A Kiwi-shot period piece Western which details the odd, thawing relationship between a
vulnerable kidnapped woman and her uncouth captor, Good For
Nothing is a movie which tells a pretty simple story but leaves
its quiet mark — to the extent that it imparts one — chiefly via the
unfussy naturalistic performances of its leads. Lacking much in the way
of narrative dynamism, the film should chiefly appeal to genre
enthusiasts.

There’s nothing wildly revelatory about the performances of Cohen Holloway or Inge Rademeyer (above), the latter of whom vaguely recalls Kate Beckinsale. They each show a certain gift and comfort with silence, though, which not all actors possess. If only the movie trusted them enough to spend more time with them instead of dawdling with an in-pursuit posse subplot that doesn’t pay off, Good For Nothing might amount to something a bit more special and memorable. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Screen Media/Mi Films, R, 93 minutes)

An irreverent reboot of the late 1980s TV series that helped launch the career of Johnny Depp, 21 Jump Street only half-heartedly scratches the surface of the more intriguing comedy of young male anxiety at which it hints, preferring instead to target broader laughs. If it gets bogged down a bit in its dutiful inclusion of procedural and action hijinks, the movie still sails on the strength of some of its joke writing, and the chemistry and smart use of its stars, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, R, 110 minutes)

A colorful, vivacious and faithful CG-animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss same-named children’s book, The Lorax delivers a peppy juvenile adventure along with an underlying ethical message that advises against greed and rampant overconsumption. Some talking heads on the far right side of the political spectrum have already decried this part of the movie as indoctrination, but the fairly innocuous moral slots in comfortably with a burgeoning eco-consciousness that should make the film a solid commercial performer with family audiences, even if it rather heartily leans on kid-pic conventions, and there’s a fundamental disconnect between story elements as discussed and actually rendered. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG, 85 minutes)

Winner of the Silver Bear Award for Best Screenplay at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, The Forgiveness of Blood, from writer-director Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace), details a simmering contempt between two present day Albanian clans — think the Montagues and Capulets, minus any love story — that boils over into a blood feud that slowly rips a family apart when a land dispute leaves one man dead. Like 2009’s The Stoning of Soraya M and Ajami, as well as a small handful of other foreign films, Marston’s movie shines a light on religiously imputed dictums of punishment that may seem harsh (not to mention downright strange) to Western audiences, but does so in a way that never betrays the wider inclusiveness of its thematic inquiry.

Movies like this and Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-nominated A Separation — one of the best films of 2011, regardless of nationality — possess a special level of import and consequence beyond their simple narrative bonafides, because they underscore the universality of their conflicts and the fact that, governmental saber-rattling notwithstanding, young people of every ethnicity have an innate desire to quell the conflicts and divergences that so roil their parents. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films/Sundance Selects, PG-13, 109 minutes)

The long history of cooperation by the United States military with Hollywood productions lionizing their professionalism and technological/weaponry superiority reaches new heights in Act of Valor, a movie being marketed chiefly via its hook of using real, active-duty American special forces personnel. The relative strengths and weaknesses one might attach to such a tack are in abundant supply throughout. If the word propaganda strikes some as too punitive or uncomfortable a description, then the dramatically inert but generally well captured film, in its unerring, square-jawed patriotism and tidy action-oriented conflict resolution, is certainly the most expensive and exclusively sourced military recruitment video to date. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, PG-13, 101 minutes)

A kind of mash-up, slightly more poker-faced version of some of the same snowy ethical dilemmas faced in A Simple Plan, Fargo and The Ice Harvest, crime dramedy Thin Ice delivers a winning, if rather drolly underplayed, black comedy that tosses its protagonist into a pit of moral quicksand, and then chronicles his flailing attempts to extricate himself. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Art Takes Over, R, 94 minutes)

By all accounts, Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster and director Oren Moverman developed an unusually strong bond during their work together on 2009’s The Messenger, a gritty, character-rooted drama about the difficulties and emotional turbulence faced by a pair of soldiers — one a veteran, one new to the assignment — who work as part of the Army’s notification team for the next of kin of deceased soldiers. The film netted Harrelson a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (and a Best Original Screenplay nod to boot), and so the trio reteamed for Rampart, co-written and directed by Moverman, starring Harrelson, and co-produced by Foster, who also pops up in a small supporting role.

