A remarkable snapshot of underclass life, love, humor and despair, Position Among the Stars, which picked up the Special World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and recently played at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is an utterly absorbing and strikingly humane nonfiction film that, in non-judgmental nor holier-than-thou fashion, locates the universality of human struggle in charting the tumultuous ups and downs of an extended Indonesian family trying to work their way out of the slums.

Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich takes as his subjects the Shamsuddins, a Jakarta family whom he previously followed as their country shook off the three-decade rule of President Suharto (2001’s The Eye of the Day) and experienced a rise in Islamic power and influence (2004’s Shape of the Moon). While there’s obviously some overlap, one need not be at all familiar with those movies, as Position Among the Stars, after a bit of a slow start, digs into Indonesia’s fast-changing society and various sociocultural issues and problems in a very relatable manner. Grandmother Rumidjah (above right) is openly Christian, but her son Bakti (above left) converts to Islam, he confesses, because of peer pressure. Getting a government job processing welfare payments, Bakti tries to scrape together enough money to help put his niece, Tari, through college, but finds himself hiding “luxury items” (like a television) when fellow bureaucrats come to check on and process a similar claim for eldest son Dwi.

From scripted films like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! and recent Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire to documentaries like Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa, there is of course a rich history of movies that seek to soak up as much grungy, grimy slum-land atmosphere as they can, frequently to illustrate just how much better Western audiences have it. Helmrich, though, neither luxuriates nor shies away from his setting. He simply presents it as it is. There’s the grotesque spectacle of roaches scattering to and fro, and a rat and cat squaring off, but Position Among the Stars is also often quite funny, as when Bakti and Tari conspire to have a joke at Rumidjah’s expense about Tari’s high school exams. The film shows that, issues of comfortability and living condition notwithstanding, family dynamics are remarkably the same the world over.

In the Shamsuddin family, Helmrich, who also serves as one of the movie’s two camera operators, has a group of subjects who are so completely at ease with his presence as to give Position Among the Stars the complete and total feeling of an exhaustively staged drama. There are no weepy, direct-address confessionals, nor sideways glances at the camera’s lens. Everything plays out in straightforward fashion. When Bakti physically loses it after his wife Sri kills the beta goldfish he was training to fight to use in street betting matches, or Rumidjah says to Bakti, “You failed in life, why should [Tari] have to fail too?” the audience experiences these not as contrived explosions, but the uneasy natural product of months of simmering tensions.

Abetting this is the film’s stunning visual style and editing. Its savvy, beautifully engaging cinematographic expression is best characterized as conforming to the single-shot methodology of the French New Wave, which means that dozens of real-life moments are pieced together to create a grander temporal reality. The deeper the film progresses, then, the more we know and feel about these characters. An intimate, achingly real and heartfelt portrait of some of the bonds and binds that we all share, Position Among the Stars is a first-rate third-world journey worth taking. For the film’s trailer, click here; for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Scarabee Films/HBO Films, unrated, 111 minutes)

A propagandistic telling of the origins of the Chinese Communist Party on occasion of its 90th anniversary, co-directors Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping’s Beginning of the Great Revival encompasses war, crumbling social institutions, societal upheaval, melodrama and plenty of political backbiting and gamesmanship, all in a package to be perhaps more admired than enjoyed. For fans of sweeping historical tales, the film’s technical accomplishment and narrative scope win out, by only the slimmest of margins, over plotting that is stodgy and characterizations that are thin and functionally sketched. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 124 minutes)

Monte Hellman’s first film in more than two decades, Road To Nowhere, is, whatever else one says about it, first and foremost a work that wouldn’t exist were it not for other movies. A referential slice of film noir which enjoyed its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, recently screened as part of a retrospective of the director’s work at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, and now opens wider in Los Angeles and other markets throughout the summer, Road To Nowhere takes grab-bag elements and splintered fractions of dramatic conflict — blackmail, a murder mystery, dubious identities, a woman in trouble — and flings them at the screen, excusing any rigidity of plotting by having certain characters involved in the making of a (same-named) movie, scenes of which are then interspersed throughout. The result is a jumbled, unengaging mess that counts on the awestruck quietness of an audience certain that the film’s makers are pursuing “art.”

It’s simpler and perhaps just as instructive to talk about what Road To Nowhere lacks as much as what it has, given its putative areas of interest. The big, easy thematic touchstones in the script, by former Variety executive editor Steven Gaydos, are the three works of David Lynch, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, that make use of multiple and/or fractured identities, film production, and more generalized Hollywood deceit. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly compelling about any of the film’s characters, and certain no woozy charm or charged sense of danger in its construction.

Is there a moodiness to cinematographer Josep Civit’s work that informs a larger, accumulating sense of tension? No. Are there moments of pin-prick terror or dark comedy? No. Are there breathtaking performances, alternately eerie, heartrending, erotically charged or flat-out unnerving? No. Is there at least a teasing, palpable sense of how all these events fit together, and a larger point or singular emotion? No. A mere sense of momentum, then, perhaps? No. Hellman — who’s achieved a sort of industry-insider legendary status due in large part to Two-Lane Blacktop and “discovering” Quentin Tarantino, and producing his film debut — dutifully pulls the levers of Gaydos’ script, but there is no slickness, nor danger, nor joy. There is no “there” there, in other words. Road To Nowhere is, sadly, aptly titled, because it is exists merely as a yawning collection of indulgent scenes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 121 minutes)

When has justice been served, and a criminal debt paid? When a victim’s family announces its forgiveness, and lobbies for the release of imprisoned? When new evidence casts a pall over a guilty plea? When an inmate is diagnosed with a terminal illness? These and other questions are at the heart of director Yoav Potash’s Crime After Crime, a documentary that spotlights the extraordinarily heartrending case of Deborah Peagler, a woman convicted in 1983, under a variety of extenuating circumstances, in the death of her abusive spouse, who it turns out pimped her out while she was still in high school and sexually abused his stepdaughter.

