A $25 billion idea began with something to which almost everyone can relate: a sense of drunken aggrievement. One night in October of 2003, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, status-obsessed, socially maladjusted Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the university’s computers to create a site that featured a database of all the women on campus. An instant viral hit, the stunt crashed Harvard’s servers, but provided the underpinnings for Facebook, which today has over 400 million users.

All this is chronicled in director David Fincher’s wildly involving The Social Network, which deftly intercuts the story of this creation with depositions from two separate lawsuits that would spring up — one by a pair of blonde, preppy, upper-crust rowers, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, pulling double duty), who argue that Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) stole their idea, and one from Zuckerberg’s friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), eventually forced out of the company via the gamesmanship of interloper Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), Napster’s co-founder.

The accelerated trajectory of these characters — brilliant, brash and soon to be flush with cash — underscores the bullet train of progress represented by the collision of their imaginations with the immediacy of the Internet, where desire gets out ahead of reason, and sets moral compasses spinning. The natural inclination on the part of many filmmakers would be to ladle on artifice, in an effort to play up the movie’s zeitgeist quotient, but Fincher keeps the movie’s tech-y elements at the periphery, focusing instead on the time-honored dramatic elements of isolation, determination, avarice and betrayal.

Eschewing the sort of more naked play for emotionalism that marked his last work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher instead — with great assistance from Aaron Sorkin’s bristling screenplay, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires — presents a consortium of tricky narrators, playing a delightful and engaging game of ping-pong with audience sympathies. The result is undeniably one of the year’s best films — an absorbing thriller for both Luddites and the plugged-in alike. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 120 minutes)

The feature film directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack
Goes Boating is a characteristically morose wallow in indie-style
shoe-gazing that should only please the most dedicated fans of the
talented actor, along with devotees of somewhat similar sad-sack works like Todd Solondz’s
Happiness and James Mangold’s Heavy.

Hoffman stars as oafish limo driver Jack, who masks his sadness with the good-vibe positivity of reggae music, which he keeps in constant rotation on his Walkman. (Yes, Walkman — take that, Steve Jobs!) At the urging of his (only) friend and coworker, Clyde (John Ortiz), Jack awkwardly, elliptically pursues another brokenhearted New Yorker, Connie (Amy Ryan), learning to cook for her since she claims she’s never had anyone fix her a meal. Booze and weed come out, and lingering resentments between Clyde and his wife Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) eventually come bubbling to the surface at an awkward dinner party.

Jack Goes Boating is adapted by Bob Glaudini from his own stageplay (which Hoffman and Ortiz, old theater chums, each have a history with), but the material lacks enough emotional punch to connect as either a more realistically rooted portrait of wounded-soul adult love, or enough sharp-tack detail to score as a searing musing on life’s accumulated miseries. To make up for relatively meager dramatic stakes and goose up the affected melancholy, Hoffman slathers on a jazz score and throws in some montages, to little lasting effect. “Everybody hurts,” R.E.M. once opined. True, but not all portraits of wallflower pain are created equal. (Overture, R, 89 minutes)

Two young Oscar nominees and another ascendant star anchor this very curious project from missing-in-action filmmaker Mark Romanek. Based on the novel of the same name by The Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go is an air-quote sci-fi drama with absolutely none of the usual genre trappings, instead grafted onto a mopey period piece love triangle.

The year is 1978, and the setting is a seemingly idyllic English boarding school where the well-mannered kids all live in The Village-esque seclusion. The rub, as they come to find out too soon from a chatty teacher? They’re being raised for their organs, so when they come of age in their 20s or 30s, they’ll make their donations and shuffle off this mortal coil. Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield, newly cast as Spider-Man) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) eventually leave the shelter of their school, sent to a sort of halfway house. The latter two are a couple, and Kathy, crushing on Tommy but eventually taking work as a counselor of enablement, has to decide between moving on and reconnecting with Tommy, filing for a deferment that may give them a coupe years together.

In both his groundbreaking music video work and 2002’s One Hour Photo, Romanek has shown a remarkable gift for tapping into personal isolation and despair, which he plumbs with only mixed results here. Despite all the morose signposts, the film never really catches fire as a doomed love story, which is clearly the target for which it’s aiming. Furthermore, it seems antithetical to the very nature of the conceit that there’s no particular angsty rebellion over their forced expiration, but that’s the case here. (Even the language they use is divorced from any personal feeling; final mortal donation is “completion,” not dying.) Perhaps that’s part of the delicate, emotionally shattering nature of the source material, adapted by Alex Garland, but if none of the characters can be roused to try to truly escape their fate, why should an audience care? (Fox Searchlight, R, 103 minutes)

A beautifully stark, challenging drama about an aging mercenary, Anton Corbijn’s The American, starring George Clooney and Violante Placido (above), is a work of pure cinema — a transfixing rumination on lone-wolf masculine
loneliness, and a reminder that the inner lives of screen characters can
be as gripping as any wildly manifested action. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, R, 105 minutes)

A spare, intimately conceived demonic possession drama, The Last Exorcism wrings plenty of spooky and, early on, darkly amusing engagement out of a wry preacher’s showdown with a troubled young girl, but is crucially undone by editorial choices which betray its mock-doc framework. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 88 minutes)

Writer-director David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival, is an involving, rangy and sneakily ambitious crime drama that pulses with a low hum of menace. Unfolding against an unfussy, decidedly non-glamorous criminal backdrop of modern-day Melbourne, the movie has intriguing characters and a broad canvas, like it could easily be spun off into a miniseries or TV serial.