A “bad cop” drama somewhat in the vein of Street Kings and Narc, and a sort of West Coast companion to (either version of) Bad Lieutenant, Rampart, set in 1999, centers on an arrogant, chauvinistic and otherwise prejudiced police officer who finds the sins of his hotheadedness and long accepted procedural shortcuts finally closing in and crumbling down around him. If a bit short on psychological perspicacity, Moverman’s movie at least provides a solid vehicle of display for Harrelson’s squirrelly, off-kilter intensity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium, R, 107 minutes)

With the lead-up to Valentine’s Day comes the requisite flood of commercials for teddy bears and flowers, yes, but especially Whitman’s Samplers and other boxed chocolates. In fact, probably more chocolate is gifted on February 14 than on any other single day of the year. But how many happy recipients will necessarily spend much time thinking about where their chocolate came from, and whether it was produced in a fashion that ethically compensates the farmers who harvest the cacao beans used in that manufacturing? The humane and engaging new documentary Nothing Like Chocolate, fresh off a much buzzed-about Santa Barbara Film Festival presentation, shines a light on the gulf between first-world manufacturers and consumers of chocolate and the for the most part third-world growers and producers of said delights.



Director Kum-Kum Bhavnani gives voice to boutique chocolatiers who either cannot or won’t wade into this ethical pool (Gary Guittard provides an eloquent defense), and also illuminates the complicated process by which chocolates and other items achieve “fair trade” status. Still other interviewees, including former Grenada Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, speak intelligently about both central subject Mott Green (locals call him “Smilo,” the name under which Green’s company markets its chocolate powder) and the larger considerations driving him, making for an engaging movie that provokes both the brain and the taste buds. For more information about the film, click here; for more information about the Grenada Chocolate Company and Cooperative, meanwhile, click here. And for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Nothing Like Chocolate LLC, unrated, 63 minutes)

A mirthless, preening action comedy populated with gorgeous caricatures, This Means War isn’t so much an imitation of life as it is a setpiece-focused aping of other movies that have more sincerely attempted to commingle spy or assassin hijinks, gunplay and romance, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Knight & Day, Bad Boys and The Whole Nine Yards. Directed by McG, it’s indefatigably paced but consistently insulting to viewers’ intelligence.

This Means War bears much in common with the slick, colorful fantasy worlds of McG’s Charlie’s Angels movies, as well as work he has overseen on the small screen, like Fastlane, The O.C. and Chuck. The look is polished, and favors kinetic movement and unremarked upon opulence over sense. The action “sizzle” arrives via occasional cheery blasts of brainless, bloodless, consequence-free shootouts, designed so as not to challenge or offend. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A low-fi genre hybrid that attempts to cash in on both the burgeoning trend of “found footage” thrillers and superhero origin stories, Chronicle only scratches the surface of its junior-level Magneto narrative. Leaning on an increasingly ineffective patchwork blend of diegetic sources, the movie opts for showy theatrics and set pieces over more honest character investment, and ultimately fritters away a quite promising concept. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 84 minutes)

Writer-director-actor Eric Schaeffer has made a career out of more or less channeling his offscreen insecurities, foibles and sexual appetites into what could loosely be categorized as slices of desperate-plea entertainment. His filmography behind the camera — which includes If Lucy Fell, Wirey Spindell and 1997’s critically lambasted Fall, to which his latest film is a quasi-sequel — is littered with movies in which he plays articulate, misunderstood, down-on-their-luck guys (often cabbies or writers, sometimes both) who bag chicks consistently out of their league and then get wound up about the impending implosion of said relationships.

