If Crash were re-cast and re-imagined as an Atlanta-set teen drama about a carjacking gone awry, it might resemble something like 96 Minutes, a wan thriller, co-starring Brittany Snow, whose reach for socio-economic/ethnic insight and relevance far exceeds its meager grasp. Despite a few good moments and performances, overly familiar plotting and a dearth of insight doom this padded, grandiloquent melodrama, no matter its claim that it’s based on true events. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Arc Entertainment/First Point Entertainment, R, 96 minutes)

Lawrence Kasdan’s 11th film as a director but his first since 2003’s Dreamcatcher, Darling Companion falls victim to an ambling, free-range focus (or lack thereof), which mistakes authenticity for dramatic engagement. A story about emotional fissure and reconnection built around the search for a missing dog, the pleasantly inoffensive ensemble dramedy suffers from a dearth of insight or elevating banter.



Co-written by Kasdan and his wife Meg, and based on an actual experience the pair had, Darling Companion has a lived-in vibe — its visual presentation feels in some respects like a L.L. Bean catalogue come to life, marked by nice outdoor footage and warm autumnal hues in general — but never quite fully takes shape. The basic likeability of much of the cast — particularly Richard Jenkins, who exudes a rumpled charm as a guileless retiree comfortable in his own skin — helps mitigate some but not all of the movie’s slack. Diane Keaton and Kevin Kline deliver somewhat shopworn performances, and reductive cutaways in particular undercut the convincingness of Kline’s character. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 103 minutes)

A canted coming-of-age tale about a 10-year-old prodigy who sets out to find his biological father, writer-director Dennis Lee‘s Jesus Henry Christ, executive-produced by Julia Roberts, uses the loose thematic conceit of burgeoning self-identity as a jumping off point for a colorful and at times funny but mostly emotionally hollow exploration of adolescent isolation and yearning for acceptance. It’s not that Jesus Henry Christ is at all bad, per se. It’s just that its casually whimsical tone and esoteric asides come across less as emblematic of a genuinely original voice and carefully constructed tone, and more like an amalgamation of Little Man Tate, Rocket Science, Running With Scissors and, of course, Rushmore, which will certainly get name-checked in plenty of reviews. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Entertainment One/Red Om Productions/Reliance Entertainment, PG-13, 100 minutes)

Fans both of last autumn’s Warrior as well as underground, edge-of-society docs like Paul Hough’s The Backyard will likely spark to Fightville, a knuckle-dusting portrait of aspirant mixed martial artists from co-directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (How to Fold a Flag). Shrewdly observed and possessing of two top-notch subjects, Fightville features plenty of neck chops, grappling and other fighting action, but connects chiefly on a basic human level, charting the fundamental craving for acknowledgment, betterment and emotional connection of two young souls.



It’s a fairly gritty thing, of course, but Fightville also bears a pinch in common with nonfiction movies like One Lucky Elephant and No Room For Rockstars, which at least partially document marginalized subcultures (a traveling circus and the Vans Warped Tour, respectively). Viewers might come for the fisticuffs, but be pleasantly surprised at gaining a real window into its protagonists’ souls. It’s the equivalent of an unexpectedly delightful conversation with a potluck-seated dinner companion with whom you thought you might have nothing in common. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Media Group, 85 minutes, unrated)

A Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee from (French) Canada, Monsieur Lazhar is a psychologically perceptive, humanistic tale of adolescent grief, wayward adult yearning, and how emotional healing can often arrive from the most unexpected sources. Anchored by an award-winning lead performance, the understated movie develops slowly, like a Polaroid, into something greater than the sum of seemingly simple parts.



Starring Mohamed Fellag, Monsieur Lazhar is so effective at connecting, no matter its nominal foreign status, because it unfolds in a world that recognizes and embraces complexity and duality, and isn’t dishonest about the piecemeal way in which emotional centeredness is often achieved. There are not writ-large catharses here, but rather honesty and setbacks followed by smaller moments of betterment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Music Box Films, PG-13, 94 minutes)

Canadian auteur Guy Maddin — he of the black-and-white art film — attempts to give genre a bit of a nominal spin in much the same way that Lars von Trier did last year with Melancholia. His stab at the cops-and-robbers template arrives in the form of Keyhole, a kind of quarter-hearted siege/stand-off film cross-pollinated with psychological melodrama, and a heavy side of metaphorical import. The result, while characteristically full of some beautiful and evocative images, seems doggedly intent on achieving art status through obfuscation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 93 minutes)

With Earth, Oceans, African Cats and now Chimpanzee, Disney, via specialty distribution arm DisneyNature, has carved out a nice nature documentary niche theatrically pegged to annual Earth Day celebrations. Its latest effort is a genuinely heartwarming and astonishingly intimate feature that engagingly locates the parallel drama, sadness, curiosity and uplift of the animal kingdom.



