No offense intended, seriously, but Bradley Cooper is just a great jerk. In his best films (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers), he plays guys defined by a rakish self-centeredness and/or insincerity, and he does so with a correlative breezy composure that makes it look all too easy. With his pin-up looks (that tan! that smirk!) and ineffable lack of gradation, he’s a performer who elicits from other guys almost equally divided feelings of idealized affinity and jealous dislike.

And that’s fine, really, because all of that actually makes him a solid fit for the new thriller Limitless, in which Cooper plays Eddie Mora, a burned-out, would-be novelist who gets slipped NZT, a designer pharmaceutical which unlocks the allegedly unused portions of his brain and turns him into an indefatigable, self-bettering genius. With an awakened appetite for science, the arts and broader knowledge in general, Eddie picks up foreign languages and musical instruments in 24 hours, and turns several thousand dollars into $2.3 million in under two weeks as a day trader. The good times roll — at least for a while, until Eddie gets cut off from his drug supply and some nasty side effects pop up, threatening his relationship with his new energy baron mentor, Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Paranoia, blackmail and worse naturally ensue.

A story like this pretty much lives or dies on its cocksure, inner biorhythms, and director Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin, The Illusionist) makes sure Limitless doesn’t get too bogged down in wonky, scientific specifics. Cooper isn’t necessarily wildly convincing as the sad-sack, stringy-haired loser in Eddie’s first incarnation, but once the movie gets past its set-up and gathers a considerable downhill momentum — partially achieved by putting Eddie in physical harm’s way, pursued by an oafish underworld type who gets turned onto the same drug — things become infinitely more intriguing.

Since it’s based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn (a more abstruse title, no doubt), the movie has a fair amount of background detail, only some of which is gracefully integrated. As shoehorned within the parameters of a more conventional, big screen thriller narrative, Limitless‘ preoccupation with reintroducing Eddie’s estranged girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), into the shenanigans is fairly misplaced — a diversion from what could be a much tauter, madcap character study. Despite both their shared past and her connection to Eddie’s drug source, Lindy doesn’t feel inherently wrapped up in his plight, but rather a tacked-on, “humanizing” sop for female audience members.

Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights captured the attention and imaginations of would-be auteurs, and probably even before, the world of pornography has held a special hold on a certain subsection of aspirant directors, who’ve populated their movies with strippers and porn stars, looking to beguile and titillate open-minded film audiences before the first flickering frame of their film has even appeared on screen. Such subject matter can sometimes be a lazy choice, indicative of a filmmaker thinking the heavy lift of audience investment lies more in the setting alone than any particular combination of characters and story. All of which brings us to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a comedy which tells the tale of an adult starlet who’s gotten out of the industry and turned to teaching an annex learning class on bedroom prowess, the better to fund her dreams of starting her new life as a single mother.



Carla Gugino stars as the title character, which goes a long way toward making the film engaging. Early on, she meets a distraught flight attendant, Cora (Marley Shelton), who approaches her with a proposition: in exchange for the purloined lyric sheets to the last album of Elektra’s recently deceased rock star lover, Cora wants Elektra to seduce her fiance, in order to “cancel out” her own cheating. Elektra reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of screwed-up events and mistaken identities involving a private investigator, Dellwood Butterworth (Timothy Olyphant), and a passel of other largely fringe-dwelling types.

While such a plot condensation makes Elektra Luxx sound like a madcap farce, in truth it’s a much more character-oriented comedy, with a porn writer, Burt Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who loquaciously waxes nostalgic about Elektra’s career in his basement web-cam shows, even as he angrily discourages his younger sister Olive (Amy Rosoff) from doing a solo video, and uncomfortably deals with the advances of local checkout girl Trixie (Malin Akerman), who delivers a series of pictures of herself to him. What do these characters, or a couple others, really have to do with Elektra’s plight? Not much, although some are interwoven, here and there. Mainly, though, they’re used to provide a sort of tableau backdrop to the film, rendering it a sort of pornland Short Cuts.