Bittersweet, Paris-set romance After Fall, Winter (or just Winter, as it was at one point known) finds Schaeffer again trying to navigate a miasma of commingled narcissism and human frailties, with a pinch of the unlikely and wounded romance on display in Never Again, which was both his most streamlined and mature, well-observed work. Characteristically dawdling and certainly a bit implausible, the film invites a certain low-fi connection for a stretch before fumbling it away with phony details and ham-fisted sexual theatrics. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For video on demand from its distributor, click here. (FilmBuff, R, 131 minutes)

A deeply vapid movie which puts no sincere care or thought into how its slapdash story choices interact with the real world, One For the Money fancies itself a spunky action comedy with a spitfire heroine and a will-they-or-won’t-they romance at its core. Instead, it’s inane (and unfunny to boot) wish fulfillment of the most dreadful variety — an utterly phony tale of empowerment whose leading lady is repeatedly rescued and enabled by men. Starring Katherine Heigl, this mishmash defies logic as an adaptation of author Janet Evanovich’s first in a series of bestselling novels, so across the board tone-deaf is it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 91 minutes)

Six discrete stories of varying levels of effectiveness come together in The Theatre Bizarre, a macabre horror anthology that eschews the laborious weirdness of something like Christopher Landon’s Burning Palms, and instead focuses more forthrightly on crafting and sustaining a mood of uneasiness. The main commingled narrative ingredients are genre staples — sex, compulsion, paranoia and obsession — which work well for a movie that doesn’t shy away from gore, but is generally interested in more psychologically rooted fear. If, in the end, The Theatre Bizarre suffers from the same main problem that plagues so many anthology efforts — a couple weak entries weighing it down — it still compares relatively favorably to the qualitative mean established by Anchor Bay’s “Masters of Horror” series from a few years back. For the full review, from ShockYa, click here; for The Theatre Bizarre‘s trailer and more screening information, meanwhile, click here. (W2 Media, unrated, 111 minutes)

A paint-by-numbers, underdog-made-good, coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of junior circuit tennis, 16-Love is a wholesome movie of modest ambitions, shaggy and sunny personality, and middling execution. For tweens looking for something to while away the time between Twilight flicks there may be some small measure of entertainment, but nothing else here particularly merits a glance for older audiences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.

Viral pandemic drama takes a backseat to fraternal fisticuffs and gunplay in The Viral Factor, an enjoyably sprawling if completely scatterbrained action movie from director Dante Lam, starring Jay Chou (above) and Nicholas Tse. A nervous tendency to flit to and fro between characters prevents the movie from successfully gaining much of an emotional foothold, and its two-hour running time renders vast swathes of its action theatrics redundant. But there’s still enough expressive investment in the two leads to mark The Viral Factor as a slightly stronger than average genre piece for foreign film fans. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion/Emperor Motion Pictures, R, 122 minutes)

A description or listing of all the recombinant parts of drama Angels Crest — the plot here feels like a Law & Order episode, more or less, and the movie itself seems like a boozy, downmarket hybrid of The Shipping News and Gone Baby Gone, with a pinch of Northern Exposure — runs the risk of making it sound more interesting than it actually is. An adaptation of a missing-child novel by Leslie Schwartz, director Gaby Dellal’s wintry indie is a not very subtle and generally unpersuasive stab at tapestral grief-as-elegy. If cinematic skill lies partially in making an audience feel things they’ve felt before, but in new and different ways, Angels Crest, starring Thomas Dekker, Lynn Collins and Jeremy Piven, is a highlighted, underlined, out-of-date textbook, dogmatic about its presentation, no matter how overly familiar it is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.

