My musical tastes were and still are fairly catholic, despite having escaped the South with, ahem, a less pronounced and geographically ingrained appreciation for country music than one might suspect. Hip-hop, pop, classic rock, folk, jazz and blues, crooners in the vein of Frank Sinatra, mid-’90s college radio staples like Superchunk, Matthew Sweet and Dillon Fence, even classical music — all found welcome home on mix tapes and CDs in my music collection, long before the days of MP3 players. Still, I for some reason hadn’t heard of the Magnetic Fields — or at the very least they hadn’t purchased a permanent space in my consciousness — when a friend gave me a copy of 69 Love Songs, the group’s three-CD magnum opus, a couple years after its 1999 release.

Quickly, I was snake-bitten by the swooning, ambitious, rangy material — full of mordant humor, literate, character-rooted lyricism and at times unexpectedly chirpy, bouncy arrangements — and I read up on intellectual frontman Stephin Merritt’s talents and background, as well as his assumed dourness. Co-directed by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, the documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields delves further into the veritable modern-day Cole Porter, the man behind the band who has inspired such cultish devotion amongst a small and diverse group, while also remaining virtually anonymous to the public at large.

A writer can certainly appreciate Merritt’s adroitness with sardonic prose (and many do), but his gift with a startling array of musical styles and genres is often overlooked, if only because his deep, melancholy baritone seems to coat almost everything in distancing tones, like a thick layer of bitter honey. Strange Powers purports to get to the bottom of Merritt’s “process” (he claims to write tunes while sitting in gay clubs listening to thumping disco and techno music, which he doesn’t particularly like, for six or eight hours at a time), but it’s hard to always take such revelations seriously when Merritt acknowledges a penchant for exaggeration and falsehood, or says to pianist/manager Claudia Golson at one point while working on a tune, “I’m not sure that’s going to fit with the expressionless Bresson character that I’m doing.”

Likewise, while the movie delves heartily into his relationships with both Golson, who he met during their teenage years, and his hippie mom (Merritt recalls her trying to fix a faulty radiator by rubbing a green banana on it), filmmakers Fix and O’Hara mostly steer clear of why Merritt never particularly got to know his biological father Scott Fagan, an island-influenced pop-rock troubadour. While it may not seem particularly immediately germane to the Magnetic Fields, there is certainly an interesting case to be made for both nature-nurture talent, and Merritt’s compositional songbook serving as a kind of extended response to his childhood.

Mostly, though, even though the creation of 69 Love Songs gets oddly short shrift, Strange Powers is a warm, loving look at a unique talent, and something that fans of the Magnetic Fields and neophytes alike appreciate as a peek behind the creative curtain. A diverse roster of fellow artists like Daniel Handler, Peter Gabriel, Sarah Silverman and Neil Gaiman pop up to
offer their thoughts on Merritt’s work — as do guitarist John Woo and cellist Sam Davol, Fields mates who maintain a respectful but almost strictly working relationship with their band leader — but the heart of the movie is undeniably Merritt’s friendship with Golson, who is in many ways his surrogate caretaker. Strange Powers describes the unique hold of Merritt’s music, but it also showcases how amazing artists can sometimes be sort of bad at life. A tip of the cap, then, to Golson, a warmhearted enabler. (Variance Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

A super-villain awakens to the possibility of the virtues of decency and integrity in Megamind, a slightly manic but dependably enjoyable animated effort that assays the symbiotic nature of good and wickedness. Voluminous joke output and a winning vocal performance by Will Ferrell jointly power this peppy entry, which seems poised somewhere between familiarity and freshness, given its strong narrative similarity to this summer’s Despicable Me. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, PG, 95 minutes)

The contortionist, moralizing thrill-kill theatrics of the Saw series come to a close (momentarily, at least) with Saw 3D, a gory entry that ditches some of the somberness of its predecessors. Yet again, however, the formal, almost episodic narrative adventurousness of its sprawling mythology gets drowned out by flat staging and unimaginative direction. For the full, original review from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 90 minutes)

The feature debut of Belgian co-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and a
movie that, quite understandably, played in heavy rotation and received warm embrace at a number
of festivals earlier this year, Amer is a woozy, deeply eroticized and entirely cinematic fever-dream, a study of entwined fear and desire.

Unfolding in near-wordless fashion, as a mondo stylish and at times brutally direct and elemental study of frayed-nerve terror, the movie assays the warping effects of a twisted childhood on a woman’s relationship with sex and love. Told in three different “movements” that correspond to the
childhood, adolescence and adulthood of its female protagonist (played by three different actresses, including Marie Bos, above), the movie is innately beguiling even when it sags a bit in its middle, compelling you to lean forward and watch, to partake of its stylistic adventurousness.

The title is the French word for “bitter,” but this provocative work is anything but. Instead, it’s lush, dangerous and darkly inviting. Most immediately, Amer is an homage to 1970s Italian giallo horror movies (Dario Argento’s Suspiria comes to mind), though re-imagined as a sort of avant-garde, French rave trance film. But hyperbolic tips of the cap to other filmmakers abound, too, from Chronos-era Guillermo del Toro and the enigmatic, dream-like logic of David Lynch to the creepiness of the aforementioned Argento, Brian De Palma, Mario Bava, and, in the movie’s concluding segment, the stalking, operatic violence of his son, Lamberto Bava.