The films and jumbled, referential style of Quentin Tarantino bear mentioning, too, since Gutierrez also seeds his movie with spun-off asides and backstories, not unlike Pulp Fiction. The chief problem is that these bits are not smoothly integrated into the final product, or made to have forward-reaching consequences. The Kill Bill films, of course, used the pregnancy of Uma Thurman’s character as the powder to spark a wild revenge ride, but Gutierrez here seems to have only loosely integrated the heady wonder of her condition — and the loss of her lover — into the proceedings. He gives us neither enough of Elektra’s backstory and life as a porn star for the pregnancy to stand in stark contrast as a life-changing event, nor evidences this richly in a major shift in her behavior, or sudden rush of manifested anxiety.

At its core, Elektra Luxx feels like it was designed around the conceit of an on-the-mend porn star, with a couple other characters and scenes thrown in. Things just kind of happen, and don’t always have lasting consequences. These moments can sometimes be fun (Adrianne Palicki and Emmanuelle Chriqui have a blast as Holly and Bambi, a pair of vacationing adult starlets, one of whose feelings give way to something unexpected), but just as often tedious, like a wayward improv sketch.

The strength of the movie is the game ensemble cast, who uniformly give lively, engaging performances — a testament to Gutierrez’s touch with actors, certainly. But when its endgame ropes in a novelist, Rebecca Lindbrook (Kathleen Quinlan), who wants to get into business with Elektra, and a book-signing that brings several characters together and ends with frantic sprint to a hospital, well… it all feels like a telenovela run amok. And no, not necessarily in a good way. For more information, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)

Gender-based clichés of fear get trotted out in The Resident, a goosing stalker thriller starring Hilary Swank that adds nothing new to the single-woman-in-peril subgenre. Swank by and large adequately conveys the juggled dual demands of steely, modern-day occupational professionalism and feminine vulnerability that such a genre exercise requires, but the script lacks any believable motivations, and additionally abandons too quickly any flirtation with significant misdirection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)

A spare, visually foreboding and well acted adaptation of one the mainstays of high school reading lists, the latest version of Jane Eyre nonetheless struggles to consistently or cathartically dramatically connect, and comes across as a well put together but effectively inessential addition to the considerable canon of works derived from Charlotte Brontë’s celebrated novel of 19th century conflicted English romance. The invested presence of rising stars Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, however, guarantee the movie a solid arthouse run with much additional holdover ancillary value, as their respective profiles continue to rise in the coming years. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 118 minutes)

A thinly imagined, stunted-guy, mumblecore-type love story starring Scream‘s Matthew Lillard, Spooner fritters away some charming low-budget production design and around-the-edges detail in service of a meandering narrative that doesn’t impart any meaningful lessons or engaging, smartly articulated revelations about the deeply held ambivalence of modern-day twentysomethings, for whom physical adulthood has brought no particular direction or clarity.

Lillard stars as the hapless title character, Herman Spooner, an introverted man-child and Monrovia, Calif., used car salesman who still lives at home with his mom (Kate Burton) and dad (Christopher McDonald). Seeking to shake their son from his routine, Herman’s parents set as a deadline his impending 30th birthday to finally get a place of his own. To top it off, Herman’s jerky boss (Shea Whigham) is putting pressure on him to up his poor sales numbers or face the chopping block.

Against this backdrop of looming doom, Herman happens upon Rose (Nora Zehetner), a girl whose car has broken down nearby. Forgoing all other priorities and commitments, Herman — an awkward wooer, to be sure — sets about trying to win Rose’s
heart, but by lying about his interests and station in life. To make matters worse, Rose breaks the news that she’s about
to leave for the Philippines, wrecking the seemingly one good thing in Herman’s life before it can even really get started.

If the word “pixie” didn’t exist, it would basically have to be created for Zehetner, who was delightful in the wicked, canted Brick, and here again exudes a guileless, kewpie doll prettiness that could find her easily cast as Audrey Tatou’s younger sister. Lillard, meanwhile, dials way back, and down, on his voluble swagger and charisma, showing intriguing flashes of beaten down vulnerability that belie his large, lanky frame. The beguiling chemistry between the pair is easily the film’s strongest selling point, though it sadly only arrives in fitful flashes.

The problem is that, kind of like the recent (but much more terrible) Waiting For Forever,
Spooner unfolds in an alternate, fantasy reality where girls swoon over de-masculinized awkwardness, and its makers additionally
assume this is will automatically tickle an audience pink. As directed by Drake Doremus — from a story by he and Lindsay Stidham, and a screenplay by Stidham — the movie never locates a convincing place of motivation for what is supposed to be Rose’s correlative ennui and emotional dislocation. Consequently, she comes across as two-dimensional, existing only in orbit and service to Herman’s narrative arc.