When his junkie mom dies of an overdose, teenager Joshua (James Frecheville) gets taken in by his doting grandmother (Jacki Weaver), which would seem to be a good thing. Problem is, she’s den mother to a cabal of ne’er-do-wells, whose armed bank robberies have made them marked men by cops, some of whom play by the rules and some of whom have no qualms with vigilante justice. As one officer (Guy Pearce) tries to flip Joshua and make him a source, shocking twists and turns ensue.

Frecheville believably exudes naivety, and is a great anchor for Animal Kingdom, but Michôd smartly trades in organic rather than artificial thrills, making a movie about the legacy of violence that doesn’t often indulge in it. The result gets its hooks into an audience slowly. For Los Angelenos, a double-feature playdate at the New Beverly with fellow Aussie crime drama The Square most certainly awaits. For more information, click here. (Sony Classics, R, 112 minutes)

Part of the reason that celebrities occupy a monarchical stratosphere, particularly in the United States, is that we seem, as a society, addicted not only to the traditional narrative cycles of debutante presentation, evolution, destruction and reinvention, but also the polarities that the rich and famous live out — lifestyles of wild excess which, by definition, cannot be sustained. Rock ‘n’ rollers probably most embody this behavior. But one of the few modern traditional artists who seemed, on an almost instinctive level, to grasp the peculiarities of this public appetite was Jean-Michael Basquiat, a painter who rocketed from graffiti-tagging anonymity and bohemian near-homelessness to avant-garde superstar status, and the subject of an absorbing but fawning new documentary, Jean-Michel
Basquiat: The Radiant Child, opening this week at the
Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles.

Directed by Tamra Davis, who developed a close friendship with the late artist, the film is centered around on a rare and heretofore unshared interview that she and another friend conducted with Basquiat over 20 years ago. Still, it’s not merely a postcard from the grave. While her chat with Basquiat is obviously the film’s centerpiece attraction, Davis also tracks down a dazzling array of old collaborators, friends, professional peers and the like for interviews, including Glenn O’Brien, Larry Gagosian, Fab 5 Freddy, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Jeffrey Deitch, Julian Schnabel, Annina Nosei, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Kenny Scharf and ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, among many others.

The result achieves impressionistic definition if not complete chronological clarity, chronicling the meteoric rise and fall of an extremely young and in many ways unlikely artist. In the crime-ridden New York City of the late 1970s, Basquiat, along with friend Al Diaz, started covering the city
with abstract poetic graffiti verses, tagged with SAMO, a quasi-acronym standing for “Same Old Shit.” A buzz built, and in 1981 he put paint to canvas for the
first time, forming the “Downtown ’81” collective with some friends. In under a year he had his first formal show, for which he took home over $200,000 in a single night. Friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol ensued, along with an array of other shows, but in 1988 Basquiat’s heroin addiction worsened, and he died
of an overdose at the age of 27.

However close Davis was to her subject — and portions of the film trade rather wanly on his undeniable charisma, as he’s a warm and inviting if still enigmatic subject who never truly lets down his guard — The Radiant Child makes a convincing case that Basquiat had, at the very least, a unique amalgam gift for translating the loose, jangly energy of the bohemian street into high art. Some of the details are arresting (Basquiat frequently painted to Ravell’s “Bolero,” which certainly seems to inform the energy of his lines and color choices), and certainly the biographical details about his mother’s bouts of mental instability and accountant father’s emotional distance color an understanding of the man behind the art.

Still, there are some interesting and provocative ideas that Davis never fully explores, as when ArtForum‘s Rene Ricard, whose laudatory profile piece from early in the artist’s career gives the film its title, talks about explicitly wanting to hitch his own wagon to an ascendant star in the art world. Putting this together with Basquiat’s well known and pronounced ambition, and penchant for knowing presentation of self, it’s not hard to see another side of the artist, irrespective of his talent, that The Radiant Child never tries to really shine a light on — that of a confused and overwhelmed but shrewdly calculating kid who had a huge investment in the material benefits of personal mythology.

In its very real intimacy, The Radiant Child achieves warmth, but Davis is not interested in paying the price of a deeper truth, in trying to peg the specifics of Basquiat’s descent into drug use, and those who might have enabled him. Such is the rub for documentaries that come from so close within an artist’s orbit. For more information, click here. (Arthouse Films/Curiously Bright Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

The conundrum facing many independent-minded would-be filmmakers is how much, if any, attention to pay to the marketplace. Ignorance to the commercial realities of eventual distribution (in whatever form) is dangerous, and yet pandering to patty-cake notions of superior “character-rooted narrative” has resulted in its own set of collective sins, I’d argue — a robust slate of risible low-fi product in which ethnically diverse families come of age in America, small town soldiers return home from Iraq, or various combinations of philandering hipsters grapple with heroin, dyslexia and coming out of the closet. Multi-hyphenate Todd Berger’s The Scenesters intuitively understands this — what makes voracious but mainstream-leaning film audiences queasy or skeptical about “indie” film as a more broadly categorized movement — and has loads of fun twisting it in all sorts of pretzel shapes in service of a rangy, noir-tinged murder comedy.