A stylistically diverse triptych — alternating between striking widescreen compositions, strobe cuts, obstructed frames, discrete montage snapshots and nervy close-ups — Amer also benefits greatly from a smart, exacting sound design and savvy use of emphatic music cues, many lifted from original giallo soundtracks, it turns out. Both metaphorically and quite literally, Cattet and Forzani are interested in the seen versus the unseen, the surface appearance of things and what lingers underneath — and how that informs behavior, elliptically and subconsciously. Amer doesn’t resolve any of this psychological or thematic noodling on a narrative level, but on a purely aesthetic level it surely showcases a strong grip. In Los Angeles, the film plays exclusively at the Laemmle Sunset 5 this week. (Olive Films, R, 90 minutes)

A somewhat buzzy entry at both the South By Southwest and Los Angeles Film Festivals earlier this year, writer-director Gareth Edwards’ spare, guerrilla-style Monsters tries to put a low-fi spin on the science-fiction genre, giving an intimate, ground-account view of a much bigger event, not unlike Cloverfield, Right at Your Door or The Crazies. Despite some engaging production design and budget-level effects work, though, the film bogs down at the midway point due to an inane script, and never really recovers.



Monsters unfolds in a near-future or alternate present day state of distress. It centers on a jaded photojournalist, Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), who finds himself tasked with locating his corporate boss’ daughter, Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able, above), and escorting her to safety, along the edge of a perilous border region infected with extraterrestrial creatures.

In certain ways, the movie feels like a little brother or youngercousin of Neill Blomkamp’s much more organized and disciplined (and, tobe fair, bigger budgeted) District 9, where crash-landed alien creatures are confined to a cordoned off sector while the world around them goes on doing its thing. The backstory here, though (a space probe launched a half dozen years earlier to collect extraterrestrial samples crashed uponre-entry over Central America, spawning aggressive new life forms), is neither particularly clearly delineated or compellingly interwoven into the narrative. So we’ve got a wasteland road trip with a pair of mismatched non-lovers and some Moonlighting-lite bickering. Does that hold up for an hour and a half? No, not really.

The behind-the-scenes story earns the movie a hearty dose of respect and admiration. Shot with just a five person crew and a cast of essentially two, Edwards and his creative team traveled through Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, finding andutilizing their locations and supporting actors as they went. The result is loose-limbed, and unfolds against a backdrop that isn’t overly processed.

Edwards’ technical proficiencies are obvious and quite real (in addition to writing and directing, he also takes cinematographer, production designer and visual effects supervisor credits), but do not extend to the written realm, alas. There is quite obviously a sociopolitical undercurrent to the movie (the entirety of Mexico is deemed a quarantined infected zone), but Edwards only engages fitfully on this front, and when he does, it’s often in clumsy metaphor, as with the alien creatures who display more aggression whenever American warplanes pass by overhead. (Get it?) It’s clear that he wants Monsters to mean something in addition to entertaining an audience, but it’s just as clear (if the perfectly generic, rather ill-fitting title wasn’t already an indicator) that he hasn’t figured out what exactly it’s supposed to mean.

Nevermind, too, some howlingly bad dialogue and wrongheaded vocalizations (upon stumbling across a candle-laden church with commemorations to the dead, a character actually solemnly utters, “The vibe just changed”), as well as myriad other narrative details that don’t add up — the fact that Andrew is laboring for a compelling still photo of these supposedly elusive beasties, for instance, even though cable television runs wall-to-wall images of them. Edwards has the nuts-and-bolts talents of a filmmaker, but Monster seems, on whole and in piecemeal fashion, a sop to audiences, a work of commercial pandering in lieu of any actual burning passion.

Apart from its impressive production design (forlorn and of a piece) and a rather relaxed pacing that isn’t interested in attempting to make a play for breakneck scares, the strongest thing going for Monsters is Able’s performance. With her short bob haircut and conflicted awareness of her own entitlement, she takes her unhappily engaged rich girl character and breathes into her a three-dimensionality and life not present in the written word. McNairy, on the other hand, never seems particularly believable as a photographer (a maladjusted indie band drummer is more like it), and so his arc, and indeed presence, induce at first sighs, then irritation, then hostility. In a movie called Monsters, someone should get eaten. It’s a shame that it’s not him, leaving more one-on-one time with the very able Able. (Magnet, R, 93 minutes)

If there were ever a movie designed to make Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin simultaneously crap their pants — pairing all the extreme edginess of an online Mountain Dew commercial with the ethnic “otherness” of a weekend’s cab rides in Manhattan — it would probably have to be The Taqwacores, about a group of young, punkish, fornicating Muslims trying to reconcile their religious beliefs and personal freedoms in a country that isn’t always as welcoming of diversity as its electorate claims.

Co-written and directed by Eyad Zahra, the movie, opening tomorrow in New York and November 12 in Los Angeles and Orange counties, centers on Yusef (Bobby Naderi, above left), a first-generation Pakistani college sophomore who moves into an off-campus house in Buffalo. There, he meets a motley crew of fellow Muslims, and their home becomes a community magnet for Friday prayers as well as music-fueled weekend partying.

Like Holy Rollers, The Taqwacores makes at least some sincere attempt to reconcile an honest faith born from a more orthodox religious sect with the bristling, more hormonally oriented energies of youth. Jettisoning any sense of structure from Michael Muhammad Knight’s novel, though, Zahra pumps up the jittery jump-cuts and opts for surface laughs and tension, not trusting the ability of the material to nervously build to a more natural climax.

The result often feels less “real” or believable, and more like a stumbling collection of characters tilting at windmills, peppered with moments either designed for raw provocation (one character needling another about masturbation and tampon use, another bellowing, “I’m so Muslim I can say, ‘Fuck Islam!'”), or that read as overly telegraphed issue statements on gender equality, sexual identity and the like. And yet there’s undeniably a natural pull to the movie, in large part because of a charismatic supporting performance from Dominic Rains (above right) as Jehangir, the mohawked, reconciliatory chieftain of this colorful clan. Amidst all the willful din and clatter, he smashes stereotypes quietly. (Strand, R, 83 minutes)

Directed by Stephen Frears, and adapted from Posey Simmonds’ graphic
novel (which was itself inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding
Crowd), Tamara Drewe unfolds at an English countryside writer’s retreat
run by philandering mystery novelist Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam)
and his dutiful wife Beth (Tasmin Greig), where the return of a former
local (Gemma Arterton, below), who with a bit of plastic surgery has
transformed herself into a bombshell magazine columnist, sets off a chain of professional jealousies, love affairs and teenage infatuations —
the latter in the form of two scheming 15-year-olds who act almost as a
sort of Greek chorus for the movie.