As written, she’s seemingly an idiot, too, though Zehetner admirably refuses to yield to this interpretation. When Herman shows Rose a picture of an apartment torn out of a magazine, and tells her it’s his place, she doesn’t blink an eye; later, he “flirts” by saying things like, “I could palm your head,” and, after she compliments his man-cave-type outdoor hangout, “I’ll build you [your own] fort, and put the plans in PDF format.” Rather than be creeped out by such disconnected, vaguely sociopathic chatter, Rose instead just accepts it blindly, at face value, with no comment or inkling that it might be unusual. Doremus and Stidham compound this mistake by having her acquiesce from the first moment of the pair’s meeting; Rose’s eyes always say yes to Herman, never no, so Spooner is devoid of much material drama, or even the quasi-emotional payoff of a sex scene, which would render Herman a more awakened adult character.

There’s a certain low, pulsing heartache in Herman’s swallowed, miserable loneliness, and how it’s warped his sociability, and the gangly Lillard actually has the chops to play something this depressive and inwardly directed. But neither the film’s writing nor its direction trust him enough to do so, and the nervous result is a blatantly false and pointless affair — a character-study dramedy that spends so much time trying to inject flickering positivity into the proceedings that it destroys any sincere chance at audience empathy with its lead character. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Moving Pictures, R, 83 minutes)

The crushing ambivalence of young adulthood gets blended together to moderately winning effect with a colorful 1980s setting and a conventional tale of romantic pining set against the backdrop of a single evening of partying in Take Me Home Tonight, an energetic and smartly cast comedy. At times its outlandishness toes the line between the ribald and contrived, but lively interplay and a great, evocative soundtrack more or less consistently impose a mood of effervescent, if slight, amusement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, R, 97 minutes)

Enviro-friendly and energy-overhaul advocacy documentaries are almost numerous enough to comprise their own labeled video store sub-genre these days, and Carbon Nation, opening at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles this week, slots comfortably and unfusssily into this grouping. While thought-provoking on a macro level in some of its interviews, sloppy construction and focus makes for a sludgy viewing experience.

Directed by Peter Byck, the film bills itself as an optimistic, solutions-based, non-partisan nonfiction film, which is true but only half the story. In its aim to be so inclusive and positive-minded, the movie doesn’t put moneyed interests of the status quo in its cross-hairs, or much acknowledge the push-back against climate change/energy advancement legislation or innovation. As such, it comes across as kind of toothless, and existing in a vacuum.

It’s also terribly unfocused. In its own roundabout way, by cheerfully playing up American business ingenuity, Carbon
Nation makes a tripartite case for bold energy innovation, without clamorously depressing the usual keys of moral suasion — it’s good business and will make lots of money; it emboldens national and
energy security; and it improves individual and community health as well as the environment, the movie tells us. The problem is that, as the movie pinballs from solar energy advances to algae studies to stories of electric cars, with little in the way of connective tissue, it fails to use these assertions as a touchstone, and tie them to each topic or field of research.

An eclectic slate of interviewees includes Virgin Group CEO Richard Branson, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, green jobs innovator Van Jones, Earth Day founder Denis Hayes and Bernie Karl, a geothermal
pioneer from Alaska. Most interesting might be Cliff Etheredge, a one-armed West Texas
cotton farmer and entrepreneur pioneering the use of small
landowner wind collectives. But the manner in which Byck sometimes introduces/tags these sources onscreen (former CIA director James Woolsey is revealed to be… a South Park fan?), comes across as curious, an overreaching stab at levity when one isn’t warranted.

Sometimes its facts and estimations are arresting (one billion gallons of fuel per year could be saved, for instance, merely if long-haul truckers were able to achieve utility-level power storage, and turn off their idling trucks while sleeping), but overall Carbon Nation doesn’t pivot its way past being anything more than a scrapbook collection of human-interest stories one might see as the last segment on the network evening news. It’s temperate, rah-rah cheerleading, when the world outside of its carefully manicured parameters feels like it’s calling out for something a bit more. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Clayway Media, unrated, 82 minutes)