Chimpanzee takes as its subject a wild group of the animals living in the Ivory Coast, and focuses in particular on a newborn chimp named Oscar, showing him playing with his fellow primates and also trying to learn the ins and outs of jungle life. Shot over the course of four years, a 10-hour car ride and two more hours of hiking into the woods from the nearest airport, the film is full of amazing footage. Scenes of the chimpanzees plotting out an attack on tree-dwelling monkeys (they aren’t exclusively herbivores, after all) is fascinating, but the most arresting sequences come by way of the group’s creation and use of tools to extract ants from an underground colony or smash open nuts. These behaviors, of course, mirror humankind traits so closely that they — and especially the wordless observance, replication and refinement by young Oscar — unlock something deep and profound within a viewer’s heart. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DisneyNature, G, 78 minutes)

Undoubtedly the idea was to bring out the long-delayed horror-comedy Detention, starring Josh Hutcherson, after the profile-raising release of The Hunger Games last month, but there almost certainly was also a significant amount of email back-and-forth from Hutcherson’s management team with other studio folk about how to downplay its theatrical unspooling, and kind of dump the body from a slowly moving van, without hoping too many people notice. A film of boundless energy and if not empty voice then at least wholly scattershot imagination, the over-the-top Detention debuted last year at SXSW, which seems a perfect home for its robust, scrupulously manufactured eccentricities.



Detention‘s story centers around someone re-enacting the slasher killings of a popular horror movie villain against a couple unsuspecting high schoolers. Lest one think this is another twist or update on The Faculty or Cherry Falls, however, the film also nips liberally from canted high school dark comedies like Pretty Persuasion, Brick and Assassination of a High School President. It’s basically sort of like what would happen if Scream and Donnie Darko spawned a love child in a threeway with Inception, and then that baby married the loquacious Juno, dosed up on some ecstasy, fired up The Breakfast Club‘s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” on their iPod, and went ironically to a Napoleon Dynamite fan convention. But in the way that sounds more like a car crash than awesome and intriguing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 93 minutes)

For most sane and normal folks, the events of September 11 sparked not only shock and grief, but also an instinct of outreach — a desire to help, somehow, not only tangibly or materially, but also emotionally. The stories told by some of the survivors in the days and weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center Towers were so heartrending that an impulse to share or ease their burden was a fairly natural reaction. Tania Head, however, took that feeling to an extrapolated extreme that’s still rather hard to grasp.

Head (above right) told a devastating story of narrowly escaping death from the 78th floor of the South Tower, blown back against a marble wall by the impact of the airplane, badly burned and suffering from a deep gash that almost took off her entire right arm. She was saved by Welles Crowther, a young man wearing a red bandanna whose heroic actions on that day were widely reported. Her common-law husband, Dave, however, was not so lucky — he perished in the North Tower. She spent two months in the hospital, and later co-founded the influential World Trade Center Survivors Network advocacy group. The only problem? Her entire story was a fabrication. On September 11, Head, actually born Alicia Esteve, was in post-graduate classes in Barcelona.

The documentary The Woman Who Wasn’t There, from executive producer Meredith Vieira, chronicles this bizarre, stranger-than-fiction story, interviewing around a half dozen of the chief subject’s former friends and peers in the aforementioned group. It’s even more peculiar when one considers that the director, Angelo Guglielmo, Jr., was actually pressed into making a nonfiction movie about 9/11 survivors by Head herself, before the truth about her deceit came out in a series of investigative articles published in the New York Times in the fall of 2007. That means Head is very much featured in the unintended resultant product that is The Woman Who Wasn’t There, narrating her (false) story while others recount their deep connection to her, creeping suspicion about her story, and eventual betrayal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ID Films, unrated, 65 minutes)