Frears is an accomplished director who trusts heartily in his casting instincts and so, as to be expected, there’s good group work here from the actors, including Bill Camp, as a constipated academic and would-be Hardy biographer. Somewhat to its detriment, though, Tamara Drewe isn’t really about… well, Arterton’s Tamara Drewe. It’s instead a rangy, noodling ensemble piece which could have used a bit more of a streamlined narrative vision and scope. Plenty of the characters are colorful, including the horny drummer (Dominic Cooper) of an ascendant rock band, but they don’t always fit together in convincing ways, and Frears’ loose-limbed film, while warm and fitfully witty, feels consistently and steadfastly like less than the sum of its parts. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 107 minutes)

It’s difficult to exaggerate the impact of the global financial meltdown of 2008, a tsunami that, if we were lucky, a lot of us felt as a pinch or a slap. The additional wallop that Charles Ferguson’s revelatory new documentary Inside Job packs comes from what it augurs for the future, and how it reveals the collapse to be both at once a crime of greed and an entirely systemic (if sadly preventable) failure, a de-pantsing of American capitalism to the rest of the world.

The word “empathy” was derided in some quarters of political discourse when President Obama mentioned it in 2009 in the context of a necessary ingredient of a Supreme Court justice, but clearly there isn’t that sort of honest feeling for constituents and the public at large in so many of those charged with protecting the interests of average Americans. Narrated by Matt Damon and told in breathtakingly concise, calmly reasoned strokes, the ire-evoking Inside
Job makes this abundantly clear. In his follow-up to No End in Sight, Ferguson rivetingly connects the dots on the shadowy financial derivatives world and a subprime lending market that swelled to over $600 billion, over one-fifth of all lending in 2006. It all adds up to a corporate-friendly dance party on the backs of retirement fund pensioners and others who can least afford it. The thing that’s most irritating, however, is the sort of shock, befuddlement and indignation at the exceedingly reasonable, base-level questions Ferguson puts to various voices of the status quo in the film. Clearly, their plan is just to dance until the music stops. For more information on the film, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 105 minutes)

“Mike Leigh meets The Sopranos” is the not entirely inaccurate production-notes shorthand for this British kitchen-sink drama, which stars real-life father and son Bob and Robin Hill as Bill and Karl, middle-management-type sectional chieftains of a crime family struggling to keep their business together as, over the course of a hectic week, infighting and hazy rumors of a police informant in their midst threaten to unravel it completely.

Simpleton Karl (above right, a sort of scruffy, neutered, blue-collar
cousin of John Oliver, physically at least) suffers
his father’s serial disrespect and baiting, and doesn’t do much about it. But when he brings home pregnant
girlfriend Valda (Kerry Peacock), it really doesn’t go over well with either of
his already frazzled parents, including mom Maggie (Julia Deakin). As they press him to cut her lose, Karl’s spine stiffens, coinciding with a series of decisions by Bill to “drain the swamp,” as it were, and methodically eliminate long-time henchmen and allies who might be the potential mole.

Co-written and directed by Ben Wheatley, Down Terrace starts off slow,
impaired by impenetrably thick accents and a misguided, unnecessarily
claustrophobic visual scheme. Opening things up a bit — with wider shots to better give a sense of the movie’s drab domestic settings, which serve as ironic counterpoint to its criminal mischief — would have done small wonders for the movie. Still, for fans of certain British TV crime serials, and particularly those schooled in the cinema of Shane Meadows, Down Terrace eventually takes hold as a passable
slice of darkly humorous, stakes-free entertainment — its narrative
pivots, in which ratcheted-up paranoia gets seriocomically spun off in
homicidal directions, employed in purely functional fashion, against a
backdrop of colorful familial bickering. If anything about this domestic
brood rings true, though, seek counseling immediately. For more information on the film, click here. (Magnet, unrated, 89 minutes)

Whether it’s sports, dancing or eating, if there’s something that Americans like more than recreational activities, hobbies and interests, it’s watching other people compete in those arenas. When it comes specifically to baking and cooking there are, by my last count, 4,752 shows on the Food Network and other cable channels about culinary competitions and/or niche specialties, so it comes as no great surprise that a high-stakes dessert competition would get the full-fledged documentary treatment in the form of Kings of Pastry, opening this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, Town Center 5 and Playhouse 7.

Co-directed by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the film focuses on the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition (Best Craftsmen
in France), held, like the Olympics, only once every four years. The sixteen finalists, French-born pastry chefs all, gather in Lyon for three intense days of mixing, piping and sculpting everything from delicate chocolate confections to six-foot sugar sculptures in hopes of being declared one of the best by President Nicolas Sarkozy, and winning a coveted blue, white and red-striped collar — the culinary elite equivalent of a green Master’s jacket in golf, or an Academy Award in cinema.

The film predominantly charts Jacquy Pfeiffer (above), co-founder of
Chicago’s French Pastry School, as he journeys back to his childhood
home of Alsace more than a month before the event to practice for the contest. Two other finalists are
profiled in the film — Regis Lazard, competing for the second time after a crucial drop of his sugar sculpture the first time, and Philippe Rigollot, a chef from
Maison Pic, France’s only three-star restaurant owned by a woman.
During the grueling final competition, chefs work under constant
scrutiny by a squad of master judges, and subject themselves to the critical palates of some of the
world’s most renowned chefs, who evaluate their elaborate pastries. Finally, in a twist that will likely ring familiar to anyone who’s paused on the Food Network for more than five minutes, these pastry marathoners must complete their race against the clock by hand-carrying all their
creations, including their fragile sugar sculptures, through a series of
rooms to a final buffet area without shattering them.