A quirky and engaging film that honors many of the conventions of classic whodunit? cinema while also giving them both a modern spin and a deconstructive nudge to the ribs, The Scenesters centers on a smarmy, out-of-work film director named Wallace Cotton (Berger, above
center) and his equally self-centered producer, Roger Graham (Jeff Grace), who land work as crime scene videographers, and set out to make some great art. They quickly stumble across crime scene cleaner Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller, resembling a cross between Casey Affleck and Dwight Yoakam), a schlubby, down-on-his-luck guy who’s quietly honed a superb sense of deduction through his work.

As a couple of apathetic detectives (Kevin Brennan and Monika Jolly) investigate a series of killings in ultra-hip East Los Angeles, Charlie discovers clues that link together the killings, which convinces Wallace and Roger that Charlie is himself the perfect subject around which to center an investigative movie. As the body count mounts — and Charlie is encouraged to romantically reconnect with a beautiful reporter, Jewell Wright (Suzanne May), at the center of the story — Wallace and Roger angle to stay ahead of the killer, and craft a winning documentary, no matter the outside corporeal toll.

Reminiscent in some slight ways of Russell Brown’s The Blue Tooth Virgin, another inside-Hollywood tale that wasn’t afraid to showcase under-the-radar ambition in ways that didn’t always flatter its characters, The Scenesters unfolds against the backdrop of a (n appropriate) hipster soundtrack that includes the Airborne Toxic Event, the Cribs, Wallpaper, Le Switch and more. Scream is obviously something of a touchstone inspiration here (and Chinatown, too, for the film within the film), but the shoegazing, mumblecore cinema of the Duplass brothers also rates mentioning, both because of this movie’s DIY ethos and the fact that it’s simultaneously self-aware about the dangers of arthouse pretension. Berger’s film spins off all sorts of jokey asides (Charlie’s crime scene training video, a music video from a side project rock band one of the cops fronts), as well as a trial session framing device that features Sherilyn Fenn as a prosecutor and John Landis as the judge, and sometimes these bits don’t connect. Or, rather, they play OK as scenes, but muddy the editorial collection as a whole — a sense of how much what an audience is watching is formed after the fact, and by whom, after the conclusion of the murder spree mystery at its core.

Smartly, though, Berger seeds his film with all sorts of mini-conflicts and personality clashes, which makes for much fun and amusement. His dialogue has some salty bite (“Would it kill people to find bodies during magic hour — I feel like I’m on the face of the sun” Wallace bitches at one crime scene), and doesn’t always dwell on its punchlines, in a hamfisted effort to drill them home, and let you know how “smart” it is. A few of the performances aren’t quite up to the par with the material, and the movie could have benefited from a bit more rakish snap to its telling, particularly in the finale. But The Scenesters has in abundance what every independent film yearns for — intrigue and a cocksure rhythm that doesn’t ever feel false. If its plotting doesn’t in the end leave much room for a big surprise, that’s no reason not to surrender to the pleasures it provides along the way. Sometimes a nice slice of archness can be a good thing. For a trailer and more information, click here. (Vactioneer/Midwinter Studios, unrated, 101 minutes)

Hollywood comedies, more often than not, go big in terms of everything — concepts, emotion, stakes and action — because there’s always the fear that if the laughs aren’t coming at a certain clip, and always out loud, then they’re not really there. Comedies with more modest, recognizably human stakes — that aim for smiles or silent, inwardly reflected laughter — are a rare breed, and often end up shuttled off straight to video, or released in top-market, platform fashion by independent distributors.

All of which brings us to The Switch, toplined by two stars, released by a major studio, and featuring an outrageous concept (unwitting sperm swap!) that would seem to augur much more slapstick demonstrativeness than is present. Starring Jason Bateman and Jennifer
Aniston, and adapted by Alan Loeb from a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides), co-directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck’s movie is a curious but not unpleasant thing, not the least of which is because of the wide gulf between its concept and how it’s being marketed and the more melancholic reality of what it is.

Bateman stars as Wally Mars, an uptight white collar New York City investment guru whose best friend is Kassie Larson (Aniston). When Kassie deems the ticking of her biological clock too loud to wait around any further for a guy, she decides to pursue artificial insemination. Wally has carried a torch for Kassie forever (they dated briefly, we’re told), but, unable to hoist the bat off his shoulder and take a real swing at things, he glumly agrees to attend her impregnation party, where he meets her sperm donor, Roland (Patrick Wilson), before consoling himself by getting wasted.

Kassie further breaks Wally’s heart by leaving New York, wanting to raise her child back in Minnesota, where she’s from. Years later, however, she returns, with her six-year-old son Sebastian (Thomas Robinson) in tow. Wally is initially less interested in getting to know the kid than in simply reconnecting with Kassie, but soon starts to notice similarities between himself and this little smart, sensitive hypochondriac. Could he have really switched sperm samples the night of Kassie’s party? And how should he break this news to her? Things are additionally complicated by the fact that Roland, fresh off a divorce, is now in play romantically for a possibly interested Kassie.