A meandering but still punkish documentary overview of the Vans Warped Tour, director Parris Patton’s No Room For Rockstars, shot over the 2010 iteration of the event, offers up a slice-of-life look at the punk rock juggernaut, a rain-or-shine misfit circus that crisscrosses North America every summer as a rollicking outdoor minstrel show aimed at kids hungry for live music mainly outside of the glossy pop mainstream. If it’s mostly an amorphous fan’s document that doesn’t locate much in the way of a dramatic throughline, the backstage and behind-the-scenes access will at least still prove engaging enough to its core demographic even if few others. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Vans Off the Wall/Agi Orsi Productions, unrated, 97 minutes)

The enormous critical and commercial success of the $288-million-grossing Bridesmaids will likely serve as a line of demarcation of sorts in Hollywood, but the witty, engaging female-oriented comedic ensemble L!fe Happens should come with an asterix, for no mere knock-off is it. Penned before Bridesmaids but only now seeing release, the Los Angeles-set movie, born of collaboration between director Kat Coiro and star Krysten Ritter, winningly marries a female buddy comedy with single mother drama, a pinch of bawdiness, sharp characterizations and some slyly observed situational humor.

There’s a Dorothy Parker-esque snap to some the dialogue, delivered with aplomb by in particular Ritter and Kate Bosworth, who exhibit a great rapport. But the thing that is most noteworthy and heartening about L!fe Happens is its emotional and psychological underpinning, which is consistent, and not constructed for sitcom whimsy or scene-to-scene contrivance. Conflicts and resolutions in various relationships are informed by characters’ maturations or, as often as not, their chafing at change. Co-writers Coiro and Ritter also deserve credit for addressing the manner in which new friendships often impede or complicate existing ones, particularly in communal living situations. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (PMK*BNC, R, 100 minutes)

If not for Bernie Madoff, Marc Dreier would likely be the name presently most synonymous with modern-era, American white collar swindling, to the tune of $750 million in fraud. The well packaged documentary Unraveled provides a fascinating look at the psychology and rationalizations of such a criminal mastermind, unfolding in a series of reflective interviews over the last two months of Dreier’s house arrest prior to criminal sentencing, in the gilded cage of his Upper East Side penthouse. If the cinematic treatment of crime is too often distilled to black-and-white morality in the name of entertainment, this engaging movie is awash in grey — about contemptible acts arising from unique opportunities. As such, while not at all exonerating Dreier, it raises uncomfortable ancillary questions about both the grander state of responsibilities and priorities in the United States, as well as a lack of cultural shame.



The basic framework of Unraveled is certainly found in the more formal sit-down interviews to which Dreier submits, recounting in chronological fashion some of the specifics of his rise and fall. In 1998 he started his own law firm, and first dabbled in fraud in 2002, forging a series of documents and promissory notes to hedge fund managers to obtain ever-increasing lines of credit under the names of richer clients, business associates and real estate developers like Sheldon Solow. But the random snippets of day-to-day life and confessions of boredom and creeping depression (“I read the newspaper, but almost everything in the world is irrelevant to me”) are just as revelatory, if not even more so. Under armed guard, and monitored with an ankle bracelet, this former jet-setting titan of industry is forced to watch his freedom on a countdown clock, unsure of whether the government’s requested 145-year term might effectively end his chances at ever being released on parole.

Director Marc H. Simon (no relation) exhibits smart instincts about how to piece together his narrative, eschewing talking head contextualization to give his movie a more cogent center and strongly felt identification. One doesn’t have to like Dreier or even feel sorry for him in order to feel and appreciate the tightened screws of the movie’s focus. Unraveled takes what on the surface could be a complex scheme and, by funneling it through Dreier himself, makes it easily comprehensible both in and of itself and as a macro example of the sort of deregulation mania that led to the American financial collapse of 2008.

Unraveled isn’t visually staid and boring, either. Using cinematography in a manner reminiscent of if not similar to The Kid Stays In the Picture, Simon also makes his space come alive in unique fashion, recreating in contrasting fashion Dreier’s $10.4 million apartment both before and after the seizure of his assets. This isn’t senseless or emotionally empty showing off, either, since Dreier also talks about using both charities and his vast art collection as leverage, to project an image and attract more clients for his bogus notes and schemes.