Filmmakers Pennebaker (Monterey Pop, Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back) and Hegedus (Startup.com) are experienced “name” documentarians and established collaborators (The War Room, Down the Mountain), but they seem to coast a bit here on the exclusivity of their secured access to the never-before-filmed event, largely eschewing probing questioning of its subjects and their unique world in the name of an uninspired, point-and-shoot style that rivals Sarah Palin for its lack of inquisitiveness. The selection process for the finalists? Not addressed. Other competitors outside of the aforementioned trio? Not addressed. The number of designated winners? Not addressed. The specifics of the chefs’ job duties and backgrounds, and how that might either advantage or disadvantage them in certain areas of the competition? Not addressed.

So it’s a sign of the artistry on display that Kings of
Pastry, after a slow start, eventually matures (ripens? comes to a boil?) into something not only engaging, but actually also kind of poignant. The film showcases the extraordinary level of skill and nerve required to tackle the competition, certainly (as well as practice: Pfeiffer sweats out time trials with his coach, while Lazard’s wife notes that his basement kitchen is his true home), but it also
highlights how luck plays a part in things too. (Taste and artistic merit scores are
still subjective, after all.) That makes the culmination of the competition, with its failures and inspirational elevations, something to which everyone can relate. The biggest tangential takeaway, however, is how and why European chefs will always remain, collectively, a cut above their American counterparts — the exactitude required is immense, and Stateside notions of masculinity don’t allow for this much attention to be paid to food of any sort, without much derision. For more information on the movie, click here. (First Run, unrated, 84 minutes)

The Hollywood studio system, almost by its very nature, tends to stifle
and suppress the urge for big screen rumination. In action and horror
films, of course, there’s hardly any precious time for reflection, but
even outside of the lucrative genre realm rarely is there a mainstream
American movie where emotional fumbling or a lack of certitude seems to
define all of the main characters. Audiences desire more rigidly defined
journeys, and don’t want to see the inherent unsettledness of life,
it’s thought.

Directed by John Curran, from a script by Angus
MacLachlan, Stone quietly challenges some of those assumptions. It’s not
wildly esoteric or steeped in unrecognizable metaphor, but Stone is a
film largely (though not entirely) devoid of typical dramatic markers
and signposts. Starring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, it’s a meditative work about people awash in latent unhappiness, coming up from the mud, and slowly pawing their way to a place where they might (but just as likely might not) be able to get out of it.

Moral crisis, and the flickering possibility of awakening, is at the center of Stone. The film unfolds on the economically depressed outskirts of Detroit, where parole officer Jack Mabry (De Niro), a hard-drinking, introverted Episcopalean, is counting down the days to retirement, which will put him at home more and exacerbate tensions with his long-suffering wife Madylyn (Frances Conroy). Reviewing the case of Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Norton), a cornrowed ex-addict who’s already put in eight years out of a 10- to 15-year sentence for setting a fire to cover up the murder of his grandparents, Jack finds himself on the receiving end of, alternately, flattery and spiteful rage and negativity. Stone needs to convince Jack that he’s remorseful and reformed, but seems caught somewhere in between a sincere, be-what-may roll of the dice and darker impulses.

Part of that negative energy involves Stone’s seemingly devoted wife, Lucetta (Milla Jovovich). In the beginning, they seem to have about as healthy a relationship as one can imagine for a couple physically separated for so long, but as the date for Stone’s hearing draws closer, fissures and tears develop. Outwardly, Madylyn and Lucetta seem to have little in common, the former having channeled her marital frustrations into religion, and the latter characterized by a sunny proactivity and sexual frankness. Both, however, are women that have suffered the sins of the men in their lives, albeit in radically different fashions. It’s here, as Lucetta flirts with and then makes a special proposition to Jack, that the film flirts heaviest with convention — another story of a married man succumbing to sexual temptation. But, even as boundaries are irrevocably crossed, Stone does not content itself with charting expected waters.

Curran has put swallowed domestic misery under the microscope before — both in We Don’t Live Here Anymore and The Painted Veil, the latter on which he teamed with Norton — and here he’s again fascinated with the varying impulses of man, especially when they awaken to the fact that there’s no longer any shared beliefs or purpose tethering them to their loved ones. What is love without commonality, in other words? This deeper psychological investment in action is paramount to Stone‘s adult appeal.

The performances here are all something special, too. For all his scholarly adroitness with book-read characters, Norton
can also breathe wonderful three-dimensionality and humanity into greaseballs and fringe-dwelling types, which he does here. Jovovich,
meanwhile, is great at conveying Lucetta’s swallowed, almost snake-y female
power. It’s different than mere sexual aggressiveness, but a cousin of the
same, and powered by an inner heat to which men respond but also frequently
kind of fear. De Niro, seemingly invigorated by material that asks more of him, also brings his A-game.

An honest appraisal of Stone cedes points for novelty of effort over execution that is solid if not always constructed for cathartic payoff. It’s a shame that the material built around Stone and the intrigue of an in-prison epiphany — is it real, feigned, or somewhere in between? — doesn’t connect more strongly. While bearing witness to a brutal shanking seems the emotional tipping point for Stone, Curran depicts the manifestations of this stirring with a gauzy indistinctness that — if true to the blissed-out, relaxed nature that sometimes flows from religious awakening — is at times a bit maddening. Admittedly, this is tough terrain, since Jack is the only person off whom Stone can bounce these changes, and their interactions are governed by a certain structure, but they feed into a feeling that quietly lingers — that at times the character of Stone has an oppositional-literary feel rather than that of a full-bodied man.