So hijinks ensue, right? No, not really. More like low-fidelity fumbling and uncertainty, all slipped under some downbeat narration from Bateman. A mid-tempo work that’s not wildly dissimilar from Steve Conrad’s The Promotion and Stephen Belber’s Management (another film in which Aniston appeared, opposite Steve Zahn), The Switch takes a narrative conceit seemingly built for zany flight and tries to find the grounded human angles, which is sometimes tough. If the sense of scene-to-scene attachment and investment at times feels a bit sluggish or lacking (particularly early on), it’s because, as with many books but far fewer films, The Switch invests heartily in scenes with Wally figuring out what the audience already knows (e.g., a long talk with a pal, played by Jeff Goldblum, in which he eventually reconnects the dots of the drunken evening in question).

This isn’t a disqualifying problem so much as an observation. Owing largely to its source roots but also marked by choices in its cinematic adaptation, The Switch is deeply concerned with character and interior feeling (Wally’s ambivalence regarding possible fatherhood, and whether he can accept it either with or without romantic strings attached) and so it takes its time in meting out conflict; its unfussy slipstream rhythms are the exact opposite of the look-at-me gyrations and gesticulations that comprise so much of modern big screen comedy. If one counts their enjoyment of a film of this ilk solely based on laughing out loud, then The Switch is most assuredly not for them. If, however, they enjoy laughing silently to oneself, and then thinking a bit about where that laughter comes from, The Switch has some enjoyable moments to offer.

Kassie, thankfully, isn’t completely oblivious to the notion of Wally’s attraction to her, but the film is least persuasive in sketching out the deep-set particulars of their relationship, which seems to exist in an entirely desexualized state — somewhat ironic, given the nature of the movie’s conceit. Where The Switch is also very much in lockstep with its romantic comedy colleagues is in its flubbing of the penultimate moment of conflict, wherein Wally has to decide how to come clean to Kassie about what he’s done. Kassie reacts angrily, not because of anything rooted in logic, but seemingly only because the story then requires a stormy moment.

Still, Bateman is the exact right anchor for this sort of material, able to convey a quiet inner desperation while also still ringing up laughs and smiles purely off of line readings, based on his impeccable sense of timing. (Aniston, while still radiant, is a bit less successful, if only because Kassie seems underwritten, prone to flighty rationalizations.) While it’s being sold as another comedy of anarchic male ribaldry, the title of The Switch actually plays two ways since its atypicality is its biggest blessing. (Disney, PG-13, 101 minutes)

Samuel Maoz’s claustrophobic war drama, which picked up the Golden Lion prize at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is decidedly a case of the emperor’s new clothes — a forcedly subjective movie that takes the complexities and moral grayness of war and reduces it to empty melodrama cloaked in air-quote artfulness.

Based on Maoz’s personal experience serving in the Israeli army during the 1982 war of the same name, Lebanon takes place inside a tank during the first 24 hours of the invasion, as an inexperienced crew pushes nervously into a fire zone. There’s some initial imaginativeness to the film’s cinematography — unfolding through the tank’s crosshairs, with all its jerkiness and zooms — but this tack rather quickly becomes grating, and overall seems like a gambit to avoid taking responsibility for choices of framing.

A big part of the problem is that Maoz’s film is populated with characters so ineffectual as to undermine any cultivated sense of bother for or investment in their predicament. More problematically, Lebanon is riddled with falsely struck notes regardless of the subjects’ character and mettle. It’s wildly inconceivable, for instance, that once a Syrian who has fired a RPG at the group is captured and placed in the tank for transport, no one within has a problem with him, or indeed even seems concerned with interacting with him, one way or another. In introducing the potential for tension, only to fumble it away in ways equally unrealistic and infuriating, Lebanon proves itself resolutely incapable of adding anything new to the old adage, “War is hell.” (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 92 minutes)

Human history is littered with all manner of mass killing — from serial murders and genocides to crusades and wars of territorial incursion — and yet such evil is consistently rendered as beyond the pale in public accountings, as somehow aberrant and not a default state of the human condition that we are almost all possibly capable of if pushed to the limit, and faced with some of the same sorts of terrible circumstances.

Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s stirring, stomach-churning new documentary, Enemies of the People, reveals just how banal evil really is. The winner of a dozen top documentary festival awards, including the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Festival, the film provides a from-the-bottom-up look at the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, and concludes, chillingly, that amorality can indeed not only exist but also apparently thrive in a vacuum.

Journalist Sambath, whose family was wiped out in the Killing Fields, serves as the movie’s anchor and guide, his friendly smile masking a world of swallowed pain. The end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War set the stage for lingering unrest in neighboring Cambodia, where they remained distrustful of Vietnamese influence, to boil over, with terrible consequences. Sambath’s father became one of the nearly two million people murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he refused to give them his buffalo and other personal property. Sambath’s mother was then forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman, and subsequently died in childbirth in 1976; his eldest brother disappeared in 1977. Sambath himself escaped Cambodia at age 10, when the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979.