Potash delivers a methodical and effective but very posed drama, leaning heavily on pro bono attorneys Nadia Costa (above right) and Joshua Safran (above left) as his guides through the case, even though Peagler appears throughout as well. The evidence the movie cites is compelling, and the fact that the film spans such a lengthy period of time gives it an additional, natural dramatic pull; unexpected, complicating factors pop up, repeatedly lengthening the odds for Peagler. Still, while the film chronicles emotionally charged subjects like sexual and physical abuse, as well as unjust imprisonment, it has a fairly dispassionate heart, which is something of a blessing or a curse depending on one’s point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Independent Pictures/Oprah Winfrey Network, unrated, 93 minutes)

Most big screen comedies — even a lot of independently mounted affairs — trade in the familiar, at least on a narrative level, operating under the assumption that audiences want to see witty banter and outlandish comeuppance visited upon recognizable scenarios that are easily transposed to a viewer’s own life, whether that’s workplace misery or the fickle nature of love. It’s unusual, then, to see something like The Best and the Brightest, a movie which eschews a more broadly relatable area of focus in favor of something much more specific and divisive, and with a bunch of warped characters and an over-the-top tone to boot.

The film centers around Sam and Jeff Jasinkis (Bonnie Somerville and Neil Patrick Harris), a married Connecticut couple who, with the vague goal of “conquering the big city,” move to New York with their five-year-old daughter Beatrice in tow. Desperate to get her into a top-flight private school the ensuing fall, the pair find nothing but bemused smiles and years-long waiting lists. Lacking connections, they hire a special consultant, Sue Lemon (Amy Sedaris), who sets up a meeting at Coventry Private School with chairwoman Katharine Heilmann (Jenna Stern). There, the transcription of a raunchy IM chat from Jeff’s sleazy friend, Clark (Peter Serafinowicz), is mistaken for trailblazing “poetry,” the artistic occupation rather arbitrarily assigned Jeff by Sue in order to impress the powers that be. Lies are then compounded, as Jeff and Sam work overtime to circumvent Katharine’s objections to their suitability for Coventry’s single open slot, and convince a randy, philandering board member (Christopher McDonald) and his politico wife (Kate Mulgrew) of the deserving nature of their daughter.

The cast certainly delivers some amusing performances. Recent Tony Awards host Harris has impeccable comic timing, and wields his lines smartly. Similarly, Sedaris (though playing a needlessly amped character whose caffeinated energy hijacks a couple scenes) has a knack for locating small, telling bits of physical humor or canted inflection amidst her torrent of dialogue. (She even rocks a New Kids on the Block T-shirt at one point.) McDonald and Mulgrew, meanwhile, evince a nice rapport as a rich, for-show couple who take delight in needling and cutting down one another (Sample exchange: “I don’t care what anyone says, you looked hetero as hell out there.” “My God, you’re droll…”), all with the knowledge that their arrangement benefits a lavish lifestyle.

Working from a script co-written with Michael Jaeger, Josh Shelov, making his feature film directorial debut, oversees a production of undoubtedly challenged means, so there isn’t a lot of visual flash or pizzazz, which might have benefited the material. The novelty of setting most recommends this effort, honestly. While a lot of its dialogue pops, the movie’s chief problem, really, is the fact that it doesn’t seem to wholly embrace the arguably detestable nature of its characters. Having the best interests of one’s child at heart is a universal story or concern; maniacally charting the trajectory of their elite education before grade school considerably less so.

The Best and the Brightest has some fun with Sam’s increasing fretfulness and histrionics, and stands for a while on the precipice of something darker, of all-out lunacy. A lot of these characters are sociopathic, deranged and/or wildly irresponsible, but Shelov only occasionally fully cashes in on those traits. The Best and the Brightest would be better if it were bit darker, and not about any of the best instincts of parental protection, but instead more wholly their corruptive influence. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (PMK-BNC, R, 93 minutes)

A recent premiere at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival, as part of its summer showcase, director Lisa F. Jackson’s Sex Crimes Unit is an emotionally pulverizing documentary look inside the special, same-named division of the New York City District Attorney’s office. An incredible snapshot of justice deferred but thankfully not denied, the movie will continue to air on HBO as part of its summer documentary series. “Entertaining” is of course very much not the right word to use, but it is uplifting to see and feel and know and have ratified and celebrated that, in a world of much darkness, there are those who fight for right. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Jackson Films/HBO Films, unrated, 87 minutes)

A creative lifestyle breeds a certain amount of introspection in and of itself, as, often, does big city life. Combine those two facts along with the ironclad reality of further navel-gazing that the downward-spiraling cost of feature film production in the digital age encourages, and one has a fairly good idea of the framework that underpins A Love Affair of Sorts, an intellectually restless new indie film that, not entirely unlike Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi’s Paper Heart, blurs the lines of introverted romance, art project and mockumentary.

Working from a loose story concocted by its two stars, A Love Affair of Sorts unfolds in Los Angeles over the span of about a week during the Christmas holiday season, and centers on a lonely painter and multimedia artist, David (director David Guy Levy). Already kicking around an idea to film himself as he interacts with the world, David meets Hungarian nanny Enci (Lili Bordan) in a bookstore, when he catches her on his ever-present flip-camera while she may or may not be trying to shoplift a tome. After a bit of back-and-forth, they strike up a friendship and enter into a pact to film one another, with the ethereal, esoteric goal of revealing and capturing their “true selves.” A more tentative romantic relationship then blooms between the duo, complicated by Enci’s quasi-boyfriend, Boris (Ivan Kamaras), and David’s brutally honest friend, Jonathan (Jonathan Beckerman). Are David and/or Enci merely posing and preening for the camera, or are they really falling in love?