Still, the window into Dreier’s mind is Unraveled‘s chief point of interest, and it’s a doozy. He is contrite, and says all the right things, but in discussions with his lawyers is also seen wishing to slightly qualify his deceit, based on the number and type of victims. What punishment does Dreier “deserve,” then? An early admission, throwaway but perhaps telling, about toiling and feeling resentment while working for (richer) clients, back before he ever committed fraud, is likely to spark equally divisive thoughts about his make-up. But part of the beauty and effectiveness of Unraveled is that, despite the intimacy of its portrayal, it doesn’t cheaply advocate, it merely presents a case and lets the audience be its jury. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Showtime/Ambush Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

Offbeat and shaggy but never emotionally false or hollow, director Steve Taylor’s Blue Like Jazz is a precious, precocious coming-of-age story that highlights the difficulties of reconciling the manner in which one has been raised with the discovery and integration of new thoughts, ideas and belief systems. Based on Donald Miller’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name — and adapted for the screen in a somewhat unusual but decidedly fruitful collaboration between Miller, Taylor and cinematographer Ben Pearson — the movie is a delightfully engaging dramedy that wrestles in a psychologically honest manner with questions so prominent in young adulthood, while also never losing its basic pulse of entertainment.



After impulsively escaping the religious fundamentalist trappings of his small Texas hometown, which he had heretofore embraced, Trinity Bible College student Don (Marshall Allman, above left) throws caution to the wind and enrolls at an exceedingly progressive liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon. A bit overwhelmed by both the free-spiritedness of his classmates, Don quickly makes a group of new pals, including lesbian Lauryn (Tania Raymonde) and an iconoclastic party master known around campus simply as The Pope (Justin Welborn), so named because of his appointment to traditionally absolve students of their sins at the school’s notorious, semester-closing three-day bacchanal, the Renn Fayre. Don is also befriended by the socially conscious Penny (Claire Holt, above right), upon whom he in short order develops a strong crush. But by willfully turning his back on his Christian upbringing and beliefs, is Don growing up, or merely mirroring who he thinks others want to see?

Eccentric and idiosyncratic but never really cloying or quirky in insincere ways, Blue Like Jazz achieves a sum even greater than the whole of its parts because it’s so suffused with humanity, and swollen with feeling. While its setting and basic narrative structure are both quite different, the movie in some ways recalls Richard Linklater’s superlative Dazed and Confused in its weird touches and lively energy.

Director Taylor makes good use of the city of Portland and some of its bohemian personality. In one sequence, agitating-for-change students stage a costumed “robot takeover” of a local corporate-owned bookstore; another throwaway bit involves the heckling of Don in a light sprinkle of rain, when a passerby lobs the insult, “Nice umbrella!” Taylor, Pearson, production designer Cyndi Williams and costume designer Amy Patterson also concoct a warm and winning look for the film, all on a budget, and a couple imaginative animated segments help give the movie a dizzy injection of feeling too. Some literary adaptations — especially those rooted in actual personal events — suffer from too rigid a devotion to factual occurrence. Blue Like Jazz, however wonderfully balances the oblique with the more forthrightly dramatic.

None of this would necessarily quite matter, however, if the film’s acting weren’t so strong. Allman is a revelation, naturalistic yet entirely sympathetic, while Welborn takes his larger-than-life character — literally always dressed in a mitre and pontiff’s robes — and makes him something full-bodied and surprisingly multi-dimensional. On the big screen religious belief is often characterized in either broad or flippant strokes, especially in movies aimed at or focusing upon younger folks. In an intellectually honest way, though, Blue Like Jazz digs into tumultuous adolescent feelings regarding faith and its hypocrisy, and makes the point that we can all benefit from a little grand conviction and devotion in all lives. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 107 minutes)

One of the harsh realities of the film festival circuit is that even the most well received, truly independent features (those not featuring, say, three or four big stars taking a swing at an arty filler project between studio fare) stand the chance of getting lost in the shuffle. Forgetting the Girl, which played recently at Cinequest, is one of those indies that deserves a shot at wider distribution. A psychological drama that arrives at its tension naturally and a character study about damaged souls whose orbits begin to exert a further destabilizing gravitational pull on one another, director Nate Taylor’s debut feature exudes a smooth, easy hold throughout.



The movie opens with a sort of direct-address confessional by photographer Kevin Wolfe (Christopher Denham), a socially yearning New Yorker obsessed with finding a girl who can help him forget his turbulent past, which includes painful memories of his younger sister’s death many years ago. He does this by habitually asking out any and all girls who come in for their head shots, which seems to further irritate and unsettle his depressed and quasi-suicidal assistant, Jamie (Lindsay Beamish, above center).