An adaptation of the first of a proposed six-book series about an extraterrestrial prodigy hiding out on Earth from would-be rival alien killers, I Am Number Four is a technically polished but rather unexceptional thriller that never much sets its sights beyond satisfying the lowest-common-denominator expectations of its target teen demographic. Broken down to its component parts, it’s difficult to not look a bit cynically upon the film, since it feels a bit like an emo-action valentine mash-up of carefully cross-tabbed teen movie trends. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney/DreamWorks, PG-13, 109 minutes)

The third film in Martin Lawrence’s comedy series about a FBI agent who finds himself forced undercover as a tubby matriarch, Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a wearyingly unamusing affair. Devoid of ideas not reflected in its title, or even much in the way of sustained comedic effort, the movie is a meandering misfire that strangely somewhat skimps on laughs built around its guys-in-drag conceit in favor of wildly misguided stabs at adolescent love and familial bonding. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 107 minutes)

Vidal Sassoon: The Movie is a quite fawning but nonetheless solidly engaging look at the iconic, same-named stylist, which benefits chiefly from its 83-year-old subject’s articulate and extremely personable nature. The movie doesn’t fully crack the nut of Sassoon’s ambition or connect it to his fractured youth, but eventually makes a fairly convincing argument that his eschewing of convention and groundbreaking “five-point” cut, associated with the mod revolution of the 1960s, helped revolutionize hair care, freeing women from both the cost and commitment of weekly appointments. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Phase 4, unrated, 93 minutes)

The framework for a potentially whipsmart, spitfire modern comedy of the sexes gets utterly wasted in Just Go With It, a bloated, mind-numbingly unfunny affair that reeks of improvisation run amok. The possible intriguing chemistry of stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston is willfully undercut, and when, midway through, a plot twist takes the story to Hawaii, the entire film morphs into nothing more than one big corporate-funded travelogue spot for its travel, hotel and luxury sponsors. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 117 minutes)

A poorly directed and even more inadequately imagined exercise in genre calisthenics, The Roommate wanly goes through the motions of the psychological thriller playbook, but never manages to raise an eyebrow, let alone a pulse. The movie lacks narrative imagination throughout, and Danish-born director Christian E. Christiansen, in his American debut, fails to imprint any sense of escalating doom or dark consequence onto the story. Myriad story details ring untrue, and even the film’s lighting and visual scheme are patently false. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 91 minutes)

When not crafting Hollywood studio blockbusters (and sometimes even when doing so, as with The Abyss and of course Titanic), James Cameron has translated a lifelong passion for underwater exploration into any number of special documentaries and side projects, and Sanctum — executive produced by the Oscar-winning filmmaker, and deploying some of the same 3-D technology used in Avatar — is his latest filmmaking assist to the nature-discovery realm, though this time it’s the sub-speciality of spelunking upon which he throws a spotlight.

Shot on location off the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, and based on true events, the film follows a team of underwater cave divers during a treacherous expedition deep inside the largest and least accessible cave system on the planet. His work funded by adventurist multimillionaire businessman Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd, above right), master diver Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) oversees a team that’s been exploring the Esa Ala Caves in Papua New Guinea for over a month. When both an unexpected tragedy down below and a “topside” storm and its resultant flash flood force a dramatic change in their exit plans, Frank’s team, including his 17-year-old son Josh (Rhys Wakefield), are forced to navigate an underwater labyrinth and search for an
unknown escape route to the sea in an effort to make it out alive.

The movie’s script, by John Garvin and Andrew Wight, trades largely in stock types,
but director Alister Grierson nicely juggles the requirements of confined space adventure with the movie’s somewhat more pedestrian human drama. It’s not ever really convincingly
communicated why Sanctum has to necessarily be shot in 3-D (and thus
come bundled with the accompanying uptick in ticket price), but the nature of its setting is at least ably delineated, and the stakes clear, and engaging.

There’s also a sort of charm to the brutally streamlined candor of the character of Frank; as the group starts to make their way through a tight space, he assigns the rear to the least experienced of the bunch, Carl’s wife, noting bluntly that if she starts to panic and gets stuck, anyone behind her is dead. Roxburgh, for his part, is particularly solid; perhaps best known Stateside for his turn as the mustachioed villain helping to keep apart Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge, he here gives a gruff but charismatic performance, and he and Wakefield evince a believably frayed father-son rapport — one of mutual respect but near perpetual exasperation.