It doesn’t give too much away to say that A Love Affair of Sorts is both a delicate, mumblecore-esque romance, and a deconstruction of sorts of the same, delving into a modern generation’s penchant for stiff-arming the messiness of reality through the insertion and embrace of a technological filter, and a simultaneous discomfort with having cameras turned on themselves. (Everyone’s the star of their own reality show, but it’s not always easy or pleasant to submit to someone else’s view of us.) There’s a nervous bundle of ideas and energy here, in other words. Unfortunately, the romance is never particularly believable, and the movie’s ideas and ambitions don’t really coalesce in a memorably meaningful way, or even come close.

Part of the production story behind the movie is that A Love Affair of Sorts is the first feature film to be shot entirely on flip cameras, an unverifiable novelty that allows for a small handful of striking verite compositions, but nonetheless eventually comes across as an excuse for a sort of stylistic sloppiness. There are parts here that are somewhat interesting. In need of much better plotting and execution, however, this Affair just wasn’t meant to be. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin, unrated, 91 minutes)

A well acted and nicely detailed if somewhat familiarly plotted immigrant drama, Chris Weitz’s A Better Life shines a light on the razor’s edge of poverty, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send the undocumented working poor tumbling into bankruptcy, criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise.

Single father Carlos Riquelme (Demián Bichir, quite good) lives in East Los Angeles and works as a gardener. His son Luis (José Julián) is a good if lonely and at-risk kid, surrounded by potentially dangerous influences. When Carlos’ truck gets stolen, it sets off a chain of events that threaten to tear him and his son apart.

It sounds perhaps weird or counterintuitive, but a bit less interaction between Carlos and his son would have actually spoken volumes about his feelings for him. In ditching gangland menace and concentrating more on Carlos’ pent-up inner struggle and feelings regarding his perpetual absenteeism, occupational shame and the like — powerful adult feelings that kids, who typically don’t come to regard their parents as actual people until sometime their 20s if ever, can’t understand or appreciate — the movie would till new narrative ground.

As is, A Better Life‘s tonal consistency and cultural and geographical authenticity are amongst its strongest selling points, particularly for fans of films like Quinceañera, Biutiful and In America; it’s firmly rooted in a place that communicates social substratum without beating you over the head with it. Immigrant life is wildly different depending on region, but the specificity of this portrait still trades in universal emotions. (Summit, PG-13, 97 minutes)

Two hundred million years ago, turtles were exclusively creatures of the land. Though their ancestors were driven into the oceans by the predatory prowess of dinosaurs, even today loggerhead turtles retain the unusual practice of birthing their young on the beach, setting the scene for one of the most amazing and improbable stories of new life on Earth. Narrated by Miranda Richardson, director Nick Stringer’s Turtle: The Incredible Journey charts this fascinating tale, and does so in a fashion as visually captivating as it is informative.

The product of more than two years of filming, Turtle opens on a beach in Florida, where we witness buried hatchlings finally burst through the sand into daylight, after almost three days of struggling blindly upward. What follows is astounding, as these delicate babies — no bigger than the palm of a child’s hand, and still soft-shelled — instinctively make their way to the sea, past a maze of hungry crabs and swooping pelicans. If they’re lucky enough to make it that far, the swirling surf batters and knocks them around, while they struggle to make it past the breaking waves and out to calmer waters. Fifty miles of nonstop swimming awaits, where they then try to hook on to a patch of seaweed that will finally afford them their first living sleep, and hopefully get picked up by the Gulf Stream, carrying them further north. Watching this unfold, it’s easy to understand why the mortality rate for loggerhead turtles is 50 percent in the first several hours of their above-ground existence.

A lot of nature documentaries aim for elegant absorption, unfolding in a mannered style at a delicate remove. But Stringer’s movie, with its intense, close-up cinematography and smart framing and editorial choices, unfolds as an almost entirely subjective experience. The result is invigorating, particularly in its first third, which comes across like the animal kingdom equivalent of storming the beaches at Normandy. With each new hurdle these baby turtles face alone — from the aforementioned predators to the perils of the stagnant Sargasso Sea, devoid of currents or winds — one’s appreciation of their indomitable spirit increases by multiple factors.

Perhaps most impressively, Stringer doesn’t let the style of his telling overwhelm the material, or cloud his instinct for narrative. Melanie Finn’s script for Richardson’s narration nicely juggles the difficulties of making the stories of these turtles palatable for different age groups, all without pandering or sacrificing factual context, as DisneyNature’s African Cats unfortunately did earlier this year. And it undercuts not one iota the visceral and emotional charge of, say, seeing a baby loggerhead turtle struggle with trying to digest plastic jetsam, get hooked by a commercial fishing line, or barely escape the clutches of a Portuguese man-of-war.