Fast forward to 1998, when Sambath, now a newspaperman in Phom Penh, got to know the children of some senior Khmer Rouge officials, and gradually earn their trust. For almost a decade he toiled on this passion project, leaving his own family and spending weekends on the road, working to gain the confidence of various
lower-level Khmer Rouge soldiers, now ordinary fathers and grandfathers, as well as the regime’s most senior surviving leader, Nuon Chea, the ranking number two officer under Pol Pot. Piecing together these interviews with narrated bits recounting some of his own familial history, Sambath and co-director Lemkin show how readily in the din and chaos of war — or, indeed, even just the presence of an emotionally charged us-versus-them scenario — ordinary people will do terrible things to their fellow countrymen.

This subject matter and the wrenching firsthand details that Sambath collects — ex-Khmer Rouge foot soldiers demonstrate in matter-of-fact fashion how they slit people’s throats, but one confesses that sometimes he had to alternate his grip and go for a straight stab of the neck because his arm became too tired from the repetitive motion — make for an engrossing if at times sickening experience. It’s a bit frustrating, then, that Sambath’s skill set as a filmmaker (and by extension Lemkin’s, since while he doesn’t appear on screen he shares in every other significant credit) doesn’t quite match his abundant reservoir of personal tolerance, and don’t extend to include a slightly more pointed and assertive investigatory style. Sambath’s hesitance to share his personal history with his most senior subject is understandable (and repeatedly explained within the film), but when video footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution by hanging surfaces and is shown to Nuon Chea, he has a curious reaction (“In spite of his arrest, [Saddam] showed he was a winner, and not a loser”) that, disappointingly, the filmmakers never follow up on.

It’s these sorts of small omissions in pressing that, far more important than just letting Nuon Chea off the hook, fail to fully illuminate the mindset that, in his words, would have stood by while governmental orders for the arrest and execution of specifically targeted political opponents were somehow translated into a systematic campaign of minority elimination in the eastern portion of the country. Enemies of the People toes the truth of human unpleasantness, getting closer to it than is comfortable for many general audiences (a Khmer Rouge boss, decades on, continues to refer to the ethnic cleansing as a “problem”) but doesn’t fully hold a mirror up to its most repugnant subject. Still, it’s a powerful and important work. For more information, click here. (International Film Circuit, R, 94 minutes)

Starring Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi, Gabriel Macht and Laura Ramsey, co-writer-director George Gallo’s Middle Men is a rangy immorality tale and crime drama inspired by the true story of a mid-1990s company that revolutionized the peddling of pornography online. The film has energy and some sleazy fun around the edges, but critically fails to ever locate a sincere and deeply lasting feeling, be it titillation or trepidation. It’s also dinged mightily by Wilson’s performance, sad to say. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 112 minutes)

Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev follows up the fascinating My Kid Could Paint That with this unsettling, emotionally affecting look behind the curtain of American mythmaking — a film that examines the truth behind NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman’s April 2004 death in Afghanistan from friendly fire, and exposes the high-level Army cover-up (and, yes, grinning, flag-waving media complicity) in knowingly packaging a phony version of this event as a heroic adjunct in a two-for-one narrative about noble wars of necessity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with an abiding interest in the intersection of media, politics and the particular history of American aggression will certainly find the movie gripping on that level, but it’s also affecting in nearly a dozen ways both specific (familial) and broader (rousing one’s independent-minded patriotic ire at such overt governmental manipulation). Interview footage with comrades provides a clear-eyed view of the tragedy itself, while family reminiscences give heartrending color to Tillman’s ghost. Some of the archival material is bracing (Tillman’s younger brother, Richard, strides to the podium to eulogize him with beer in hand, and pointedly tells the assembled pro-military crowd, including John McCain, “He’s not in heaven — he’s fucking dead”), and agonizingly illustrates the often hidden personal toll of what is now a war nearing a decade in length — in this case a family torn asunder once, and then re-traumatized through the betrayal of their government. Powerful and thought-provoking, The Tillman Story is sure to be on the documentary short-list for Academy Award consideration. For more information, click here. (Weinstein Company, R, 94 minutes)

Based on Guillermo Martinez’s award-winning novel, The Oxford Murders is an unlikely thriller, given its narrative investment in number theory and logical series. And the result, adapted by director Álex de la Iglesia and pitched at a breakneck, didactic clip, absent any sensible, modulated emotional investment in the characters or material, falls flat, accordingly. What wants to be a gumshoe Sherlock Holmes-ian tale with a hearty pinch of The Da Vinci Code‘s symbology never coalesces into anything more than a grating cinematic hybrid exercise, in which convoluted academic deduction enjoys the warmth of esteem and respect despite an increasing gulf between it and simple narrative logic.

The story deposits Martin (Elijah Wood), a young American graduate student, in England, where he’s just arrived at Oxford University, hoping to be a pupil of Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), a prestigious professor of logic and mathematics. When Martin’s elderly, terminally ill landlady is apparently murdered, the police initially focus on her daughter Beth (Julie Cox), but Seldom and Martin have a connection to the woman as well, having discovered the body together, and the former posits that hers is the first in a series of murders linked by strange symbols. Ergo, professor and student join forces to try and crack the code, setting into motion an elaborate game, even as the motivations of the alleged killer remain blurry.