Still, these criticisms take only a bit of shine off of what is otherwise a thoughtful and bracing story of ethical compromise and moral ambiguity. It’s been a long time since the traces of French filmmaker Robert Bresson have been detected in a mainstream Hollywood work, but the ascetic, tightly focused nature of its scripting and telling mark Stone as unmistakably his progeny. It’s a slow and fairly willful psychological seduction, but Curran’s film is still a fascinating work, often times as much for what lies around the edges and in the interstices as for what actually unfolds on screen. (Overture, R, 105 minutes)

Nowhere Boy exists for the same reason that Googling “celebrity high school photos” will yield over 35 million results — there is, in modern society, a deep and abiding obsession with famous people, and so one of the correlative expectations floating about out there is that there surely must have been some fascinating signs of greatness in their adolescence.

Or maybe not. Set in Liverpool in 1955, coming-of-age tale Nowhere
Boy centers around 15-year-old John Lennon (Aaron Johnson, of Kick-Ass), and his differently strained relationships with his stuffy aunt and guardian, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), and party-girl mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), with whom he has only recently reconnected. Amidst the syrup-thick accents, there’s teenage fisticuffs, a burgeoning awareness of girls, the discovery of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and other music, the formation of a band and, eventually, an encounter with a young Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster).

The acting here is fine. In particular, Johnson wears well the mantle of young legend, capturing the hidden effort that so often goes into affecting an air of teenage insouciance, while also slyly spotlighting unspoken feelings of jealousy and competition awakened by Paul — feelings that he himself doesn’t even yet fully understand, but will eventually spur him on to great artistic heights. When the movie is just charting John’s knockabout adventures, and letting Johnson’s lingering silent glances fill in the spaces of quiet heartache and confusion he feels at learning his biological mother has lived virtually around the corner his entire life, it’s in good hands — something trusting, unhurried and subtle.

The problem is that Nowhere
Boy, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, wants to hurry and get John together with Paul, and poke us in the ribs and show us how important music is to John. And, dramatically speaking, this material is a non-starter. (Damaged kids escape into what they can; for John it was eventually music, though it could have been something else.) Ergo, the second half of the movie just kind of unfolds, without much in the way of surprise, save a late jolt related to familial tragedy. It’s a serviceable snapshot of the developing mind that eventually created some great music — some of the pain and disconnect that found an escapist home in rock ‘n’ roll — but unless one impresses upon the movie some sort of sweeping scope and emotionalism born of a grander investment in the Beatles mythology, Nowhere Boy is at its core a rather unexceptional story, told in conventional fashion. For more information on the movie, click here. (Weinstein Company, R, 98 minutes)

With films like Remember the Titans, The Rookie, Miracle, Invincible and The Greatest Game Ever Played, Disney has not just revitalized but almost entirely owned the truth-based inspirational sports drama subgenre in recent years, with smash hit The Blind Side being a notable exception. Secretariat, starring Diane Lane and John Malkovich, follows in these well-worn grooves, detailing in earnest and narratively conventional fashion the story of the same-named 1973 Triple Crown-winning racehorse. If the drama of its last hour-plus seems predetermined, the film consistently and pleasantly holds one’s attention, albeit more lightly than grippingly. Director Randall Wallace pulls all the emotive levers rather effectively, aided by a slick technical team. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 123 minutes)

Infidelity, in either temptation or its actualized form, has always offered up rich dramatic terrain, because in addition to being about sex (which immediately piques the interest of at least half of the population), it’s also all wrapped up in betrayal and insecurity. But as the nature of modern marriage has evolved — it’s now much less about providing a base of financial security for women, and more about actual shared values, notions of family and a vision for moving forward together — so too have the manner in which some movies approach the topic of romantic cheating. If couples are cognizant of the differences between men and women, and allowed to have that honest conversation, then that’s but a stone’s throw away from a conversation in which certain extracurricular flings or activities are allowed, or pre-approved.

All of which brings us to multi-hyphenate Katie Aselton’s The Freebie, which bowed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. A spare, almost enervated character sketch, the movie centers on Darren (Dax Shepard) and Annie (Aselton, above), who from the outside seem to have a solid relationship, and still enjoy each other’s company. Unfortunately, they can’t remember the last time they had sex. When a dinner party conversation leads to a later discussion about the state of their love life, and when an attempted bikini seduction leads to a crossword puzzle race instead of some horizontal action, the pair begins to flirt with an idea for a way to spice things up. The deal they strike: one (calendar-fixed) night of freedom, no strings attached and no questions asked.

Though it has at its core a provocative premise, The Freebie is in certain ways a kind of chaste treatment of the notion that monogamy is a fairly awkward (and unnatural?) state when the
haze of lust has faded, and there are no children involved. The film was workshopped at the Sundance Institute, and it’s no coincidence that it’s executive produced by one of the Duplass brothers (Baghead, The Puffy Chair), reigning kings of the so-called mumblecore movement. Even though they strike upon this radical experiment, its characters are reticent, cuddly-smoochy PDA-types, and they in essence lean back rather than forward, no matter what choices the story foists upon them.

This works well for a bit, establishing a certain intrigue as it relates to who exactly these characters are, and why they find themselves in such a rut. Shepard, who heretofore has specialized in more out-there comedic characters, channels a bit of Owen Wilson’s penchant for cud-chewing conversational ellipticism, and Aselton is equally subdued. Some of the dialogue here is quietly smart, for how it locates what the characters are avoiding saying to one another, and the laughs the movie proffers exist for the most part entirely outside of itself, in our judgments of the characters’ earnest declarations (“The way we love each other is so far beyond whether we have sex every night”).