Just as much as there is a value in human empathy, there is a certain value that comes from knowing and understanding the life journeys of other creatures on this planet, because it lends awareness to our innate interconnectedness. Turtle reflects this, in a warm and involving manner. It edifies and illuminates in equal measure, and is a film that truly an entire family can enjoy. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Hannover House/SeaWorld Pictures, PG, 76 minutes)

An animated automotive espionage adventure (say that quickly five times) that improves upon the leaden moralizing of its predecessor, if not in strikingly original ways, Cars 2 delivers base-level entertainment on a familiarly laid racetrack. While unfolding against a sumptuous visual backdrop, the movie doesn’t have the same adventurousness of spirit that marks Pixar’s best efforts. An utterly delightful new seven-minute short featuring Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story gang uniting to put on an impromptu vacation for Ken and Barbie precedes the feature presentation. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, G, 106 minutes)

British period piece import Toast, playing at a handful of Laemmle theaters in Los Angeles this weekend as part of their “From Britain With Love” series, is a well-acted if somewhat meandering and pedantic coming-of-age story, based on the memoir of Nigel Slater, a popular English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. Fans of EastEnders and all other sorts of across-the-pond television, as well as kitchen-sink dramas in general, will find reward in the detail and clarity of this tale.

The movie opens in Wolverhampton in the late 1960s, where nine-year-old
Nigel (Oscar Kennedy, quite superb and sympathetic) lives with his
mother (Victoria Hamilton) and father (Ken Stott). Nigel seems bright
and curious, about food in particular, but neither of his parents seem
to understand him very much. A plaintive voiceover tells us he’s “never
had veggies that weren’t from a tin,” and his mother not only
discourages any culinary adventurousness but also seems basically
clueless in the kitchen. (The film takes its title for the default
family dinner when things get burned, or Nigel’s mom forgets to open
cans before boiling beans.)

Nigel tries his hand at cooking, but
as his mom falls ill with an inoperable respiratory condition, the
family falls apart. When she passes, Nigel is left alone with his
father. Until, that is, housekeeper Joan (Helena Bonham Carter) sets her
romantic sights on him, targeting his heart via his stomach. Flash
forward more than a couple years and Nigel, now a teenager (Finding Neverland‘s Freddie
Highmore, above), feels even more isolated, having moved away from his friends
and out to the country. Joan, as ever, still holds sway over Nigel’s
father, and they eventually wed. But, emboldened by a home economics
class at school, Nigel makes plans to pursue his culinary interests more
fully, and “out-cook” his un-matronly nemesis, thus winning over his
father.

If one wasn’t familiar with the fact that Toast was based
on a true story, one could easily intuit that from the movie’s faults.
The adaptation, by Billy Elliot screenwriter Lee Hall, aims righteously
for adolescent feeling, and has a capable enabler for that mission in
neophyte Kennedy. The problem is that Toast feels rather scattershot in
its focus and tone, and doesn’t successfully identify a main problem or
conflict. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (BBC Films/Ruby Film & TV, unrated, 96 minutes)

A lot of nature documentaries, or films that look at animals, focus in either/or fashion on their behavioral impulses or relationship to and interaction with humans, ignoring the potentiality of a more complex causal relationship. In other words, do human masters, even kind ones, make some animals sad? The heartwarming and thought-provoking new documentary One Lucky Elephant tacitly asks this and other tough questions in presenting a look at a compassionate but aging pachyderm owner who’s searching for a suitable place to retire his circus elephant.

David Balding adopted Flora, an orphaned African baby elephant, when she was only two years old, and made her the central attraction of his St. Louis-based traveling show. After 16 years, however, Balding, beset with some health problems himself, begins to sense that Flora is no longer happy performing. Not wanting to merely sell her to a zoo or another circus, Balding first explores a tribal reservation in Botswana, but that falls through. While he beseeches Carol Buckley, the operator of a sanctuary in Tennessee whose organization does not take African elephants for fear of mixing them with their Asian elephant population, to change her mind, Balding makes arrangements to temporarily house Flora at the Miami Metro Zoo. An incident there, however, risks Flora’s extended stay.

Directed by Lisa Leeman, One Lucky Elephant is an extraordinary movie about inter-species relationships, and the beauty, enrichment and, ultimately, constraints of those bonds. Beginning in the infancy of the new millennium, the movie showcases a seemingly impatient and at times unhappy Flora, stuck in her teenage years with no other elephant companions. As the film tabs Balding’s progress in placing her long-term and Flora’s adjustment to various new surroundings, however, it also smartly winds its way back a bit to 1984, showcasing Flora’s training.

Much to its credit, Leeman’s film doesn’t lean solely on the majesty or stirring wonder of its intimate proximity to this enormous, hulking animal, which chows down on over 400 pounds of apples, potatoes, carrots, bran, grass and other food per day. One Lucky Elephant also devotes ample time and resources to capturing and exploring Balding’s conflicted feelings about owning and exploiting Flora, as well as the myopic limits of his own realizations. While Balding is extremely remorseful about having split up two-year-old Flora from her sister when he first purchased her, and also admits to broader feelings of regret related to Flora’s need to “just be an elephant,” he resists the professional diagnosis of Flora as having post-traumatic stress disorder. To Balding, it’s inconceivable that his occasional appearance for visits at Flora’s new home would or even could summon up intense feelings of abandonment and anger within Flora.

One Lucky Elephant spans an extraordinary amount of time, over a full decade, and this fact allows it to achieve a sort of natural, relaxed ranginess, without dawdling too long or foisting pat “conclusions” on an audience too soon. In fact, Leeman’s movie eschews black-and-white didacticism. Balding is seen to be a loving and devoted caregiver, but also ultimately simply unable to provide Flora with the sort of companionship she needs from others of her own kind. Their time together was beautiful, but it was destined to end. That’s a lesson with broader applicability to life, one of but several reasons that One Lucky Elephant resonates so deeply. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (LLC/Sandbar Pictures, unrated, 84 minutes)

Based on the novel by Marieke van der Pol, Dutch import Bride Flight is emblematic of the particular sort of heritage cinema that is from the outside and at first glance stuffy and a bit boring but, if one gives it time and an open heart and mind, eventually blossoms due to the strength of its characterizations.

