A spirited and slickly mounted production that suffers more from sins of omission than commission, Predators gives distributor 20th Century Fox good reason to believe there’s life yet left in their alien hunters franchise.

Directed by Nimrod Antal (Vacancy), from a script by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, Predators opens with Adrien Brody awakening in a mid-air free-fall, dumped from up high on what turns out to be an alien planet, with a parachute that (naturally) barely opens in time. Brody’s square-jawed Royce, it turns out, is an experienced mercenary. In a matter of minutes, he’s soon surrounded by Isabelle (Alice Braga), an Israeli Defense Force sniper, and a set of assorted killers, scumbags and underworld enforcers (Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Walter Goggins and Louis Ozawa Changchien), with Topher Grace’s wimpy Chicago doctor apparently the odd man out. They quickly squash their beef, this group, rightly assuming that greater dangers lurk not too far around the edges of their strange new environment.

Firefights with boar-like beasties ensue. It seems that these alien predators apparently value the very sport of death-hunting, and having dangerous human game helps keep them on their toes, and adapt to new strategies of defense. At least that’s what the group eventually finds out from Noland (Laurence Fishburne), a cracked veteran they stumble across who’s been surviving on his own. As the predators’ hunt commences, the humans scramble to stay alive, and Royce hatches a long-shot plot to try to locate and commandeer the cloaked alien spaceship.

Other than a token fealty to the variable degrees by which characters’ actions are governed by some sense of human connection instead of purely self-interest, Predators doesn’t offer up much in the way of subtext or nuance. Instead, it’s mostly about action and letting viewers get a (nostalgic, for some) kick from seeing aliens using their heat-signature vision, and making their now characteristic gurgley-clicking noises. Its technical execution is fairly slick, but, damningly, the movie leaves untapped intrigue and tension on the table.

Its characterizations are thin (no great shock there) and its dialogue rarely more than functional, but also, crucially and unrealistically, there’s a level of basic unexamined human interaction to the movie that’s pretty baffling. When Royce and the others, all strangers, somewhat suss out that they’re each familiar with violence, let’s say, to put it euphemistically, no one ever glares at Grace’s character, points, and says, “Hey, what about this whitebread kid with glasses?” They just don’t have the conversation, which could be accomplished in a minute of screen time. Coming on the heels of the conclusion of small screen phenomenon Lost, which similarly made hay out of a group of strangers thrown together into an insane and intense situation in a remote environment, Predators seems especially lacking in this regard — in its steadfast, almost allergic avoidance to any sort of intellectual reasoning regarding the group’s surroundings and who might have put them there. Even if — as correctly ascertained and certainly born out through immediate experience — it’s basically just a survival-hunt obstacle course, wouldn’t all the gun-toting-types recognize the one not like the other, and voice something about that? Part of this, in theory, is to preserve a slight twist near the movie’s conclusion, but it doesn’t pass muster. It’s lame to (exclusively) have characters this plugged-in, reflexively unanalytical and ready to go.

What gives Predators its kick and pull, then, is its casting. The inking of Brody to the film (along with that of Grace) initially drew plenty of raised eyebrows from fans, but he handles the crypto-macho thing with aplomb, and steely nerve. Even though he’s beefed up a bit (20 pounds, say feature interviews, but that seems a bit generous), it cuts against the grain to see a somewhat lean, normally proportioned guy wading into the breach in a movie like this, and it comes off as refreshing. Braga, meanwhile, is solid, in the role that would have surely been given a bit too much sneering surface toughness by Michelle Rodriguez. And then there’s Fishburne, who wanders into the film deep in its second act, and absolutely owns a whispery-crazy scene in which he imparts some of the wisdom he’s gleaned from 10 “seasons” of hunting and being hunted. These three performances — in addition to the creative misfire that was 2007’s Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem — are a shared reminder that while otherworldly hunters may be the slaying stars of the show in the Predator series, humans still matter most in the equation. (20th Century Fox, R, 106 minutes)

As fans of the criminally underrated Laurel Canyon can attest, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko knows well of actors, bohemian life and quiet human moments. And she delivers another rich, warm and involving dramedy with The Kids Are All Right, the story of two teenage children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) who, without the advance consent of their lesbian mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), set out to find their sperm donor father (Mark
Ruffalo). When they succeed, what ensues is a series of small conflicts
and adjustments that have unforeseen repercussions.