After a one-night stand with Adrienne (Anna Camp), Kevin tries to spin their relationship into something more, but Adrienne rebuffs him. His desperation again surges, but Kevin seems to finally find refuge with the pretty, nice Beth (Elizabeth Rice, quite natural and charming). When it’s discovered that Adrienne is missing, however, some of Kevin’s engrained troublesome behaviors flare up. This, along with some of Jamie’s actions, lead to more instability.

Working from a script by Peter Moore Smith, Taylor manages to ably capture a disparate array of emotions in his movie’s compact running time — everything from the commingled terror and simple pleasure of reaching for a girl’s hand to the crushing isolation of romantic rejection. There’s a smooth confidence at work here that never tips over into flamboyance or stylistic overreach. Taylor and cinematographer Mark Pugh also concoct an imaginative visual template that greatly benefits the material, a la last year’s indie standout Bellflower.

If the late-developing plot strand related to Jamie feels a bit less well sketched than the movie’s main story (there’s a bit of a problem with narrative focus), it at least still achieves an interesting crescendo that is creepy without coming across as completely unearned or inane. The performances, too, are superlative almost across the board. Denham (of the forthcoming Sound of My Voice) in particular gives a solid turn. Vocally, and in a few small mannerisms, he recalls Topher Grace; there’s a certain lilting, lyrical cadence which embodies a robust inner monologue in Kevin, shot through with uncertainty. The audience, meanwhile, is tethered to him, and along for that queasy ride. For more information, visit ForgettingTheGirl.com. (Full Stealth Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

A socially engaged documentary with more heart than head, The Island President takes as its central figure the charismatic, crusading, image-savvy (and now ex-) president of the Maldives, Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed, detailing his efforts to drive climate change conversation and cooperation to the top of the international to-do list. A friendly, somewhat lightweight portrait that doesn’t really dig down into the issues at its core, director Jon Shenk’s movie, the Audience Award winner at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, unexpectedly achieves ancillary connection as a ground-floor look at a grand clash of political and governmental wills that takes place at the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie and playdate availability, meanwhile, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 101 minutes)

An amiable comedy import at once thoughtful and low-key, multi-hyphenate Nanni Moretti’s Italian-language We Have a Pope takes an unlikely subject — the aftermath of the election of a new pontiff, and the swirl of self-doubt surrounding the newly infallible voice of God on Earth — and turns it into something rich, surprising and altogether rewarding.



The performances, too, are special; Michel Piccoli is arresting and sympathetic as newly elected pontiff Cardinal Melville, bringing a great vulnerability to the role. And Moretti himself (above) is wry and wonderful, delivering a droll turn as a not particularly religious psychiatrist brought in to try to settle matters. There isn’t a big play for theological profundity here, but the narrative omissions of We Have a Pope shouldn’t count as strikes against it, and given a simple surrender to its basic conceit the movie richly compensates arthouse-leaning and intellectually curious viewers with both laughs and an awakened contemplation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 104 minutes)

In 1999, a low-budget teen comedy put a wicked, winning spin on tried-and-true formula — a group of high school guys make a pact to try to lose their virginity — and led a successful takeover of the waning-millennium American zeitgeist, as embodied by pie fucking and other gross-out gags. Many other movies, from Superbad to, most recently, Project X, have taken up the mantle of American Pie‘s party-hearty, pull-no-punches hormonal comedy, but the original game-changers return in American Reunion, an adequate if not especially memorable get-together. More middling than ineffective — laughs are intermittent but the tone is lively throughout — the film is a reminder that there is a time and season for all things, and some relationships are not meant to last. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 112 minutes)

When it first got its start, Comic-Con was a little annual subcultural curio down in San Diego, and certainly an after-thought for Hollywood. Now it’s a high-stakes proving ground for almost every genre film and any other non-drama tentpole release with even the most tangential connection to superheroes, sci-fi or fantasy, a media feeding frenzy where the buzz on debuted trailers and photos can feed a pro forma narrative and help lift or doom a movie’s commercial fortunes. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock turns his lens on this crazed fanboy convention in Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a movie whose breezy title indicates its soft, chewy, geek-friendly center.