Directed by Ben Sombogaart (Twin Sisters) and based on true events, the film opens in the present day at a funeral and then flashes back to 1953, as a plane full of (mostly betrothed) women escape post-World War II Holland by emigrating to New Zealand for what they hope will be better lives. Marjorie (Elise Schaap), Ada (Karina Smulders, above) and Esther (Anna Drijver) strike up a conversation with the rakishly handsome Frank (Waldemar Torenstra), an agricultural college graduate looking to make his way with his own farm and tempted by the chance at cheap land. Frank represents a certain temptation for each of the women, but upon landing they meet their respective fiances and set about with their lives, to varying degrees of happiness. A casual fling between Frank and one of the ladies yields a pregnancy, while another grapples with the possibility of infertility. Secret pacts are then struck, which have far-reaching consequences throughout the rest of the years that members of the quartet remain in touch.

Once the element of progeny is introduced, Bride Flight charts a fairly predictable narrative course. But it’s made enjoyable through technical acumen and a clutch of strong performances. Torenstra has an appealing, square-jawed charisma that kind of favors Hugh Jackman by way of Simon Baker. He radiates decency, which is integral to an audience’s embrace of Frank, since he behaves not as a cad, per se, but just a guy seemingly ill at ease with the consequence of any of his attachments. All of the female leads beautifully inhabit their characters, meanwhile — especially Smulders, who gives a nuanced and conflicted turn as Ada, torn later in life between a choice to remain with her children and the chance for a new life with Frank.

One assumes that the split structure owes to import from the novel, but Sombogaart does more than pay lip service to these flash-forwards to present day. He imbues them with a full-bodied emotional integrity that give the movie’s final act punch some force, no matter the fact that one can see it coming. The actors playing all the characters in their golden years are also superb (Rutger Hauer pops up as Frank), making Bride Flight a solid arthouse offering for fans of quality international drama. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box, R, 130 minutes)

After being very publicly forced out of his dream job as host of The Tonight Show in order to make way for the return of Jay Leno (and his equally large contract and chin), Conan O’Brien was at a place most of us have been at some point in our lives — very angry, but in front of a large group of people, and unable to really express or address it. Of course, O’Brien was being paid millions of dollars not to say anything, as the final legal details of his buyout and exit were hammered out.

Still, trying to channel that debilitating rage into something more constructive was at the heart of O’Brien’s decision to launch his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” live tour, which, starting of April last year, spanned 44 dates in 33 cities. His traveling show — part high-energy song-and-dance routine, part variety sketch show, all smiling exorcism — is lovingly chronicled in the ramshackle new travelogue Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.

A bit of brief interview footage with O’Brien sets the stage, and we see him and his team discussing and concocting details of how to roll out the announcement for his show — even before they really know what it’s going to be. After that, however, the film mostly unfolds in a straightforward chronological fashion, rolling from city to city and bearing witness to the highs and lows of creating, honing and delivering a live show, while also pressing the flesh with fans at after-show events and figuring out what comes next in life.

Director Rodman Flender’s film is an admirably candid look at the sheer amount of work that is married to this sort of high-wire creativity, and in that respect the movie is, perhaps surprisingly, somewhat reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Regrettably, the film could use a bit more of a streamlined vision. Those early, direct chats with O’Brien that give an interesting glimpse into the gaping need for acceptance that drives so many of the most successful showbiz psyches unfortunately melt away. Flender doesn’t spend much time soliciting the opinions of the comedian’s peers and employees, which would complement the footage of O’Brien onstage and round out a professional portrait of the man.

Instead, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop kind of morphs into the ultimate backstage video, which is surely not the worst thing in the world. Fans ply the tall, exceedingly friendly, once and future TV host with “masturbating panda” pizzas and an endless stream of photograph requests. He’s only human, though. O’Brien finally does lose it just a bit, and question the sanity of exhaustive pre-show and post-show meet-and-greets with everyone and their families. One day he’ll stop, maybe — just not yet. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Abramorama, unrated, 98 minutes)

If part of the reason action movies resonate so broadly is because most of us are simply never going to have a chance to go Action Jackson, let alone drive a truck off a freeway ramp or swing by rope from a helicopter and kick open a skyscraper’s window, then prison dramas also provide vicarious entertainment at a comfortable remove. After all, we can enjoy all the cursing, fighting and vengeful plotting without fear of sacrificing our own behymens.

Case in point: the starkly titled R, a Danish prison flick that strongly recalls HBO’s The Wire and the recent, award-winning French import Un Prophete. The fiction film debut documentary of directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, and the winner of the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the prestigious Gothenburg International Film Festival, the gritty and well acted R is strongly sketched enough to leave a mark with predisposed audiences, no matter its subtitles.

The story here is quite familiar and charts a rather expected path, more or less, whether one has seen a small handful of prison films or upwards of five dozen. Still, the precision and care with which it is rendered mark it more than some time-whiling throwaway. The ethnic and religious divisions, also on display in Un Prophete, are solidly elucidated without ever becoming overbearing or pretentious, and there are nice, relaxed parallels drawn between Rune (Pilou Asbaek, above) and fellow prisoner Rashid (Dulfi al-Jaburi), a Muslim, by way of the respective family members who come to visit them. They are doppelgangers, in a strange way, and the slow dawning of this point gives the movie a nice and somewhat unexpected depth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Olive Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

The word “Riverdance” isn’t really used, but that’s what the documentary Jig puts under the microscope — the story of the 40th Irish Dancing World Championships, and specifically the leg-splaying competitions between certain youth subsets. To that end, there’s some absolutely fantastic talent on display in this ambling but only passably inquisitive nonfiction film, meaning that those inclined to like this sort of thing (those who might have a TiVo season pass for TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, say) will find in this plenty to like. General audiences, however, may feel a bit danced out.