An unwieldy, frequently baffling piece of claptrap that careens wildly to and fro in its efforts to serve many different narrative masters, gospel-tinged Joyful Noise aims for many different marks, and misses on almost all of them. By turns a musical competition drama, a blue-collar homily, a forbidden coming-of-age romance and a tale of familial reconciliation, the movie tries to use noisy, open-hearted effort to mask its narrative deficiencies, but it comes across as phony — a duet of prefabricated sentimentality and self-satisfied impudence.

The performances are things of volume and homespun sass; in short, these aren’t characters, they’re vessels for wan moralizing and sometimes snappy, mostly tired rejoinders. Ladled across all of the hokum is a bunch of convoluted, cornpone metaphors. Special note should go to hairstylist Cheryl Riddle, though, who creates a mesmerizing special effect and the movie’s most lasting reminiscence in the form of Dolly Parton’s towering, teased-upwards hairdo. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 118 minutes)

A thin sheen of technical proficiency isn’t enough to boost the emotional connectivity or entertainment value of the exceedingly programmatic genre offering The Darkest Hour, an alien invasion tale with a flat, humdrum script. Derivative and relatively unconcerned with that fact, the film doesn’t take advantage enough of its Moscow locale to truly qualify as an exotic sci-fi curio.

Former art director Chris Gorak made his directorial debut in 2007 with Right at Your Door, but his follow-up, while bigger in scope, trades away its chance at cultural authenticity by having native characters speak mostly in accented English, and also understand various American idioms. Whereas the cultural chasm between the four main characters, none of whom speak Russian, and everyone they come across could have been mined for much tension and drama, The Darkest Hour is instead content to use them as bit player enablers in its gung-ho story of fighting back and survival, which makes the movie seem small, not particularly thoughtful and entirely inconsequential. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG-13, 89 minutes)

Stephen Daldry has previously made three feature films and been Oscar-nominated as Best Director for each of them, so Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close demands to be taken seriously, and certainly will be by many awards pundits and critics. An adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, the movie purports to filter anguish and the experience of loss through the prism of a quirky young boy. In reality, it’s a preening, somber, pretentious and contrived film, a tapestral effort of skilled tradecraft brought to bear upon a self-serious framework of overt manipulations.

Screenwriter Eric Roth jettisons the ethnic specificity and pares down the source material to focus almost exclusively on young Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn, above right) and his unusual quest to emotionally reconnect with his father (Tom Hanks), who perished in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks of September 11, by finding the lock that a key from his closet fits. But the result takes on the qualities of an overly mannered exercise in stimulative poignance. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close exists less to tell a story than to make an audience feel, and boy does it know it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 128 minutes)

Years ago, when the NC-17 rating was first created, it was serious-minded, almost grim explorations of adult sexuality like Shame that its champions no doubt had in mind. Of course, along came the campy Showgirls, which didn’t help matters. Mostly, though, the NC-17 rating was a non-starter for Hollywood studios not only because they tend to instinctively shy away from art and controversy like a cat avoids rain, but also because many newspapers — bowing to the tom-toms of local morality police — refused to carry advertising for NC-17 films, which made their attempted distribution more of a hassle than they were worth, frankly.

In the intervening years, of course, the Internet has changed life and commerce, not the least of which with its readily accessible graphic depictions of sexual intercourse. Simultaneously, sexual compulsion and all other manner of addiction have gone mainstream — via VH-1’s Celebrity Rehab and Sober House, among other outlets — and so the table has been set for something like Shame, a very glum, austere putative snapshot of modern emotional disconnection co-written by director Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan.

The film stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon Sullivan, a white collar New York City guy whose extreme and seemingly insatiable sexual proclivities — he frequents prostitutes, he’s wrecked his office computer with porn, and he chronically masturbates in a manner more furious than blissful — have taken over his life. Brandon is extremely isolated, without any friends to speak of. The one semi-acquaintance he does have is his boss David (James Badge Dale), who, though married, hits on chicks in a second-nature manner, like breathing. This fact further exacerbates problems caused by the sudden arrival of Brandon’s wayward sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), when David picks up on her and enters into a fling.