Working with
collaborator Stuart Bloomberg (Keeping the Faith), Cholodenko delivers a
film that doesn’t condescend or strike a single false note, and whose
structure and detail work together in lockstep. There’s a warmth and
perfectly to-scale reactivity to all of the actors’ interactions, and
each character is imbued with a sense of silent yearning and searching — illustrating the uncomfortable truth that so many more slanted, typical
coming-of-age movies avoid: that the path of adolescence doesn’t
generally end with a flash of self-actualization and cast-in-stone
answers, only loose realizations of what lies ahead in adulthood. For this reason, among many others, The
Kids Are All Right is the best American independent film of the year
thus far. (Focus, R, 104 minutes)

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Restrepo is a slice of gritty pie — an experiential, you-are-there travelogue of war reportage from veteran conflict photographer Tim Hetherington and author-journalist Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) that chronicles a year-plus of fighting in Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley. While not without some undeniable anecdotal punching power, the film nonetheless seems like a bit of a relic since it unfolds in a relative vacuum, willfully ignorant or silent on any of the factors influencing some of the events we see on the ground.



Unfolding from June 2007 through July 2008, in a remote valley in the eastern part of Afghanistan, where at one point 70 percent of all the ordinance being used in the war in was being dropped, Restrepo (pronounced ress-TREP-o) offers up a look at the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company, as they engage in wrestling matches, weekly “shuras,” or meetings with locals, and, most notably, the building and stubborn maintenance of a same-named, remote forward operating post, tabbed for a fallen medic comrade. This footage — presented somewhat chronologically, but not exactingly so, and never with date stamps — is intercut with separate, closely shot, individual interview reminiscences.

On both a technical level — the captured footage of the nearly daily firefights pops with a jumbled, chaotic authenticity that would make even Paul Greengrass jealous — and a base emotional level, the movie connects. Owing to both its terrain and conditions on the ground, the Korengal Valley seems a pretty hellish place, fairly immune to even the most meager material comforts (hot meals, iPods, slightly comfortable beds) that are part of modern-day warfare, and Restrepo communicates this.

Embedded with the soldiers for the whole year, Hetherington and Junger, operating their own cameras but staying out of the frames, do a good job in capturing the pervasive sense of low-lying dread and anxiety that swirls around the regular grunts on the ground in war. But they seem allergic to any broader contextual framing or analysis. As such, it’s almost as if Restrepo dates from the days of the Korean War or the early Vietnam era, before the idea of any sort of messiness seeped into the manner in which war was packaged and sold to the American public back at home.

The most heartrending stuff — one soldier talking about avoiding mentioning any of the specifics of his deployment in conversations home, and having to swallow hard and put on a shine when wishing his mother a happy birthday just days after losing a buddy; another smiling in clinched psychological disengagement while talking about taking sleeping pills to combat post-traumatic stress reactions and nightmares — comes from the first-person testimonials that are intertwined with all the captured day-to-day footage. The sad and bitter truth, though, is that those passages would retain their impact even without anything else being used to frame them. Restrepo represents, in its hands-on construction, an extraordinary feat. The actual finished product, however, doesn’t attempt to give any value to the actions of the men on screen, and as such it robs them of their courage, in a way. (National Geographic Entertainment/Outpost Films, unrated, 93 minutes)

Slapdash filmmaking and a thick, indolent haze of self-satisfaction most characterize Grown Ups, Adam Sandler’s new ensemble laffer, which rounds up a bunch of old costars and offscreen pals and serves as an informal reunion of Saturday Night Live alumni. A few fitful flashes of interpersonal ribbing interrupt what is otherwise a wan, meandering tale, which warms over hackneyed bromides about familial engagement and ladles those over thinly sketched characters and stock banter galore. Predictably, the actors just each yawningly trade on their own well-worn personas. It’s air-quote comedy, with all the make-a-buck calculation of a rock ‘n’ roll reunion tour. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 102 minutes)

Reframing the hero’s journey around the story of an ambitious villain whose quest for notoriety stems from maternal approval he never received as a child, the 3-D animated film Despicable Me, with a lead vocal performance by Steve Carell, delivers a steady stream of colorful, unfussy engagement. An imaginative visual design, compelling characterizations and witty interplay between the two elevate a tale whose component parts are otherwise quite familiar. While Toy Story 3 will continue to exert a strong pull on family audiences throughout the summer, there should be plenty of room in the marketplace for this potential franchise-in-waiting, which opens Stateside July 9. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG, 95 minutes)

The potentially interesting mixture of several different genres gets wasted in the dreadful, bafflingly thin, supernaturally-inflected Western actioner Jonah Hex, about a vengeful Civil War-era bounty hunter whose brush with death leaves him with the ability to communicate with the dead. Distinct from its various failings, this DC comic book adaptation, starring Josh Brolin, Megan Fox and John Malkovich, is most notable for how skimpy and curiously under-sketched it feels given its passel of familiar faces. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 81 minutes)