Unfolding in the final months leading up to the aforementioned March, 2010, competition in Glasgow, Jig charts a number of highly skilled young folk dancers — precious few of whom have any connection to the rapid step-dancing genre’s link to Irish culture — and loosely pairs off some of them who will eventually be competing against one another. The film is comparable to but not quite as engaging as the recent documentary Make Believe: The Battle To Become the World’s Best Teen Magician. The subjects in Jig all put in an equal amount of hard work and dedication, but the latter movie has significantly better guides, if you will, and a sharper focus. It succeeds in eliciting information and perspectives from its young would-be magicians, whereas most of Jig director Sue Bourne’s interview chats, while perfectly amiable, are less revelatory. They do less to connect the kids’ passion for dance to the different ways it makes them feel, and how they see it eventually integrated into their adult lives.

Watching excellence in almost any field, and the pursuit of the same, can be a fortifying and rewarding experience. And it’s certainly interesting to see the wide variety of personalities (a group of Russians, an adopted Sri Lankan teen living in Holland) drawn to this extremely difficult and competitive discipline. But Jig doesn’t spend a whole lot of time elucidating the actual steps of Irish dance (perhaps by design, as one judge later says it’s a highly subjective art form), and the movie unfurls as a haze of practice and performance footage — again, frequently impressive — with neither much contextual mooring nor ambition in staging. It’s just kids dancing, and competing. Some eventually win, and some will lose — as often happens in life. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media, PG, 93 minutes)

Because of the very simple nature of the human voice, and what its sound means to us, music captures the human experience in a special way that other art forms cannot. If joy is nearly impossible to contrive, then listening to the joyous, excited and unblinkingly forthright celebration and expression of community, faith and gratitude to simply be alive can be a profoundly moving experience, one impractical to resist. Such are the life lessons communicated by Don McGlynn’s Rejoice and Shout, an exhaustively comprehensive documentary about the 200-year musical history of African-American Christianity.

Gospel music is of course informed by the plantation and slavery experience of African-Americans many generations ago, and McGlynn — a filmmaker well-versed in musical documentaries — connects that historical fact to the unbowed spirit of its earliest practitioners and progenitors, while also tracing it all the way forward in time to the emotional, participatory qualities of worship still found in many predominantly African-American churches. Using a wide-ranging roster of interview subjects, from academics like The Gospel Sound author Anthony Heilbut to singers like Ira Tucker, Smokey Robinson, Mavis Staples (above) and more, McGlynn crafts a genre-specific portrait that may be among the most detailed in all of music-related nonfiction film. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 115 minutes)

Scalene, a recent world premiere at the Dances With Films festival, opens with a jolt, in large part because one doesn’t expect to see Margo Martindale, a veteran character actress with more than 80 credits under her belt, doing physical battle with Hanna Hall, the young Jenny from Forrest Gump, and later costar of Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake. And yet there they are — one with a gun, the other in flight. They scuffle, yell and run about, giving clues of a greater familiarity with one another. Soon we’re winding backwards in time, and learning more about the specifics of just how things went so wrong.

Scalene bills itself as a perceptual thriller, which is a perhaps fancy way of saying it’s a psychological drama that toys with audience sympathies via shifting perspectives. Martindale stars as Janice Trimble, the single mother of Jakob (Adam Scarimbolo), a 26-year-old, live-in mute with other unspecified developmental and/or behavioral disabilities. When she starts quasi-dating divorcee Charles (Jim Dougherty), Janice places a few fliers for a part-time caregiver, and soon-to-graduate college student Paige Alexander (Hall), looking for work to bolster her resume with potential social work further down the line, responds to Janice’s need. Eventually there’s an accusation of rape, which pits the two women against one another.

Scalene unfolds more or less in reverse, actually, with a mediator advising Janice to accept a court-ordered psychiatric hold and multi-year rehabilitation program for Jakob, and the tearful mother swearing that her son is innocent. As director Zack Parker, working from a script co-written with Brandon Owens, navigates back in time, the film juggles two slight and eventually increasingly divided points-of-view in regards to Janice’s treatment of Jakob.

There’s a wonderful ambiguity captured by scenes in which Janice greets Paige curtly, or acts toward Jakob in the same manner in Paige’s presence. The screenplay, though, doesn’t allow Martindale a lot of chances to trade in quiet subtlety, of which she is certainly capable. Certain scenes drag on for too long, though, past the point of conveying either the emotional essence of a given bit, or what’s functionally necessary to advance the narrative. Hall, too, is required to do some silent heavy lifting, and the contrast of her woodenness versus later emoting does the movie no favors.

Scalene is much more interesting when it flexes its ambition some, working to try to also incorporate Jakob’s subjective, jumbled recreated memories — which at one point find his mom recast as a physician, and introduces Paige to him in the doctor’s office, which is different from the reality we’ve seen. For a film that otherwise pivots on the offscreen spaces around a couple distinct, concrete scenes — albeit ones glimpsed from two different points-of-view — these bits are quite intriguing, a wily X-factor in how any given audience member might ultimately interpret Janice’s relationship with her son, and Paige’s accusation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Along the Tracks/Kachi Films, unrated, 97 minutes)

A Los Angeles-set indie flick which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, The Comedian at the Friday offers up an almost serially listless look at an interesting and creative occupation. Instead of getting caught up in the vicarious or behind-the-curtain thrill of even a fringe comedian’s quirky, atypical lifestyle, an audience watching it is much more likely to go through and ultimately bog down in the first half of the seven stages of grief — denial, pain, anger, bargaining, depression, etcetera — than enjoy any sort of fulfilling entertainment, let alone cathartic uplift. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Comedian at the Friday LLC, unrated, 92 minutes)

Based on the British television series of the same name, director Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip finds Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon again playing loose, bickering versions of themselves, uneasy partners on a restaurant-tasting road trip across the British countryside. After some contretemps with his girlfriend, Coogan is left without a partner for his weeklong foodie vacation, so he begrudgingly invites his actor pal Brydon. They then proceed to preen for attention, and spar in competitive, passive-aggressive fashion.