From his debut, Super Size Me, up on through his latest film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock has exhibited an uncanny knack for both tapping into the zeitgeist and self-promotion. He takes a backseat here, however, funneling his movie chiefly through the experiential lens of five different subjects — aspiring illustrators Eric and Skip; ambitious DIY costume designer Holly; comic book store owner Chuck, hoping for big sales to pay down some debts; and James, an amiable kid looking to pop a marriage proposal to his girlfriend on the anniversary of their meeting at the previous year’s event. These folks are interesting on different levels, but each pretty engaging in their own way.

Spurlock rounds out his movie with sidebar confessionals and other interviews with fans and some other very familiar faces. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon talks convincingly about finding “his tribe” at Comic-Con (other famous interviewees include Seth Rogen, Matt Groening, Eli Roth, Frank Miller and of course Stan Lee, also an executive producer on the project). In its able chronicling of the event — and the sweaty exhaustion it brings about — Comic-Con is a solid little treat, the cinematic equivalent of a rock tour T-shirt.

Where the film really misses the opportunity to blossom into something special is in Spurlock’s refusal to dig down into the enmity bubbling just underneath the event’s surface, the tension and conflict between old-guard attendees like Chuck and the many thousands of annual attendees who have less of a connection to comic books or graphic novels and more of a generalized pop cultural interest in the latest projects that Hollywood is peddling. One or two throwaway lines make mention of this, but ignoring it instead of more robustly embracing or trying to understand this pressure point puts a glossy shine on the radical metamorphosis that Comic-Con has undergone, and how that in turn has impacted — for better or worse — both the present-day marketing and moviemaking formulas. Fans will applaud, but more inquiring minds will be left wanting for a little more. For the movie’s trailer, click here. For more information, including VOD options, click here. (Wrekin Hill Entertainment/NECA Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)

An outré nonfiction offering from director Marie Losier, this lively and most assuredly provocative document details — in arty, roundabout fashion — the strange love affair between an aging proto-punk performance artist, Genesis P-Orridge (above right), and his younger muse, as they undergo a series of plastic surgeries to more closely resemble one another. A brisk watch at just over 70 minutes, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye evinces a loose sense of engagement just based on subject matter alone, but it unfortunately rather pathologically buries its lede regarding the abuse and trauma suffered by its subjects, thereby offering up only an inch-deep exploration of its wild and supposedly liberated behaviors. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, unrated, 72 minutes)

A spatially contained thriller loosely in the same vein as P2 and The Perfect Host, ATM squanders the participation of a solid young cast, fumbling away viewer sympathy and engagement with a string of increasingly harebrained scenarios. Audiences will feel as ripped off by ATM as they would be by exorbitant user fees at the namesake devices.



After having long nursed a crush on sweet co-worker Emily (Alice Eve), slightly bumbling David (Brian Geraghty) finally gets up the nerve to haltingly ask her out at the company Christmas party. She agrees, and they start to leave early from the party. Thwarting David’s plans, however, is his chatty, cock-blocking friend Corey (Josh Peck), who was using David as his designated driver. The plan then becomes to drop him off first, but, wanting food and needing cash, Corey makes them stop at desolate parking lot ATM. What should be a routine transaction soon turns into a fight for survival when an unknown man (Mike O’Brien) appears outside, blocking their collective exit. Inane cat-and-mouse shenanigans ensue.

Unfolding in December in the wintry Northeast, ATM sets the bar for implausibilities quite high, and then keeps raising it via stupid narrative choices both large and small. First, the film is set in a stand-alone ATM in the middle of a parking lot, which is exceedingly rare if such structures even still exist. Then ATM posits that the group is immediately cowed by the mere appearance of this guy, before he’s even demonstrated any requisite bloodthirst.

It goes without saying, too, that David of course parks his car sufficiently far away enough from the structure to prevent any escape while still setting up air-quote tense dashes back and forth to the car. Perhaps most ridiculously, however, the film indulges weather-related panic; “Daylight is hours away, we’ll be lucky if we don’t freeze to death!” says one character. Poppycock, plain and simple. Even if it were zero degrees outside, you’re in an enclosed (i.e., wind-free) space!

