (a longtime off-screen couple) obviously have a rich, infatuating chemistry, and it’s put to fantastic use here. The rest of the supporting cast — Annette Bening as Calvin’s hippie mother, Antonio Banderas as his wood-carving artist stepfather, and Steve Coogan as a passive-aggressively competitive fellow writer and mentor — is equally fantastic, but it’s chiefly the show of these two young actors, and they deliver nuanced, emotionally perceptive work.

Ruby Sparks recalls other films (certainly Harvey and Adaptation) in flitting fashion, but it doesn’t cede or trade away its unique personality to any other work, in the gimmicky pursuit of pat resolution. After Ruby finally learns the truth about how she and Calvin came to be a couple, the film’s conclusion both puts a bow on things, closing a narrative loop, and leaves them ambiguous and open-ended. Is Ruby Sparks a morality tale, per se, a bedazzled cinematic meditation on free will, or just an inventive romance jazzed up with some metaphysical jewelry? It’s all three, really. Or at least enough of each to kickstart a wonderful conversation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox Searchlight, R, 104 minutes)

A narrative competition world premiere at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, Pincus is a delicately shot curio about the meanderings of an emotionally adrift man-child, laced with autobiographical elements from writer-director David Fenster’s life. Picture a much more melancholic, down-tempo Greenberg, vacuumed free of its pin-prick wit and sardonicism, and one begins to approximate the bobbing-cork-in-an-ocean qualities of Pincus, which exhibits a slight hold but eventually comes across as a series of posed moments in search of a clarifying signifier.



David Nordstrom sits in for the filmmaker, starring as Pincus Finster, a directionless Miami thirtysomething who lives with and cares for his Parkinson’s-stricken father (Paul Fenster, the director’s father, and an actual Parkinson’s patient). His father used to own and operate a contractor business, but Pincus’ halfhearted attempts at keeping things going seem maintained chiefly to just provide him with an excuse to get out of the house. He hangs out with Dietmar (Dietmar Franosch), an illegal German immigrant and one of his father’s old employees, drinking and smoking pot. Phone messages from disgruntled customers start piling up, but Pincus instead seeks a sort of refuge in a holistic yoga class, where he sidles up to instructor Anna (Christi Idavoy). She agrees to help Pincus try out some alternative therapy treatments on his father, but remains ambivalent about any romantic connection.

Any discussion of what’s right with the easygoing Pincus begins with its beguiling naturalistic style. Fenster blends documentary elements (his father, simplistic editorial framing) with occasionally improvised-seeming dialogue, which focuses attention on the film’s characters in hard and fast fashion. It is to the movie’s benefit, then, that Nordstorm is such an amiable peg on which to hang this loose a story.

Unfortunately, while there exists around the edges of the unfolding narrative the opportunity for much more dramatic engagement, Fenster seems allergic to conflict. His film toes the line between stubbornly minimalist and, if not pointless, then at least futile. Pincus cries out for an injection of dynamism from somewhere, be it in the form of romantic intrigue with Anna, more ruinous and concrete financial consequences, or some other problem. The sudden disappearance of Dietmar crops up as a minor mystery, but is poorly integrated into Pincus’ quest. This is shoegazing cinema — perfectly serviceable for curated, air-quote appreciation, but lacking in breakout insights or vision. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Pincus, unrated, 78 minutes)

Award-winning filmmaker Yung Chang drew praise for 2007’s Up the Yangtze, which focused on the many socioeconomically disadvantaged people impacted by the building of the massive Three Gorges Dam in Hubei. With his latest movie, he returns to China for another unexpectedly lyrical snapshot of that country’s rapidly changing economic landscape. A nonfiction look at the recruitment and training of young boxers for future hopeful Olympic glory, China Heavyweight is an unadorned, guileless work that starts slowly but accrues a deeper emotional hold and resonance as it winds on. In not dissimilar fashion from the recent Pelotero: Ballplayer, a documentary which examined teenage baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic, Chang’s film illustrates how sports are still one of the most widely pursued avenues out of outright familial poverty or working-class despair. China Heavyweight opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall and the Laemmle Playhouse 7. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 94 minutes)