Largely improvised, The Trip is an example of something that probably works a lot better in its short-form incarnation, as an exploration of the cresting nature of comedic riffing. There are moments of pure, unadulterated delight here, in Coogan and Brydon’s arguments over Michael Sheen, or the latter’s hilarious impression of Michael Caine, even modulated to take aging into account. Other impersonations, like the guys’ dueling James Bonds or Woody Allens, are also funny. But the whole is far less than the sum of its parts, and the framework upon which it hangs — which purports to also tangentially assay the insecurity of actors — creaks under the weight of injudicious oversight by Winterbottom and editor Mags Arnold, who overindulge their stars. Like almost any journey, there are a few interesting sights along the way, but this Trip is too long and winding — a scenic route that becomes tedious. (IFC Films, PG-13, 107 minutes)

One need not be a horse enthusiast to appreciate Cindy Meehl‘s richly textured Buck, a profound and moving portrait of channeling misfortune into something positive, and far and away one of the best documentaries of 2011.

Horses are majestic creatures, but known to have their own personalities, which often leads to training practices predicated on harsh punishments. Soft-spoken, middle-aged Buck Brannaman (above), who travels the country more than eight months a year giving clinics to horse owners, preaches compassion and respect, and in doing so underscores how the animal-human relationship is in many ways a metaphor for the challenges of self-betterment, and life itself.

Part of the inspiration for both Robert Redford’s
1998 film The Horse Whisperer, as well as the novel upon which it is based, the
quietly charismatic Brannaman is an endlessly engaging and paradoxical figure — a figure who shuns the sort of attention he naturally draws forth. The delicate illumination of his incredible gift and way with horses is fascinating in and of itself, but Meehl shades her movie with plenty of Brannaman’s personal story, which includes the death of his birth mother and a terribly abusive early childhood. The love of his incredible foster parents, including the wry aphorisms of his mother Shirley (“Blessed are the flexible, for they don’t get bent out of shape”), seem to have penetrated a protective veneer all the way to Brannaman’s core, and serve as a powerful example of the roles that adult care, choice and focus play in overcoming fundamental disadvantages. The feelings Buck elicits linger with one long after viewing. It’s a deeply humanistic film, rendered with grace, compassion and an unfussy aptitude. For an interview with Meehl, click here. (Sundance Select, unrated, 88 minutes)

A lot of Hollywood romantic comedies unfold in worlds that are virtually unrecognizable from the real one, where couples meet in strange fashion and relationships often overlap in messy ways. Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s engaging The Pill, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is thankfully not one of those efforts.

The movie centers around Fred (Noah Bean, Rose Byrne’s murdered fiancé on Damages), a New Yorker who hooks up with the free-spirited Mindy (Rachel Boston, above right), has pleasantly drunken but unfortunately unprotected sex, wakes up, and then spends a madcap day trying to avoid his girlfriend Nelly (Anna Chlumsky) and stick to his one-night stand, in order to make sure she takes the two-installment morning-after pill that will help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Claiming first that she “knows her body,” and later that the birth control pill is against her religious beliefs (“the one with the Pope”), Mindy is a grab-bag of resistance and whirling dervish energy, keeping Fred on his heels and making his quest mainly a furtive one, under the guise of striking up a more serious relationship. Dragged to a family party, Fred gets to meet Mindy’s parents (Jean Brassard and Lue McWilliams), as well as her engaged younger sister Rose (Gossip Girl‘s Dreama Walker), and ex-boyfriend Jim (Al Thompson). Slowly, Fred finds himself more attracted to Mindy in unexpected ways, complicating his problematic and possibly flickering relationship with Nelly.

The Pill‘s compressed timeline, and its conflict with New York City’s geographical realities, offers some opportunity for pin-prick critical deflation, but there’s a pleasant, forward-leaning energy to the entire film that mitigates this. This isn’t gritty and wildly insightful, or reinventing the wheel, but Khoury is honest about the varied and jumbled emotions of his characters, and lets them make/have made some dubious choices without judging them or bending over backwards to try to explain and justify everything. The Pill is reflective of the realities of the twenty- and even early-thirtysomething dating scene, in which people mean well but often find their attempts at monogamy tested in unexpected ways. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Shoot First Entertainment, unrated, 83 minutes)

An achingly sincere (and achingly familiar), Seattle-set drama of parental bereavement and relationship drift, writer-director Joseph Mitacek’s Morning, which just screened as part of the recently concluded 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is proof that there’s quiet, to-scale reward in plenty of indie cinema, if predominantly for those who don’t mind its gaping, laid-track similarity to so much heartstring-tugging Hollywood studio product.

Morning centers around Michael (Andrew Ramaglia) and Sarah Hade (Emily Cline), a married couple with a two-year-old son, and all of the typical sorts of challenges that come with trying to juggle both home and work. Sarah is going back to school and closing in on a degree, while Michael works on a fishing crew that’s seen better days. His stresses inform a certain boozy detachment and isolation, which in turn further calcifies Sarah’s resentments. Things take a turn for the tragic when Michael falls asleep while babysitting one evening, and their son drowns. Sarah, while understandably grief-stricken, is also additionally racked with a complementary sense of guilt since she stayed out for a drink that night with an old college boyfriend, Alan (Ryan Cooper). In this grey aftermath, the couple struggles with how, and whether, to say together.