It’s a disappointment, then, that The Freebie doesn’t take this at-odds tension — the foisting of a hot-and-heavy premise on a couple of characters who have started to look through rather than at or into one another — and ultimately do something with it, in terms of sparking a deeper analysis of their current state of being. The manner in which Aselton constructs her film — its intercut, did he/did she? structure, which vacillates between the couple first agreeing to the deal and the beginning stages of them acting out their trysts — is interesting, but she chooses the wrong wind-up for her third act. The big emotional argument to which The Freebie builds is inherently less interesting than what causes that outburst — the offshoot reasons for Darren and Annie’s individual and collective unhappiness, either in a continuing, latent insecurity or serial sexual unfulfillment. Aselton’s failure to recognize that makes The Freebie‘s climax both empty drama (“You slut, I can’t believe you did that!”) and something of an emotional-psychological cheat. With neither empty titillation, complete feel-good resolution, nor an honest accounting of what triggered this foray into “on the side” fulfillment, the film comes across — despite the quiet rhythms of its scene-to-scene successes — as a watered-down exercise in gender-play sociology. (Phase 4, R, 77 minutes)

A lot of otherwise quite avid moviegoers avoid horror films outright because of an aversion to gore or violence, but if you dig deeper in conversation you’ll find an equal or greater number that are more turned off by the violence’s lack of connection to tangible motivating factors. They want to know and be able to identify with — albeit sometimes in only exclusionary fashion — a killer if they’re going to take a trip to a nasty and brutish place, in other words.

Red White & Blue is a film that invests wholeheartedly in the foreboding set-up of its characters and their predicaments on its slow, winding road trip toward Very Bad Things; it’s one of those stunning, gem-find indie movies that creeps up on you like a dark, sudden storm cloud in the middle of a summer afternoon. Marked by stellar performances and sophisticated storytelling, the film is a powerful, visceral and surprisingly emotionally tangible dramatic thriller — an edgy, psychologically charged tale, unfolding in triptych structure, that grounds itself in real-world problems before veering off into darker territory.

Austinite Erica (Amanda Fuller) is a troubled nymphomaniac whose tough veneer and sexual acting out masks deep and private wounds. She lives rent-free in a small co-op as a trade-off for housework, but when her living situation changes she gets a job at a nearby hardware store. Despite getting off on the wrong foot with Nate (Noah Taylor, above), a mysterious Iraq War vet who claims to be mulling over a job offer from the CIA, Erica forms a hesitant bond with her neighbor, in part informed by the fact that he’s the only guy who doesn’t seemingly immediately want to sleep with her.

Old actions can have terrible lingering consequences, however. Though his mother Ellie (Sally Jackson) is suffering from a terminal illness, things seem to be on the occupational upswing for musician Franki (Marc Senter). Until, that is, his previous one-night fling with Erica — part of a boozy orgy with a pair of his rocker pals — comes back to haunt him, bringing to bear unforeseen costs for a whole host of people.

Red White & Blue is British writer-director Simon Rumley’s follow up to the acclaimed and oddly personal horror film The Living and The Dead, and his deft touch with multiple tonalities is again in evidence. The first three-quarters or more of the film doesn’t touch the rails of horror at all; it’s a gritty little drama about fringe-dwelling characters in pain, and Rumley trades in woozy montages and still frames that convey a sense of depressed place with startling economy and clarity. Once the discrete narratives coalesce, though, the movie picks up a certain doomed downhill momentum, wringing tension from violence lurking around the story’s edges, and then, finally, bursting forth in ugly fashion.

A couple of the narrative pivots or reactions may at first blush seem odd (Franki’s behavior toward Erica, for one), but they stem from recognizably human places. There’s an almost subliminal electric energy attached to all the characters, and Rumley doesn’t overwrite his story, stuffing it to the seams with explanatory dialogue pitched at highlighting action for a lowest-common-denominator audience. Instead, he invests time and energy in establishing an audience connection to the largely unarticulated but nonetheless engaging, parallel inner dialogues and lives of these characters, and then foisting terrible choices and situations upon them. What happens is not pleasant, but it’s darkly understandable, in its own way, and perhaps that’s the most effectively unsettling element of Red White & Blue. For more information on the film, and its special theatrical engagements and VOD listings, click here. (IFC Midnight, R, 103 minutes)

An adaptation of University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York-based journalist Stephen Dubner’s 2005 book about hidden and surprising causality, Freakonomics represents an unusual cinematic experiment, bringing together as collaborative directors the documentary filmmakers behind Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Jesus Camp, Why We Fight and The King of Kong.

The title of the book stems from Levitt’s coined term about social science research and other empirical data shattering common (but untrue) assumptions about human behavior, and society. Breaking from the convention of more structured, formal review, it’s just easier to flat-out say what doesn’t really work about Freakonomics, especially since its partitioned structure and insistent flitting to and fro makes the movie come off as a hit-and-miss collection of appetizers. I’m generally a sucker for these sorts of documentaries — movies that take big, meaty swings at matters political, anthropological and/or behavioral — but this movie is wildly uneven, and doesn’t really coalesce in a meaningful way.

There are basically two segments in Freakonomics that connect. The first is helmed by Morgan Spurlock, and looks at whether there is such a thing as a financial value in a baby’s name — whether it’s a predictive or determining factor in adult happiness, opportunity or wealth. Given its focus on the unique nature of certain predominantly African-American names, this is a fascinating inquiry, whatever one’s previously staked out position or lack thereof, precisely because it’s something recognized in perceptive circles but wildly underdiscussed. In the other engaging portion, Eugene Jarecki investigates Levitt’s original research which postulates that the national drop in crime rates in the 1990s stemmed chiefly not from new law enforcement measures enacted by politicians (sorry, Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton), but instead the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which allowed for choice in pregnancy