Sanctum doesn’t prove itself radical or revelatory, either narratively or from the vantage point of technological innovation, but it does hold one’s attention, and make an audience care about the shared plight of its characters. Even if, perhaps, the lesson they take away is but this: “Damn, I’m never going that far underground.” (Universal, PG-13, 103 minutes)

A nice sense of comedic background detail and the winning chemistry of stars Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher power No Strings Attached, a comedy in which two young adults test a pact to avoid any deeper feelings while enjoying each other’s company purely for sex. Bantamweight but fun throughout, the movie connects consistently, both on personality and scene-to-scene joke-writing. If there’s a complaint, it’s that Kutcher’s character seems game for a relationship so quickly, and so the movie misses a chance to dig into and as deeply explore the dance of unstated feelings in such an agreement. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 107 minutes)

The chief problem with The Dilemma, directed by Ron Howard, is
that it’s a comedy built upon an inherently false premise, and
in its heart of hearts it knows this, so it expends all sorts of energy
trying to fan smoke and throw sand in the eyes of viewers, obscuring
this fact for the sake of “zaniness.”

The story centers around Ronny Valentine (Vince Vaughn) and his pal and business partner Nick Brannen (Kevin James), who since college have been best friends. Working up a design for an electric vehicle that retains the bowel-shaking engine throttle noises of an old-school muscle car, the guys are close to landing an important sponsorship and funding deal that would help launch their company into the stratosphere and nail down secure futures for Nick and his wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder), as well as Ronny and his girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Connelly).

It’s during this stress-filled time, however, that Ronny’s world is turned upside down when he inadvertently sees Geneva making out with another man, Zip (Channing Tatum), and makes it his mission to get answers. Launching into a rather hapless amateur investigation, Ronny learns that Nick has a few secrets of his own. He also separately confronts Geneva and her lover, but all his strange behavior arouses suspicions in Beth, and others, that Ronny, an inveterate gambler, has lapsed back into his addiction.

Howard trades mostly in a curiously flattened affect, and for the most part the film’s comedy is rather listless, except when Queen Latifah shows up, as an auto business middle-management type, and keeps trying to awkwardly inject some forceful personality into the proceedings. The screenplay, by Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) consistently and wearyingly contorts itself to avoid and forestall the reality of “guy code” — that any male worthy of being considered a real and true friend wouldn’t fret over telling his best pal if he saw his friend’s woman stepping out on him. It does this by having Ronny at first rationalize that it’s not a good time, since Nick is very stressed, and then wade into a strange game of blackmail, wherein Geneva insists she’ll reveal a shared secret from their past if Ronny deigns to break the news to her husband. All this is bullshit, quite frankly, and meandering, not very engaging or funny bullshit at that.

Vaughn invests his characteristic full-bodied energy into the proceedings, and through sheer force of will makes some moments not so painful; he’s a natural laugh machine. But The Dilemma is much more interesting when it’s a bit darker, and skeevy. The idea of Ronny giving a wildly inappropriate celebratory toast at Beth’s parents’ 40th wedding anniversary — as a not-so-veiled threat to Geneva to come clean — is gripping in a certain twisted way, but the film is so invested in more conventionally oriented “hijinks” that it misses its true calling: as a pitch-black comedy that doesn’t pander for mainstream laughs. (Universal, PG-13, 112 minutes)

A film of pleasantly half-sketched domestic noodling, writer-director Richard Levine’s pedestrian drama Every Day fails to satisfyingly connect not so much because of what it bungles in execution as what it just never really tries to do — namely bring substantive conflict to the fore. Lacking in any major catharsis, the film perhaps angles to be chiefly a snapshot of the accumulated burdens of life’s quotidian responsibilities, but instead merely comes across as inconsequential. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Image Entertainment, R, 93 minutes)

Jack Black cycles almost entirely through his bag of lively, bug-eyed performer’s tricks in Gulliver’s Travels, a 3-D family comedy rendering of Jonathan Swift’s 18th century satire that delivers miniaturized laughs. Alternately yawningly obvious and under-sketched, the movie never settles on a consistent tone, or takes full comedic advantage of its big-man-in-a-small-land opportunity for steady physical comedy. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 87 minutes)

Based on a Russian graphic novel of the same name by Vladimir
Nesterenko, Alien Girl exudes a wearying recombinant raison d’être. (Even its title, strangely enough, is a reference to Ridley Scott’s classic thriller,
shorthand for the dangerous, vixen-ish woman at its center.) It’s as if all the parts of a couple dozen American crime thrillers (and maybe some early Luc Besson as well) were distilled through a heavy sociocultural filter, reconstituted, and then aped in middling fashion.