Fassbender and Los Angeles Film Critics Association New Generation Award winner McQueen previously collaborated on 2008’s Hunger, a movie with a similarly ascetic design and chilly vibe. That film, about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, featured an unbroken, 17-minute take in its middle, and while Shame doesn’t completely mimic that captured stageplay aesthetic, it does unfurl at an unambiguous remove, including a confrontation between Brandon and Sissy that unfolds in a single shot from behind. It largely lacks, however, the historical mooring that gave Hunger some of its punching power.

Shame has some value or merit as a more or less honest exploration of the reach of adolescent sexual abuse and trauma, and the adult dysfunction and acting out that such problems can create without treatment. But its subtextual markers are obvious (Chic’s “I Want Your Love” makes a soundtrack appearance, to underscore the notable lack of true intimacy in Brandon’s life), and its narrative arc kind of banal. The power and hold of addiction — be it via drugs, sexual compulsion or whatever else — lies in the fact that the acting out for a good period of time works, as an emotional salve and substitute. Shame never shows the audience any real evidence of Brandon’s disease working for him, only a downward spiral with a few elliptical hints at a nasty past. (“We’re not bad people, we just came from a bad place,” says Sissy in the movie’s sole, half-hearted concessionary stab at catharsis). Ergo, there’s no emotional involvement or sense of powerful revelation — just a mild, chilly appreciation, from a distance.

With its copious (male and female) nudity, McQueen’s film seems created chiefly to court praise of its “braveness,” which isn’t to say that Mulligan or Fassbender’s performances lack in focus or commitment. His output over the past several years — inclusive of Inglourious Basterds, Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and this, among many other films — have shown Fassbender to be the rarest of commodities: a movie-star-in-waiting with serious acting chops and a preternatural understanding of and gift with nuance. And Mulligan, with the faintest trace of baby fat still rounding out her cheeks, has a face that captures and conveys a tremendous vulnerability. Still, in Shame they’re stuck in a vehicle that mistakes hermetic artfulness for insight — characters whose stories remain frustratingly incomplete. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox Searchlight, NC-17, 99 minutes)

On the small screen, AMC’s Breaking Bad has shined a light on the production of methamphetamine, and wrung much drama from the heightened stakes of a seemingly regular family man’s descent into moral and criminal contravention. Writer-director David Pomes’ effectively grimy Cook County takes a look at the ravaging effects of the same drug from a user’s point-of-view, detailing the familial chaos surrounding three generations of addicts living in rural East Texas. A gritty, pungent drama with some nicely attuned performances, the film is well worth seeking out for fans of off-the-beaten-path independent fare.

At the movie’s center is Tommy, aka Bump (Anson Mount, above left), a perpetually strung-out addict and meth cook who lives with his girlfriend Lucy (Polly Cole) and a series of other burn-outs who seem to come and go. The ruination of his own life might not be so bad, but Bump’s six-year-old daughter Deandra (Makenna Fitzsimmons) is also caught up in the mix, and a continuous victim of his curious combination of obliviousness and over-protectiveness. Bump’s teenage nephew, Abe (Ryan Donowho), tries to look out for his younger cousin as best he can, but lives in constant fear of his uncle’s violent rages and irrational paranoia. He’s older, but no less stuck and a victim of his circumstances than Deandra.

An uptick of hope arrives when Bump’s older brother and Abe’s dad, Sonny (Xander Berkeley, above right), returns home after a two-and-a-half-year absence. He’s gone clean and sober, and unbeknownst to Bump has also done a stint in prison, and is thus required to check in with a parole officer. Abe at first welcomes his father back, but then old resentments come bubbling up. Trying to finally do right by his son, Sonny wonders if his brother is too far gone, and if so whether it’s too late to extricate the rest of his loved ones from the dark clutches of drugs.