The rest of Freakonomics is a collection of sputters and half-measures, however, weaved together by interstitial
interludes from Seth Gordon, which provide a bit of context and sit-down commentary from the authors. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s look at attempts to incentivize high school learning with cold hard cash provides moments of engagement courtesy of some of its teenage subjects, but only scratches the surface of their relationship to continued education, and fails to really give a voice to those conducting the research program. Alex Gibney’s look at the crumbling façade of sumo wrestling’s honor
system, meanwhile, weighs Freakonomics down (no pun intended) mightily. Stretching on for far too long in the film’s middle, it’s so self-satisfied with its uncovering of Japanese corruption and bribery that it fails to acknowledge its insights or revelations are far less about any sociocultural specificity than they are about… money. As in: where people can make large amounts of money betting, corruption and gaming will follow. For more information on the movie, click here. (Magnolia, PG-13, 93 minutes)

When mysterious, 12-year-old Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her dad (Richard Jenkins) move next door to Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a social outcast who’s being bullied at school as his parents undergo a divorce, Owen forms a profound bond with his new neighbor, who he can’t help noticing is like no one he’s met before. As a string of strange, grisly murders grips his small town, though, Owen must confront the reality that his new friend is actually a vampire.

Writer-director Matt Reeves, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling novel Let the Right One In, ups the gore quotient a bit, but retains the artfully deliberate pacing and wintry desolation of the original Swedish film that it spawned. His experience on Cloverfield with chaotic, jumbled, yet still involving cinematography is richly evident here, and Reeves also recognizes that, current commercial appetites notwithstanding, this isn’t a vampire movie in any typical sense, it’s a movie about loneliness. Let Me In pegs the lingering, character-molding anxiety of adolescent humiliation and degradation, and in doing so breaks one’s heart while simultaneously quickening one’s pulse. At once tender and brutal, Let Me In is a transfixing elegy the likes of which the supernatural horror genre rarely produces.

Directed by Oliver Stone, Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps is the rarest of Hollywood sequels, in that it seemingly has
an artistic rather than financial motivation for its birth. This is all the more
ironic given the subject matter of the first film, a financial drama of spotlighted moral decay, and that it saw life in the go-go 1980s, both deftly encapsulating the mantra of its setting-sun era (“Greed is good”) but also, and perhaps much more tellingly, providing a fleeting glimpse into the future (“I create nothing — I own“), and the working mindset of financial services wizards and captains of industry for whom the American economy and electorate are seemingly little more than their grown-up sandbox and toys.

Having served more than eight years in prison for securities fraud, disgraced Wall Street tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) emerges in 2001, just after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Seven years later, he’s peddling a half-apologetic, half-prophetic book forecasting doom for the American economy. Young Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), meanwhile, is an ambitious proprietary trader whose affection for both green energy as well as the green of money gets tested when his company fails. Against a backdrop involving both opportunity and jostling related to an old rival, venal trader Bretton James (Josh Brolin), Gordon tries to use his professional knowledge base to arm-twist Jake in friendly fashion into helping him reconnect with his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), to whom Jake is engaged.

Stone’s sequel to his 1987 zeitgeist hit, which won Douglas a Best Actor Oscar, would seem positioned to really sink or soar, given both its unique standing as a Hail Mary-type throwback drama, and its desperately au courant status given the nation’s newfound focus on its economic maladies. Thankfully, Stephen Schiff and Allan Loeb’s script is admirably rooted in character, so the drama pulls one along fairly naturally, abetted by performances that don’t forsake the human element. Whether by cajolement, threat or end-around obfuscation, Stone squeezes out of LaBeouf so much of the nervous-chatterbox energy and too-cool-for-school insouciance that characterize the bulk of his work. Similarly, Douglas taps into nicely layered reserves of an alpha dog brought low, and in significant ways reformed — but someone who still has a burning, hardwired ambition for relevance, above all else.

There’s a pinch of ridiculous alpha-male jockeying (involving a scene of motorcycle racing), but overall Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is engaging and slick without ever coming across as pompous — its story hinging on believable twists and turns born of personality, not wildly fluctuating narrative convenience. Take note, Hollywood moguls. For more on the film, click here. For another, longer take, meanwhile, from Telly Davidson, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 131 minutes)

Co-directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the absorbing, low-fi Catfish is a very generational cinematic offering, a digital-age mystery about identity, human frailty and social connection. Less is truly more when heading into the film, but in the broadest strokes the movie centers on a 24-year-old New York City photographer, Nev Schulman (Ariel’s brother), who is contacted on Facebook by an eight-year-old Michigan girl who asks permission to paint one of his pictures, and then falls headlong into a complex online relationship with the girl and her family.

A documentary pieced together like a thriller, Catfish highlights, in ways funny as well as squirmy and uncomfortable, the parasitic nature of parasocial relationships, and how technology can feed intimacy in ways both new and exciting and also inherently false. (For all the shrugging ease that the use of the Internet provides in terms of facilitating lies or mistruths, the film also shows the flipside — that the Internet makes it that much easier to investigate people, and their claims.)

Catfish hums along and works on several levels, not the least of which because Nev (above) is both engaging and vulnerable. Its few missteps are less outright failings, and more sins of omission. For all the ghastly ruminations summoned forth by what Nev and his filmmaker friends uncover when they finally trip to Michigan to uncover the truth, it would be equally legitimate to more deeply assay the need for connection that drove Nev in the first place. Of course, that’s something that resides in all of us, which perhaps cuts a bit deeper to the bone than is comfortable for both those involved as well as an audience, who naturally like to retain the right to pass judgment. For more information, click here; for an interview with the directors, meanwhile, click here. (Universal/Rogue, PG-13, 86 minutes)

Actor Adrian Grenier is most famous for playing a young, famous actor on HBO’s Entourage, so that gives him a somewhat unique perch from which to assay the curious nature of celebrity and the often aggressive shutterbugs that, in symbiotic if frequently somewhat diseased fashion, make their living off of snapping as many pictures as possible of actors, athletes and other figures in the public eye. And it’s just that high-ground perspective that informs and elevates his entertaining and thought-provoking new documentary Teenage Paparazzo.