Locating a winsome blend of peppy ensemble adventure and nostalgic reflection, Toy Story 3 is the type of film adults might goad their just-as-eager children into seeing again. Coming 15 years since the first film revolutionized animated storytelling, and over a decade since the last installment, this chapter again imaginatively details some cooperative toy questing, while also movingly assaying change, and what it means for the fundamental nature of a relationship to be irrevocably altered. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney/Pixar, G, 102 minutes)

Picking up immediately after the events of 2008’s Diary of the Dead, Survival
of the Dead is the sixth film from writer-director George
Romero to posit and examine a world where humans are in the minority, and flesh-eating
zombies rule. It’s also a sad confirmation of if not his complete creative bankruptcy then certainly his wildly diminished gift for imparting glancing metaphorical dread.

The film opens off the coast of Delaware on Plum Island (based loosely on the same-named remote animal disease center 100 miles northeast of New
York City, in the Long Island Sound), where zombiedom is apparently only the latest wrinkle in a generations-long struggle for power between two families. The O’Flynn clan, headed by patriarch Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh, dialing up the Billy Connelly), approach the zombie plague with a lock-and-load, shoot-to-kill attitude. The Muldoons, headed up by Shamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), feel that the zombies should be quarantined and kept alive, in hopes that a solution will someday be found.

When Shamus and his crew get the drop on Patrick, they force him into exile by boat, where on the mainland he meets up with a band of soldiers, headed by the square-jawed Sarge (Alan Van Sprang). After a shootout and standoff, a cajoling Patrick rebrands himself and misrepresents his mission, sneakily getting Sarge and his military brethren to sign on for a return to the island. There, they find that the zombie plague has fully gripped the divided community. As the battle between humans and zombies escalates, Patrick has to come to terms with a difficult reunion with his infected daughter, Janet (Kathleen Munroe).

A huge part of Romero’s justifiably earned credit as a master genre filmmaker lies in his blend of humor and pointed social commentary within the horror milieu. Survival of the Dead reveals, though, in the starkest terms possible,
that a large part of Romero’s reputation has always been a result of diminished expectation — of his penchant for being able to do more with less, in terms of production resources and a professionally trained cast.

Many other reviews will likely pull punches regarding the craftsmanship of the film, but Survival of the Dead repeatedly exhibits poor choices on both narrative and technical levels, from picking the wrong point of entry into the story as a whole and dawdling with less interesting set-ups to flatly framing its action. In fact, none of the attack sequences are either executed at a skill level high enough to raise heart rates, or even staged in a fashion to evoke such feelings.

Furthermore, there’s a warped, nonsensical nature to the film’s interior logic. (Hammy performances and awkward, emotionally-on-the-nose dialogue don’t help matters.) Characters are by various turns motivated by money (in a world where clearly this no longer matters) and misplaced senses of air-quote glory, even when they’re aware of the apocalyptic conditions of the world beyond the story’s most immediate borders.

Most damningly, though, Romero doesn’t seem to bring into focus any viable subtext, to prop up what is otherwise an exceedingly one-note, uninteresting conflict. There’s the faintest hint of Shamus serving as a stand-in for isolationist/anti-immigration viewpoints (“We have an obligation to protect what’s ours,” he thunders at one point), but this isn’t ever developed in a substantive way, and so interpretations in this regard wither on the vine. Even Romero doesn’t seem to know — or care — where all of this is really going. Somewhat miraculously, the film builds to a climax — involving the attempted training of zombies to eat animal meat, rather than persons — where even
one of the main characters dozes off. If a gun-toting fundamentalist in a supposedly tense standoff in a world full of marauding zombies can’t be bothered to stay awake and invested in the proceedings, how can an audience? (Magnet, R, 90 minutes)

Since its small screen inception in 1998, Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, has served as a chatty, fashionable sounding board for the thrills and travails of big-city professional women, and the turbulence in romantic expectation that the changing landscape of gender roles has wrought. The follow-up to the series’ enormously successful transition to the big screen, Sex and the City 2 spins forward its heroines on an adventure abroad. The result is a bloated, wearyingly unsubtle and dramatically inert valentine to conspicuous consumption. Writer-director Michael Patrick King, who served as show runner on the TV series for most of its duration, aims for a comedy of material extravagance, but his tone is so willfully broad as to cause dissociation with almost any sentient adult, regardless of income bracket. Working with a reported wardrobe budget of $10 million, Oscar-nominated costume designer Patricia Field at least gives armchair fashionistas much to ogle. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 146 minutes)