Bluntly, Morning is the sort of film that could carve out a certain niche in the commercial marketplace if it had big stars or recognizable faces attached, but as rendered stands virtually no chance of doing so. There’s a legitimately melancholic soul to the movie that holds one’s attention in they’re feeling more or less sympathetic going in. And Ramaglia and particularly Cline offer up game performances. But, beat by beat, almost all of Morning’s arguments and scenes of dramatic intensity feel nipped from some well-worn screenwriter’s playbook of heightened stakes rather than flowing honestly from the characters.

Additionally, Mitacek handles these and other dramatic turns — including the movie’s big battle-to-save-their-drowned-son sequence — so artlessly that the contrivance of each bit is highlighted instead of being smoothly under-stitched. Rather than try to underplay things and get at the root of Michael and Sarah’s personal devastations, and how they overlap but are also different, Mitacek instead repeatedly comes up with ways to foist and inject puffed-up drama into the proceedings — grabs at audience attention that come across as needlessly showy. Loss and terrible pain visits all of us at certain times in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that all movies that try to merely hold up a mirror to that loss are created equal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (St. Andrews Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

When a film’s press notes or marketing efforts trumpet it as a “metaphysical thriller,” one knows they’re likely in for a bunch of art-school/Psych 101 posturing (read: horseshit) or something nervy, intellectual and oddly appealing, and director Eric Atlan’s arresting French import Mortem is maybe five percent the former but overwhelmingly the latter.

An in-competition title at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, where it just enjoyed its U.S. premiere, this engaging and strikingly photographed bauble centers on a woman, Jena (Daria Panchenko), who is in an accident and finds herself stuck in a strange motel room, where she becomes locked in a sort of existential game of cat-and-mouse with her soul (Russian-born model Diana Rudychenko). Jena’s one-time and lasting love, Aken (Stany Coppet), also pops up, but for the longest time he is neither able to see Jena’s soul nor help her find passage out of this confinement. As Jena pleads for another chance with Aken, her soul teases her with revelations about his other romantic liaisons, puts a few hot and heavy moves on Jena herself, and eventually dictates to her that her fortune be decided by a deck of cards.

Mortem is kind of desperately French or European in the best sense of that phrase — unabashedly arty and leaning toward the pretentious (“I came out of you,” says Jena’s soul, “and now I exist!”), additionally characterized by an acting style that toes the line between formalized and high emotion. After a brief period of adjustment, the absolute certitude with the film it is rendered and the technical skill and precision with which it is captured, however, make for an fascinating cinematic experience. Atlan, who has a background as a painter, works as his own cinematographer, and the rich, redone black-and-white CinemaScope frames of Mortem give it a sumptuous look that translates in heady, involving fashion into deeper feeling.

Thematically, we’re firmly in Ingmar Bergman territory here, as perhaps refracted through the lens of an Eraserhead-era David Lynch. Fear of death is the big subject, but all of the big life questions — as well as chiefly the friction between heart and head, desire and intellect — inform the sense of generalized anxiety that course through the movie. There’s an erotic, sapphic charge to the scenes in which Jena’s soul puts the moves on her, with Jena alternately succumbing to and recoiling from their abortive love-making. If some of its verbal parrying doesn’t quite match this level of response, resulting in a few scenes of re-tilled emotional ground, Mortem still locates abundant reservoirs of feeling untapped by many far more narratively forthright pictures. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Artistic Finances/New Distributors Association, unrated, 94 minutes)

Foreign cinema conjures up a collection of very specific stereotypes, even (perhaps especially) for seasoned film fans. After all, myriad cultural dictates play a huge role in not only what types of movies get made internationally, but which are lauded and/or positioned in a fashion to then penetrate the American cinematic market. Viva Riva!, a flamboyant and sprawling crime picture whose style and plotting recollects movies like City of God and (to a lesser extent) Shottas, is a foreign film that smashes some of these preconceptions of what an African movie is, can or should be.

Plot-wise, Viva Riva! is fairly simple and straightforward, charting the return of native son and small-time hood Riva (Patsha Pay Mukuna, exuding a raw charisma) to Kinshasa, Congo, where he turns a quick score by stealing truckloads of precious, in-demand fuel from his Angolan crime boss, Cesar (Hoji Fortuna). Out to spread some of that cheddar and have a good time at the city’s bars and strip clubs, Riva quickly goes Charlie Brown — which, in this case, is to say he falls under the sway of a red-haired girl, Nora (Manie Malone, above). Problem is, Nora is spoken for, the girlfriend of quasi-ineffectual local criminal kingpin Azor (Diplome Amekindra), a descendent of Congolese kings who keeps his woman under his thumb.

Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga — whose film justifiably scored six African Movie Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and two Supporting Actor prizes — has a confidence that comes through in virtually every pore of Viva Riva!. His film is marked by a sexual frankness certainly at odds with much of African cinema, but just as striking if not more so is the unfussy, matter-of-fact candor with which the filmmaker treats the insidious reality of sociopolitical corruption in his country, as well as the juxtaposition of impoverished shantytowns with bustling, pulsating nightclubs. Tonally, there’s a certain dispassionate detachment that serves this material surprisingly well, abetted by a top-to-bottom technical polish, including some gorgeous cinematography. For the full, original review, from Shockya, click here. (Music Box Films, R, 96 minutes)