The winner of the prestigious Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival, Cook County is a solidly constructed little film that casts its lot with a group of game actors. If Mount — emaciated and sporting a scruffy beard that makes him look like a crazed gold rush ancestor of Daniel Day-Lewis — sometimes feels like he’s overdialing his accented impression of Matthew McConaughey, he certainly nails the flitting mindset of a drug addict, in which tangential thoughts collide and battle for mangled articulation. Donowho, who kind of recalls Lou Taylor Pucci, exudes a basic sympathetic nature. The underrated Berkeley, meanwhile, particularly shines as a fundamentally decent but in-over-his-head guy trying desperately to pay down the sins of his past. Crucially, there is humanity here in all these characters, regardless of their sins and shortcomings.

Director of photography Brad Rushing and production designer James Fowler, meanwhile, abet Pomes in creating a movie with a grungy authenticity. Sweat pours off of almost every character in every scene (Mount probably never wears a shirt during the entire film), and the rank aroma of frantic hopelessness can almost be smelled coming off the screen. That things end badly is no great surprise, but there is hope in the pinched battle for redemption that unfolds in Cook County. This may not be a pleasant slice of Americana, but it is unfortunately part of our modern collective story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Hannover House, R, 94 minutes)

A refined and not entirely disagreeable slice of square-jawed drama with the smooth, uncomplicated contours of film made to please the broadest possible audience, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse clings steadfastly to very old-fashioned — and sometimes torpid — notions of emotional engagement. With its episodic stabs at poignancy, there’s not much to assail with fury here, but neither is there much about which to get passionately excited or interested.

Notwithstanding the well received nature of its source material, and the array of accomplished below-the-line artisanship brought to bear in its adaptation, War Horse — a self-consciously epic story, set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during World War I, about a teenager (Jeremy Irvine) and his connection to and unlikely reunion with the family’s horse — is a movie with very rigidly prescribed and not particularly ambitious melodramatic inclinations. Screenwriters Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, working from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, get plenty right in the period detail, but never find a way to make a dramatic throughline really stick, and when the film actually goes off to war its grip loosens considerably. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DreamWorks, PG-13, 146 minutes)

Answers to Nothing is an unfortunately all-too-apt title for director Matthew Leutwyler’s sprawling thematic think piece, which focuses on the hard knocks and self-deception of a disparate group of Los Angelenos. The filmmakers seem to be reaching rather nakedly for early Paul Thomas Anderson territory here, but the copped moves come off less as artful homage and more as the nervous half-formed duplications of a mentee who’s left the nest too soon.

While Ryan (Dane Cook) and Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell) try to conceive a child, Ryan is also carrying on an affair with would-be singer Drew (Aja Volkman), as well as dealing his mother Marilyn (Barbara Hershey), who seemingly lives in a cocoon of denial over the fact that her long-away husband is somehow going to suddenly return home. Frankie (Julie Benz), a police detective investigating a missing child case, is at first convinced that the skeevy Beckworth (Greg Germann) is the guilty party, but runs up against a dead end. Teacher Carter (Mark Kelly) seems increasingly fraught by news coverage of said event, while rookie cop Jerry (Erik Palladino) floats through his days and nights lonely, and other characters come and go.

Many other movies, from Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia to Garden Party and even the Oscar-winning Crash, to name but a small handful, have delved into this melancholic “underworld” of the City of Angels, where so many dreams die hard. While Frankie and Kate are best friends, and other characters share some connections, though, there isn’t quite as much overlay as one might expect in Answers to Nothing, and subsequently the film leans on behavioral similarities and a couple late twists to drive home its point: that we each construct rationalizations and tell ourselves lies, whether big or small, to help frame, situate and create comfort with our own actions. This is all fine and good, but there’s not much “oomph” to the picture, given the varying degrees of emotional payoff.