The movie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and makes its bow this week on HBO, jointly documents
the actor’s well-mannered exasperation and irritation with paparazzi, and his burgeoning personal relationship with 14-year-old Austin
Visschedyk, a home-schooled shutterbug whose parents routinely let him troll around Hollywood streets until midnight and beyond, stalking dining and partying celebrities like Grenier. Further contextualizing this vivid, unusual relationship are interviews Grenier conducts with other celebs (Paris Hilton, Eva Longoria, Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg and Matt Damon) as well as psychologists and historians, who weigh in on the changing nature of fame, notoriety and gossip in the New Media age.

Young Austin is precocious, characteristically self-centered, and possessing of the same type of moppy-haired bangs that Justin Bieber has recently made all the rage, but he’s also a more complex figure than on the surface he might seem. The title conjures up very specific (and not at all positive) notions of parental neglect and failure, but in the beginning Austin seems less obsessed with celebrities than merely excited by the thrill of a chase — in getting a picture of a personal moment. He’s something of a snob (“Hell no, I’m not following anyone from Dancing with the Stars!”), but more because of the monetary value of his work. Yes, while not yet able to drive, Austin rakes in hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for his photos.

The inherently navel-gazing nature of Teenage Paparazzo sort of cuts both ways. While on the surface it seems like it could come off as little more than a well-funded incursion into woe-is-me self-analysis — and it very occasionally tilts in this direction — Grenier’s film doesn’t merely spotlight the antagonism between paparazzi and their subjects, it also digs into the mutual-use nature of their relationships. (Hilton is an especially interesting and enlightening interview subject on this front, even if a segment in which Grenier explains the story of Narcissus to her comes off as unintentionally hilarious.) If Grenier is a bit hands-off with Austin’s parents — wanting to retain their participation and cooperation, and so approaching their son with a bit of a clinical, “hey-that’s-cool” alien distance — his subject eventually obliges him, exhibiting increasingly bratty behavior, and morphing into a miniaturized version of some of the same prissy, entitled rich folks he spends his time shooting. (A proposed E! reality show centered around Austin helps fuel this fire, and provide an ironic production-crew-pileup that Christopher Guest would surely appreciate.)

Grenier has a certain laconic charm, and so his movie is incredibly spry and facile, and thus entertaining in a base-level, empty-caloric sort of way. But it’s also at its best when really, substantively trying to dig into the nature of falsely intimate, one-way connections between massively marketed celebrities and their fans, or “parasocial” relationships — as it does in a conversation between the filmmaker and a social scientist at Fenway Park that is interrupted by a (slightly inebriated) fan who tells Grenier, “I’m not trying to be gay, but I love you,” and, “This’ll get me so much ass on Facebook, you have no idea!”

This candid, unplanned interaction, and other moments in the film, seems to lend credence to the idea that unlike past generations, or milennia ago — when we would each achieve some measure of notoriety and recognition within our smaller social structures — fame for fame’s sake is in the digital age, with connected societies and worldwide economies, now its own surging currency, and something to be valued over more tangible personal qualities, like talent or intelligence. (Italian import Videocracy, another documentary, also has some interesting insights in this regard.) It’s an unsettling thought, perhaps, but ultimately also a humanizing one; as Teenage Paparazzo shows us, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it ultimately cannot capture a human being in all their complexity. For more information on the film, click here. (HBO/Reckless Productions, unrated, 100 minutes)

Years before the infamous obscenity trial of comedian Lenny Bruce,
counter-cultural icon and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg also stood trial — or,
more accurately, the publisher of his long-form poem that gives this
film its title did — for deigning to hold up a mirror to American
hypocrisy. Co-written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman,
Howl isn’t a commercial work, or satisfying on any predictably plotted
dramatic level. But, like a great song one surrenders to, its
tangential, multi-varied approach captures the urgency and dread of
Ginsberg’s groundbreaking, semi-autobiographical work, which recounts in
searing detail various underbelly road trips, love affairs and his
search for personal liberation.

Starring James Franco as
Ginsberg, Howl unfolds in a fractured and cerebral style, interweaving
four stories: a Socratic courtroom drama that follows the aforementioned
landmark 1957 obscenity trial, with Jon Hamm’s prosecutor and David Strathairn’s defense attorney squaring off against one another; an imaginative, feverish animated ride
through some of the text’s stories; a chat between Ginsberg and an
unseen interviewer; and a slightly more conventional,
black-and-white-lensed biographical portrait of a man who strove for
new ways to express himself and capture the aching ambivalence of those
he encountered.

There’s a quite contradictory nature, a fiery
reticence, at the soul of Ginsberg and his confessional writing, and in
his virtuoso performance Franco captures that quite well, especially in
his vocal timbre, which swells and recedes like an ocean tide. The
inclusion of animation — another potentially tricky thing — connects in a
certain roundabout way like similar footage from Ari Folman’s Waltz
with Bashir. Neither flat-out surreal nor entirely subjective, it
instead aims for (and captures) the heat of feeling, for those
unfamiliar with and/or resistant to the text. We all have to howl, from
time to time. For more information on the movie, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 90 minutes)

Yet another contrived, manically pitched romantic comedy centered on forcedly farcical nuptial hijinks, the wearyingly unfunny You Again — in which Kristen Bell discovers her older brother is marrying the same girl, Odette Yustman, who made her life completely miserable in high school — is the cinematic equivalent of a loud, sugar-fueled kid desperately
calling for his or her parent’s attention from a pool. There’s an interesting and even quite possibly very funny movie to be made about the manner in which women filter their competitiveness with one another through men, but You Again is so divorced from the real world as to immediately negate the possibility that this is it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 105 minutes)