The Oxford Murders goes to considerable lengths to establish and play up a litany of possible suspects, including Beth; a squash-playing nurse, Lorna (Leonor Watling, above), with a romantic connection to both Seldom and Martin; an oddball fellow student of Martin’s, Yuri (Burn Gorman); and the Christian fundamentalist father (Dominique Pinon) of a terminally ill little girl. A shame, then, that the suspense elements never catch fire, since we don’t really come to know any of the victims, and it’s posited early on that those targeted will be already close to death, for labyrinthine reasons related to the chain of symbols, and how the killer wishes to challenge Seldom.

Owing probably to both its novelistic roots and the nature of the material, the film possesses a certain breezy if at times self-satisfied intelligence and ambition, but almost nothing about the manner in which characters meet and interact seems to fit comfortably within the recognizably real world, and so the movie’s entire mystery plot feels like a hammy put-on almost from the get-go. When Martin meets Beth and her mother, huge chunks of expository dialogue are unleashed, and it becomes readily apparent that characters are going to behave in ways that feed (or obscure) a given plot point, rather than comes across as genuine. A couple scenes later, as Martin makes a play to attract Seldom as a thesis advisor, a lecture hall confrontation ensues, with a classroom full of students chuckling, for no other reason than to underline Martin’s humiliation. Later still in the movie, a madcap planned elopement (“to a place with no books, or logic series”) comes off as risible.

Still baby-faced as he approaches 30, Wood doesn’t find a way to convincingly convey Martin’s unhinged obsession with Seldom, which is meant to cast a bit of suspicion on him as well. Instead he just comes across as whiny, without much reasonable cause. Watling puts an assertive spin on a character who as written is a bit of a cipher, and she’s quite attractive to boot, but other characters are occasionally seen reading some of their math-jargon-specific dialogue off of cue cards. A pro’s pro, Hurt provides a bit of mooring, but not enough to give The Oxford Murders any lasting sense of purpose, or impression.

Hours after the conclusion of de la Iglesia’s movie, in fact, the only two moments that linger involve a random bit of colorful dialogue (“One day the Mad Hatter will come out of his closet and ass-fuck the lot of you!”), and Wood eating spaghetti off of Watling’s apron-clad chest. Oh, there were murders in the film, you say? I’d already forgot, I guess. While it’s theatrical release is fairly limited, for those interested, the movie is also available on VOD, Xbox Live, Playstation, Amazon and Vudu. For more information, click here. (Magnolia, R, 109 minutes)

The star-free Step Up franchise has proven a lucrative moneymaking machine for
corporate parent Disney, with the first two films racking up just under
$265 million combined, and the peppy second installment — helmed by Jon
Chu, who returns for a third go-round — in particular dramatically increasing its percentile foreign returns. This brings us to Step Up 3D, a movie that tries to serve as a reminder that, for all the advances in digital technology, the human body is and remains one of if not the most engaging big screen special effects there is. Unfortunately, loud and insurmountable narrative gear-grinding completely derails the energetically pitched third installment of the popular dance series, which never convincingly locates any sort of emotional pulse amidst its occasionally dazzling choreography. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/Summit, PG-13, 97 minutes)

Atypical genre plotting and some absolutely delicious twists feed British kidnapping thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, the solid and engaging feature directorial debut of J Blakeson. Plenty of movies have covered this narrative terrain before, but few in recent memory with as streamlined a sense of tension-soaked purpose.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a tightly drawn “three-hander,” with a deceptively simple plot. Planning to make a mint on a ransom-and-exchange scheme, ex-con kidnappers Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston) snatch Alice (Gemma Arterton), a young woman estranged from her wealthy businessman father. Despite having set up a secluded safe house and seemingly left nothing to chance, Vic and Danny — the latter the younger and more nervous of the two, the former powered by a snarling, steely conviction — soon find their plans upended. Though scared witless, Alice isn’t about to let her captors just use her as capital, but neither is the film merely some prodding feminist revenge tract.

From the outset, it’s clear that Blakeson’s film won’t kowtow to genre convention. The movie opens with an intriguing, dialogue-free, five-minute prep sequence in which Danny and Vic methodically set up shop — buying a drill, a mattress and other supplies; lining the inside of a windowless van with plastic; assembling a bed for the mattress; and stapling foam
insulation and plywood board to the walls and windows of the bedroom that will serve as Alice’s quarters of confinement. When the actual kidnapping takes place, it’s similarly presented in dispassionate, matter-of-fact fashion, despite Alice’s kicks and screams. In fact, it’s 10 minutes into the film before either party utters a line, really.