The story unfolds in the Ukraine, amidst a violent clash between two rival gangs. Both have a vested interest in a woman named Angela (Natalia Romanycheva), the sister of a gang member who may or may not be about to cut a deal with the police. In order to exert influence over him before he testifies, his boss dispatches a quartet of his best hit men, who set off on a trip to Prague to find Angela and bring her back to the Ukraine. What starts off as a war between rival gang members and all those standing in their way soon becomes a game of manipulation, seduction and betrayal in which Angela cannily plays each member off against one other.

The film, unrated but certainly comparable to a “R,” exudes a certain crassness and openly revealed drama almost from that start (its thugs have names like Booger, Kid and Whiz). In his feature debut, director Anton Bormatov seems to be doing little more than paying eager homage to all sorts of C-grade American mafioso and underworld tales. Parts of the story hint at some sort of deeper or more interesting social commentary (the hit men stand out as sore-thumb cultural invaders in Prague, and detest the city), but the narrative seems arrested in inchoate form, and more invested in shouting and gun-waving than anything else. The eventual deeper revelations of Angela’s connection to the crime boss, and why she ran, don’t hold much emotional sway, unfortunately; this Alien doesn’t speak a universal language. (Paladin, unrated, 100 minutes)

A hyper-slick sequel to the heady 1982 man-versus-machine action-adventure Tron — which is remembered among a certain generational subset more for its ideas, images and namesake videogame than any huge commercial success or critical embrace at the time of its release — Tron: Legacy represents a souped-up chassis built around an engine that doesn’t
start. Imaginative production design, a great score from Daft Punk, the presence of Olivia Wilde and piecemeal excitement cannot
boost the film’s level of engagement above and beyond anything more than
superficial throwaway entertainment. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 125 minutes)

A Sundance 2009 entry, You Won’t Miss Me is a quasi-experimental travelogue through twentysomething malaise, opening this week in New York and just before Christmas in Los Angeles, to be followed by a (limited, one presumes) big-city national roll-out. Starring Stella Schnabel, the impressionable daughter of talented filmmaker father Julian, the film exudes a woozy hold — in equal measure because of and despite its wounded aimlessness — that a lot of its like-minded indie brethren fail to convincingly emanate.

Co-written by Ry Russo-Young (Orphans) and Schnabel, the movie centers on Shelly Brown, a 23-year-old urbanite who cycles through a series of unhappy hook-ups; takes a trip to Atlantic City with a friend that ends in a sniping fallout; and hits the acting audition circuit, in less than enthused fashion. Interspersed with this loose narrative are flippant response segments from a presumed therapy session, along with short, time-nonspecific montages depicting Shelly in life and love.

Schnabel has the ability to project a simultaneous vulnerability and masked cattiness, and her turn is more than one without vanity — it is without care or regard for audience perception one way or another. With neither affect nor guile, she casually owns scenes and anchors the movie, an utterly natural screen presence. Watching her performance, one is reminded of Marlon Brando’s line from The Wild One, when asked what he was rebelling against: “Whaddya got?” Shelly is neither to the manor born nor outwardly beset with more conventionally prescribed traumas. She is a character of recondite desire and inwardly reflected nervous energy, and so her quiet unhappiness and small examples of acting out elicit a sort of puzzlebox pleasure in trying to unravel and figure out her larger issues.

Detractors will hammer the proper narrative of You Won’t Miss Me (not entirely without justification) for some of its mumblecore ramblings, but to dismiss it out of hand in this regard is to ignore the manner in which the film’s kaleidoscopic style — inclusive of various formats, and looks — smartly dovetails with its protagonist’s flitting psyche. The movie may not arrive at a comfortable end point so much as finish, but Russo-Young proves herself to be a shrewdly perceptive chronicler of the damages young people often self-inflict despite better judgments, and her engagingly unassertive and evocative sophomore feature recalls the work of an early John Cassavettes, marking her as a filmmaker to watch. (Factory 25/Meese Productions, unrated, 81 minutes)