To be sure, the characters aren’t wildly over-sketched, and Leutwyler admirably keeps the film’s collective temperature turned down, so that each story strand plays out on equal footing and the looming specter of the missing child doesn’t overwhelm the movie. The performances are of the same piece, tonally. But the result is a film without much of an electric charge or mystery — problematic though not necessarily damning except for the fact that so many of Answers to Nothing‘s moments of small observation also feel nipped or overly familiar rather than natively insightful. The movie unfolds dutifully, over the course of two hours. And then, just a short time later, all memories of it are gone as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 123 minutes)

Cameron Crowe tries on something of a forcedly whimsical tone in We Bought a Zoo, a well-meaning and sentimental but lumbering family drama that never quite connects. Existing in a kind of wan emotional middle-ground, only occasionally punctuated and illuminated by Matt Damon‘s winning lead turn, the film is a search for familial rejuvenation and self-renewal in only the vaguest terms possible.

Based on a memoir by journalist Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo tracks closely in its massaged feeling to Marley & Me, which distributor 20th Century Fox had great success with in the same holiday frame in 2008, pushing to $240 million worldwide gross. But while character-driven, tonally commingled qualities have always been a hallmark of Crowe’s big screen efforts, this film exudes the feeling of an artist reaching more than halfway to make contact with an audience that market-parsers have told him should be right in his wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 124 minutes)

A sprawling tale of power, sleaze and ambition in the vein of City of God, The Departed, Infernal Affairs and The Wire, writer-director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a howling, labyrinthine lament against the brawn and fraudulent self-protection of entrenched institutions that could and perhaps should well find a welcome audience amongst #OccupyWallStreet cineastes. Brazil’s official Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film submission, the movie — which is set in Rio de Janeiro and unfolds at the intersection of drugs, crime and high-level governmental corruption — is programmatic, and tipped heavily toward procedural rather than emotional payoffs, but nonetheless still packs an effective, gritty punch.

At the center of the movie is Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion, or BOPE (so named for its native-language acronym). When a mission to bring an end to a jail riot ends in violence, it puts several men on a trajectory that will eventually result in unlikely new alliances. Andre Mathias (Andre Ramiro) willingly takes the fall for the raid, out of devotion to BOPE, but his superior, Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura, quite good), fails upward, and finds himself installed as Sub-Secretary of Intelligence, where he oversees the city’s wire-tapping programs. Academic and social activist Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos, above), meanwhile, decides to enter politics, winning a position that puts him further at odds with a crooked mayor and the moneyed political-discourse entertainers who prop up their efforts with much on-camera bloviating.

Nascimento is no friend of Fraga’s either. He views him as a pain, and his irritation is exacerbated when Fraga takes up with his ex-wife, and starts influencing his son’s view of Nascimento’s work. Then there’s the fact that Nascimento comes to realize that by strengthening BOPE and bringing low the drug gangs that run the slums, he’s actually only made things easier for the corrupt cops and dirty politicians who are actually pulling the strings from above, including a particularly brutal police captain (Sandro Rocha) who has no qualms about flaunting his thuggishness.

The qualities that most benefit Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (it’s actually a sequel to Padilha’s 2007 feature debut, featuring several holdover characters) are also what make it slightly impenetrable at first — its density, and attention to detail. There’s also the matter of Nascimento’s overwritten narration, which serves as an effective hatchet through some of the bureaucratic bramble but also bleeds the movie of the chance for a more rooted emotional connection. Eventually, though, the movie’s pieces start to fit together, and somewhat disparate strands cross paths in interesting ways when old allies become enemies, and vice versa.

Padilha, who got his start in documentary filmmaking, has an obvious eye and ear for the sorts of information that makes this material seem snarlingly current. It’s a fictionalized tale, but one rooted in real scandal as it relates to both BOPE and Brazil’s government. The film is also properly awash in the shades of grey morality required to tackle a telling of such systemic indecency and corruption, which is quite separate from individual malice. “War is like medicine — it keeps the mind busy,” says Nascimento early on, who comes to realize the double-edged nature of that statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 115 minutes)