Interestingly and admirably, Blakeson isn’t concerned with or particularly invested in repeatedly using Alice’s vulnerability to wring tension and unease from his audience. Yet neither does he shy away from it, as when a hooded Alice is stripped, given new clothes and handcuffed in spread-eagle fashion; Arterton arches her back in wild anxiety, which is a visceral and realistic depiction of primitive fear. Once some measure of chatting and an explication of the chain of events yet to unfold begins, though, the movie really hits its stride, fed in large part by the differences in age and gender, and the underlying but ever-shifting power dynamics therein. Without giving away the movie’s twists, it suffices to say that — both before the ransom money arrives, and after — Blakeson does a fantastic job of screwing with both his audience’s expectations and senses of identification, though always in ways rooted in character, and never in a manner that feels tawdry or false.

Given the quiet, steely verve of its set-up, it’s somewhat to be expected that the film’s energy eventually starts to flag a bit. And it would have been interesting — once the film opens up a bit from its quite theatrical staging, and gets to stretch its legs some in its final act — for an outside character or two to force the hand of those grappling for control. But the performances here are gripping, and The Disappearance of Alice Creed‘s commitment to character-driven minimalism makes it a standout genre entry in the late summer indie sweepstakes. For more information, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 100 minutes)

Adapted from a novel by Ben Sherwood, and starring Zac Efron and Amanda Crew, Charlie St. Cloud is a passably effective melodrama that should play like catnip to its
star’s core female audience but hardly anyone else. An inoffensive,
worshipfully photographed, yet at times dramatically stolid
interpretation of swelling adolescent feeling, the movie wrings maximum
consequence out of Efron’s dewy-eyed, cherry-lipped pin-up
sensitivity. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)

The feature film debut of writer-director Ryan Piers Williams, The Dry Land centers on James (Ryan O’Nan, below right), an Iraqi War veteran who struggles to reconnect with family and friends, including wife Sara (America Ferrera), upon returning home to small town Texas. Riddled with post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to reconcile his experiences overseas with the staid life he left at home, James sets off on a road trip to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., hoping a wounded pal can shed light on the combat accident he can’t remember.

As James’ homebound friend and fellow vet, respectively, Jason Ritter and Wilmer Valderrama alternately inject some soulfulness and squirrelly energy into the movie. But, almost beat by beat, all the dramatic conflicts here are very familiar in both construction and source, from quick-trigger sexual aggression and communicative dysfunction to boozy masculine bonding gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the film’s female characters — shrews or wounded doves, all — are mostly underwritten to a ghastly degree. And while there’s lip service about “understanding,”  in none of the supporting characters’ actions do they ever seem to reflect a realization that direct confrontation is not the best form of engagement with psychologically fragile soldiers. Viewers needn’t have seen either Coming Home or Army Wives for this to ring essentially hollow. Narratively, The Dry Land just goads when it’s convenient and shrinks when it suits its purposes, never feeling like an honest exploration of its characters’ problems. For more information, click here. (Maya/Freestyle, R, 92 minutes)

A slow-burn rural drama that seems to unfold somewhere between real-life and deep-fried folk tale, feature debut director Aaron Schneider’s 1930s-set Get Low centers around Felix Bush (Robert Duvall, again trading in crazy-old-coot mode), an irascible hermit who lives in a cabin at the wooded edge of a small Tennessee town, where everyone seems to have heard a frightening story about him. Felix approaches funeral services director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray, amusingly projecting both self-interest and sincerity) and his assistant Buddy Robinson (Lucas Black), wanting to throw a funeral party… for himself, while he’s alive. Concocting a plan wherein townsfolk gather to share tales about him and he auctions off his land via lottery, Felix tries to work up the courage to share his own story. When he finds himself increasingly nervous as the date approaches, however, he turns to a figure from his past for some help.

The mystery driving this narrative forward, of course, is the nature of Felix’s self-imposed four-decade isolation, and that small stakes X-factor mostly works for the movie in a fairly low-key way. In the end, the dramatic payoff here is pretty mundane — a personal unburdening involving a former beau (Sissy Spacek) that has no real cathartic consequences for anyone else, and barely even really for Felix. It might not completely warrant Get Low‘s malingering pace, but serves as a reminder that the pleasures of life as frequently lie in the journey as the destination. Fans of Secondhand Lions, Starting Out In the Evening and Junebug take note. (Sony Classics, PG-13, 100 minutes)

French filmmaker Francis Veber’s works have long proven ripe for Hollywood adaptation, and his 1999 comedy The Dinner Game provides the source material underpinning for the odd-couple farce Dinner for Schmucks, which reunites The 40-Year-Old Virgin stars Steve Carell and Paul Rudd to generally underwhelming effect. Some mildly amusing character work and colorful detail gets largely lost in a movie that can’t decide whether it wants to be sour or sweet. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. Mind the pay-wall; it’s worth it, though. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG-13, 114 minutes)

A coolheaded yet still quite frightening nonfiction exploration of the inherent dangers of nuclear weapons and proliferation, Lucy Walker’s sobering Countdown to Zero makes a strong case, in non-polemical fashion, that political myopia is perhaps helping ink humankind’s eventual obituary.

The details make the thing. Much talking-head discussion centers around so-called loose nukes, but it’s also fascinating to hear former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (above) reflect regretfully on the 1986 Reykjavik summit breakdown, which could have possibly eliminated all nuclear weapons, or at least ballistic missiles (something many saber-rattling Reaganites are now too confused with anti-Obama rage to remember).