A visually rich but lumbering, narratively confused genre hybrid, The Warrior’s Way feels like a wildly missed opportunity for East-meets-West action mayhem. Lackluster pacing and ill-defined dramatic stakes make this movie — about a reticent swordsman (Jang Dong-Gun) who absconds with a baby and
takes up residence in a dusty American town full of transplanted circus
freaks, including Kate Bosworth and Geoffrey Rush — a tough sell for even its target audience. In his feature debut, writer-director Sngmoo Lee works up a film that, thematically, serves as able homage to its various touchstones, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns among them. But Lee doesn’t seem to know where to take his story. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Relativity Media, R, 100 minutes)

Inspired by one of the more infamous missing person’s cases in recent New York history, All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, angles to be both a character portrait of psychological unease and rot, as well as a true-crime thriller loosely in the vein of Changeling, The Black Dahlia and Hollywoodland. Beset with a series of miscalculated dramatic misfires, it is instead a melodramatic adaptation of a tabloid-style telenews-magazine murder-mystery, wearyingly overstuffed with baroque detail in an effort to prop up its legitimacy.

Director Andrew Jarecki made a splash with the Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans, but in his dramatic feature debut he evinces little comfort for and skill with working with actors, and makes liberal use of tired dramatic markers more commonly associated with time-compressed television, like a whistling tea kettle to signify mounting tension. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Magnolia, R, 101 minutes)

Written, directed by and starring Lena Dunham, and costarring her real-life mother and sister, Tiny Furniture is a loose-limbed and pleasantly idiosyncratic independent film that takes an amusing look at romantic humiliation and twentysomething dawdling, when deep-seated ambivalence is so frequently mistaken for a lack of ambition or intelligence by adults who’ve forgotten the choppy waters of post-adolescence. If Todd Solondz were 25 years younger, and had a beating heart where his contempt for humanity resides, he might make a movie like this.

The story centers on 22-year-old Aura (Dunham), who returns home to the TriBeCa loft of her artist mother (Laurie Simmons) and younger sister Siri (Grace Dunham), with a useless film theory degree and some extremely minor Internet celebrity courtesy of a handful of esoteric YouTube video uploads. Reconnecting with her somewhat scandalous best friend from childhood, Charlotte (Jemina Kirke), Aura takes a dead-end afternoon hostess job. She also strikes up off-kilter relationships with a pair of guys — Jed (Alex Karpovsky), a performance artist and would-be actor/filmmaker in town for some “meetings,” and the mustachioed chef at her workplace, Keith (David Call) — neither of whom seem to be that deeply interested in her.

Unabashedly frumpy, Dunham embraces her lumbering, unadorned physicality to play up the movie’s anti-romantic comedy streak, which hums with a quick-patter energy that rings generationally true — of a certain set speaking everything on their mind even when long-on-the-horizon plans remain frustratingly hazy. Tiny Furniture doesn’t quite completely take flight as an entirely convincing portrait of post-graduate malaise, but it’s fun, and possesses much color and character, powered by the same sort of literate yet laconic characters and banter that Noah Baumbach
has such a fine touch with. And against a backdrop of American indie film that has of late favored tone and mood over more finely honed narrative, it marks Dunham as a fresh new voice and unique multi-hyphenate. (IFC Films, R, 100 minutes)

More a lurching, blue-collar social drama than a conventional boxing
biopic, The Fighter connects fitfully as a story of brotherly bonds and underdog triumph. Engaging performances and a certain overall nervy energy help overcome slapdash plotting in what represents the realization of a longtime passion project for actor-producer Mark Wahlberg. Eschewing much of his signature directorial quirkiness, director David O. Russell, working for the third time with Wahlberg, nonetheless locates a rich and unexpected humor in the material. A compact vessel for the audience’s sympathies, Wahlberg is a good match for the material physically, and evinces a basic levelheaded decency. Christian Bale, meanwhile, should receive strong awards consideration in supporting actor categories. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 116 minutes)

An appropriately commingled sense of classic sentimentality and contemporary, gender-equal romance and adventure meet in Tangled, an engaging updating of the Grimm brothers’ Rapunzel fairytale that represents Walt Disney Studios’ 50th animated feature. Amidst the backdrop of a slate of much more forcibly lively animated fare, this well-rendered throwback underscores the still existent pleasures of traditional storytelling. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 100 minutes)