Working from this lackluster script by Chris Sparling (Buried), director David Brooks does what he can with the staging, but ATM is mortally wounded by its stupidity. Even if one ignores all of the above problems, the movie suffers from little details that set up more potentially interesting plot twists — in the form of lies or in-fighting within the group — none of which come to convincing fruition or factor into ATM‘s stalking and increasingly desultory, mindless final act.

The cast, especially Eve, gamely tries to elevate the material, and succeed in crafting a few nice character moments here and there. But the best genre pieces milk what-if tension from characters serving as surrogates for the audience. Even with merely super-slick execution, many genre offerings can overcome what are on the surface stupid decisions by its characters. The feeblemindedness of ATM‘s characters, however, overwhelms the picture, and mirrors the lack of inventiveness on display by Sparling and Brooks. (IFC/Gold Circle Films, R, 90 minutes)

The documentary Bully arrives in theaters after much hullabaloo — it initially received a restricted rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to the presence of a handful of curse words, sparking a social media campaign embraced by many celebrities — again confirming the marketing prowess of Harvey Weinstein. After unsuccessful attempts to reclassify the film as PG-13 Stateside, the mogul’s distribution company, the Weinstein Company, is releasing the movie unrated, and the AMC Theatres chain is allowing minors with a note from their parent or guardian to see the film — a reflective and affecting but still flawed cinematic entreaty which inveighs against teen-on-teen harassment.

Bully is constructed to elicit emotional response, for sure, and there’s an agonizing poignance to some of its pedestrian eloquence, which outstrips most scripted heartbreak. Yet for every illuminating interview tidbit and additional moment of discerning remove — as when director Lee Hirsch lingers on a near catatonic kid, allowing an audience the possibility of contemplating a seething future rage — Bully also seems to miss an opportunity to dig a bit deeper, psychologically, mainly because it doesn’t elicit explanations of mindset from those doing some of the bullying. This would crucially underscore the ineffectiveness and socially unacceptable nature of this behavior, show that this kind of acting out stems from its own type of trauma, and also illustrate that roles are often flipped later in life — with victims becoming victimizers, certainly emotionally if not physically. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. For more information on the film, click here. (The Weinstein Company, unrated, 98 minutes)

A generation or two ago, fantasy genre adventures like Wrath of the Titans still had some semblance of DNA connection to their B-picture forebears, the matinee serials that featured swashbuckling, sword-slinging heroes and backlot action shenanigans. Now, they’re just enormously budgeted machines, tent-pole franchises designed to necessarily wow with state-of-the-art digital wizardry and seemingly interchangeable heroes and circumstances. Such is the case with this inoffensive and slick if still rather middling upgrade over 2010’s Clash of the Titans, which ladles mythological spectacle on top of silly end-of-the-world boilerplate, and puts its characters through an effects laden steeplechase that squeezes out a few moments of synthetic bedazzlement that evaporate upon exiting from the theater. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 99 minutes)

The United States’ military forays into the Middle East over the past decade-plus have resulted in a fair number of big screen dramas of domestic re-entry, but few have the thoughtful delicacy of the quiet, lived-in Return, whose very title has a relaxed connotation that the movie robustly embodies. Spurning crazy outburst or demonstrative dramatic flair for something more measured, fragile and almost ineffable, writer-director Liza Johnson‘s narrative feature film debut is built around a standout performance from ex-Freaks and Geeks and ER star Linda Cardellini, as well as a nice supporting turn from Michael Shannon. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Focus World, R, 97 minutes)

The latest young adult literary property and blockbuster-teen-film-franchise-in-waiting, The Hunger Games will certainly make a mint (weekend showings
have already been selling out around the country), and likely rally many
fans of the book series to its defense, but more inquisitive minds will
find its cinematic adaptation lacking in some, if not many, crucial
respects.

Adapted by director Gary Ross, Billy Ray and Suzanne Collins from the latter’s bestselling novel of the same name, the film unfolds in a post-apocalyptic future, on the ruins of what was once North America and is now a super-nation known as Panem, divided into a dozen districts. As a twisted annual punishment for a past anti-federal uprising, each compliant district holds a lottery in which one adolescent boy and girl apiece are selected to compete in a televised “tribute,” known as the Hunger Games, in which there is but a single survivor.

After her younger sister is chosen, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) impulsively volunteers to take her spot and represent the impoverished District 12; baker’s son Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), meanwhile, is chosen as her male counterpart. Whisked off to the fancy Capitol by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks, sporting a wardrobe seemingly nipped from Helena Bonham Carter in Alice in Wonderland), Peeta and Katniss are soon introduced to their assigned mentor, former winner (and current lush) Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson).