And there are, of course, many horror stories of nuclear disaster barely averted, plenty not widely known. One that was reported on was a 1995 American missile test over Norway that tripped all the signal wires of a preemptive attack. The Russians were informed of it in advance, but somehow failed to pass the message along up the chain of command, resulting in Boris Yeltsin (thankfully not intoxicated… or perhaps thankfully so?) being awoken in the middle of the night and given only a couple minutes to decide how to respond. If he’d followed established governmental protocol, he would have launched nuclear missiles at a dozen American cities. With so many threats in the world, it seems insane to continue to exist in a state of alert so open to malfunction, corruption and error. And yet if there’s anything that human history has taught us, it’s that we typically don’t truly learn a lesson until it’s we’ve paid disastrous consequences. (Magnolia, PG, 90 minutes)

Cult infamy and accidental celebrity take a turn under the microscope in Winnebago Man, an intriguing documentary from Ben Steinbauer that takes a look at Jack Rebney, the foulmouthed “star” of a viral sensation. Hired in the late 1980s to host a series of industrial videos for Winnebago’s RV campers, Rebney repeatedly lost his temper in the sweltering Iowa summer heat, and his crew — half out of irritation at his antics, half out of bemusement — left the camera rolling.

The outtakes became an underground sensation, traded around on VHS tapes, and, starting around 1995, became a huge hit on YouTube, generating millions of views worldwide. For his movie, Steinbauer tracks down the heretofore unexamined Rebney living in semi-seclusion in northern California, where he initially claims to know nothing of his strange demi-celebrity. Again given a stage, though, Rebney soon roars to life.

The original clips are funny because in them the savvy viewer recognizes, perhaps on a subliminal level, the public presentation of a very private anger (“Why don’t I say it fucking right? My mind is just a piece of shit!”). Steinbauer, though, never really seems to work up either a cogent thesis statement or tack of inquiry — his work bears the marks of a serial noodler. Early, promising strands seeming to offer some greater contextualization give way to little more than a travelogue, in which Steinbauer and a longtime friend of Rebney’s coax and cajole him into attending a special San Francisco festival screening of other video curios.

Even as Steinbauer becomes closer to his subject, and tries to inject biographical details of Rebney, the essence of the man remains curiously distant. Still, the emergent portrait is at least entertaining, offering a glimpse forward at the next generation of Andy Warhol’s famous assertion regarding fame, when one person’s 15 minutes can now become a frozen-in-time, perpetual humiliation — either good-naturedly owned, or forever an irritant. For more information, click here. (Kino, R, 85 minutes)

Standing unabashedly on the shoulders of giants, director Angela Ismailos pays homage to her favorite filmmakers in the documentary Great Directors. The worthy subjects? David Lynch, Richard Linklater, Stephen Frears, Bernardo Bertolucci, Todd Haynes (below, middle), Agnes Varda, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Liliana Cavani and Catherine Breillat.

Intercutting among these filmmakers in a fairly freely associative way, Ismailos (above right) explores each director’s artistic evolution, and, variously, the roles of politics, history, opportunity and peers on their work. The reflections are often revelatory, if in glancing fashion. Sayles discusses his writing-for-hire mindset and Haynes assays the “culturized, homogenized” version of screen gayness spawned by the ’90s New Queer cinema, while Linklater ruminates on the flipside benefits to the imagination that a (relative) lack of privilege breeds. While Ismailos lets a couple big opportunities for follow-up go unexplored (Lynch’s interesting assertion, in one of his few self-analytical moments, that Eraserhead is his “most spiritual work”), her film is still an inviting illumination on the struggles of being an artist, and attempting to achieve a singular vision in a creative medium that is also, and perhaps foremost, an industry. (Paladin, unrated, 86 minutes)

To try to completely distill filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s sprawling sci-fi chessboard action-drama on the fly and in short-form would be something of a fool’s game, so a longer review will likely follow, in some form, somewhere, but suffice it to say that an admiration and understanding of the mind-bending Inception rests largely in one’s appreciation for and tolerance of the idea of esoteric feeling fueling an action film rather than merely corporeal concerns.

Still plagued by the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), freelance corporate espionage agent Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) extracts ideas from dreams, tilling his victims’ subconscious for valuable information. Busted by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) who offers him a chance for amnesty by planting an idea deep in the mind of his ascendant rival (Cillian Murphy), Dom and his team plunge deep into a multi-layered dreamscape.

Rangy and intellectually muscular, Inception is flawed in the ways that only a brilliant, overreaching work can be. While almost always involving, it doesn’t have a suitably engaging antagonist, and its grander emotional strokes don’t quite pack the emotional wallop Nolan thinks they do, mainly because Mal remains a cipher, a placeholder of peaceable tranquility rather than a full-blooded character.

What’s most heartening and invigorating, though, is the sheer, staggering theoretical and philosophical ambition on display, and the amount of studio muscle and capital thrown at it, when pablum is so often Hollywood’s default setting. At its core, Inception is a rumination on the very human and appealing idea of utter stability, and arrested happiness. For plenty of film geeks, that will be achieved this summer. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 148 minutes)