After a regimented system of combat and survival training, the contestants are released into a cordoned off wilderness, and the bloodletting begins. Combatants from the elite Districts 1 and 2, located closest to the Capitol, are the aristocratic blue-bloods of this game, training in special academies for years before the competition. Katniss, though, is a skilled hunter with the bow and arrow, and repairs deep into the forest to try to outwit and outlast the others. Peeta at first seems willing to sell her out to the others for his own temporary advantage, but soon a powerful alliance and burgeoning romance between the pair blossoms, perhaps forcing a change in the Hunger Games’ rules.

Taking its inspiration from television’s Survivor, American Idol and many other sources, including The Running Man and 2001’s Series 7: The Contenders, The Hunger Games on the surface seems interested in exploring darker human appetites and impulses that feed so much of our present-day tabloid culture. Except that it doesn’t really exploit or explore anything it sets up, instead diddling around with sappy, sub-par teen romance. Haymitch makes mention of playing nice for the cameras in order to curry sponsors, but there’s no real follow-up with this, nor an explication of the events’ rules, or how the televised extravaganza fits into the broader dystopian society. Ross’ vision for this story is very programmatic, and its finale — a fight against three remaining contestants on top of a Frank Gehry sculpture in the middle of a field — is so predictable as to almost elicit yawns.

Basically, the film seems oddly disengaged from the potential richness of its conceit, and interested in little more than a parallel-world representation of the distracting spectacle in which its sub-class is forced to participate.That its politics are shapeless and its social commentary less than trenchant is perhaps hardly surprising in the grand scheme of things, given the hundreds of millions of dollars which distributor Lionsgate wishes to mine from the property, in the form of this movie, its sequels and all sorts of merchandising spin-offs. Still, at a certain point, does mere baseline structural proficience stop being enough for audiences? The Hunger Games just sets its sights on “good enough,” and ergo achieves that result in listless fashion.

Equally problematic is the visual scheme Ross and cinematographer Tom Stern (Million Dollar Baby, J. Edgar) employ, which favors wildly restless, tightly framed hand-held camerawork and close-ups that undercut any potential thrill or pop in the movie’s additionally blandly staged action sequences. For the first forty-plus minutes this is fairly interminable. It settles a bit — once settled in the Capitol, the filmmakers seem less eager to prove how wild and desperate circumstances are for the average citizen — but never comes across as more than a strange masking technique, a substitute for deeper characterization.

Some of the supporting players definitely enliven the proceedings — Banks, Stanley Tucci and especially Harrelson — but they’re still interlopers from a grander world we know little about. Lawrence is a fine actress, as evidenced in Winter’s Bone and Lori Petty’s The Poker House, but she seems a bit too perfect and un-rough-around-the-edges as Katniss. Different strokes, I realize, but a pertinent point of comparison is Saoirse Ronan in Hanna; she anchored that film, physically and emotionally, but also retained a certain feral or socially maladapted quality stemming from her having been raised alone in the woods by her father. Katniss comes from what used to be (and basically remains) rural Appalachia, but seems a bit too at ease with the circumstances around her, burdened by neither wonderment nor the fear of an animal who is lower on the food chain. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 142 minutes)

Simple grace is a quality rarer in modern films than one might expect, as is the yard-by-yard, in-the-trenches slog of messy human connection, absent a lot of cathartic speechifying. Both are on rich display in French import The Kid With a Bike, however, the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and a Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe nominee. With their latest movie, fraternal portraitists Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne deliver a compelling character study of adolescent emotional dislocation, shining a light on the weight of both nature and nurture.

The Kid With a Bike centers, as one might surmise, on a title character, 11-year-old ward of the state Cyril (newcomer Thomas Doret, an acting neophyte), and his relationship with Samantha (Cecile de France), a hairdresser who is granted part-time custody of him via weekend furloughs, and finds herself surprised at how determined she is to help him. Spare but never without thought and care, the Dardennes’ movie unfolds on a precipice of loss and confusion, teetering in the wind. It’s a stirring reminder of the variety of divergent paths that life affords each of us, and how the more nuanced consideration of those choices and decisions can be corrupted by the white-hot heat of overriding emotion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 87 minutes)