Adapted from the same-named series of Saturday Night Live short comedic sketches about a clueless, angsty soldier of fortune whose talkative nature habitually prevents him from disabling a series of bombs, the willfully crude and vulgar action-comedy MacGruber should end the series of big screen bombs adapted from the show. A foul-mouthed send-up of testosterone-infused, small-budgeted ’80s action flicks, MacGruber is more of a functional than revelatory success — its script doesn’t really substantially or satisfyingly delve into a number of amusing character defects it sets up for its self-involved hero. But there’s undeniably a woolly, shambling charm to the film, particularly in the contrast found between Will Forte’s blustery, buffoonish performance, and Kristen Wiig’s tight-lipped, nervous energy. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 90 minutes)

A selection at Sundance earlier this year, period piece drama Holy Rollers lifts a veil on Jewish Orthodoxy and reveals a world where — shock of shocks — religious adolescents aren’t immune to doubt and desire and even behavior that contradicts their own sense of self. Unlike the recent Happiness Runs, another skewed sort of coming-of-age tale, Holy Rollers takes filtered, subjective truth and drug experimentation and spins it into something personal and woozy and idiosyncratic, yet still relatable to an outside audience without much of a deeper knowledge or rooting interest in its subcultural milieu.

Directed by Kevin Asch, from a screenplay by Antonio Macia, the film is inspired by actual events in the late 1990s when Hasidic Jews were recruited as mules to smuggle ecstasy from Europe into the United States. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Sam Gold, a young Hasid from a tight-knit Brooklyn community who is nervously following the carefully prescribed path laid out for him by his family, which includes studying to become a rabbi, working with his garment dealer father, Mendel (Mark Ivanir), and awaiting the final confirmation of a pending arranged marriage to Zeldy (Stella Keitel, daughter of Harvey and Lorraine Bracco). At this time, Sam falls under the sway of the charming older brother, Yosef (Justin Bartha), of his good friend and neighbor, Leon Zimmerman (Jason Fuchs).

Yosef taps Sam to help him transport “medicine” for Jackie Solomon (Danny Abeckaser, above left), an Israeli dealer who operates under the guise of an import-export business. (Yosef’s amusing advice for a nervous Sam: “Relax, mind your business, and act Jewish.”) Crunching numbers on the fly, Sam quickly demonstrates his business acumen to his new boss, who takes Sam under his wing. As he showcases his increasing indispensability to Jackie, Sam finds his heady exposure to the respective nightlife worlds of Manhattan and Amsterdam, which he frequents for travel, to be both exciting and corrosive. As the business grows and his family starts to become suspicious of his illegal activities, Sam grapples with a not-exactly-discouraged burgeoning attraction to Jackie’s girlfriend Rachel (Ari Graynor, above right), and slowly comes to realize the unstable nature of the façade related to all this easy money. Caught between life as a smuggler and the path back to God, Sam has no easy answers, but instead only tough choices.

Eisenberg is an actor who, ever since bursting onto the scene in 2002’s precious, somewhat contrived Roger Dodger, has induced in me a not completely explicable exasperation. He suffered a terrible wig in Cursed, which would’ve failed irrespective of his involvement. And I’ve actually legitimately dug a couple films in which he’s appeared, most notably The Hunting Party and Adventureland; while it would be snide and neither fair nor totally true to say I enjoyed them in spite of his presence, they haven’t exactly been actorly triumphs, in my view. I’ve tolerated Jesse Eisenberg, in other words, waiting for him to give me something different, something less mannered and obvious than the same stammering nice guy wallflower of whom he’s played various iterations.

Holy Rollers is the film that finally shows a glimpse of something different. It’s not jaw-droppingly revelatory, but Eisenberg’s attuned performance showcases the slow bleed of secularism into Sam’s distinctly ethnic patter, and when he propositions elopement with Rachel in fitful fashion late in the movie, it plays as both a mock come-on from a guy who doesn’t know from flirting as well as heartbreakingly real.

Debut feature director Asch keeps the tone relaxed and real, so that one has an appreciation of the sincerity of Sam’s faith without it becoming a smothering trait. In portraying the difficulty with which Sam stands astride two worlds, increasingly at odds, the movie doesn’t implicitly choose a side, and the audience is the ultimate winner in the adaptation of this unlikely true story, which richly captures all the befuddlement of youth, albeit in some circumstances of extreme duress. (First Independent, R, 89 minutes)

It’s no surprise that Middle Eastern-set tales of war, religion, families torn apart and the jumbled intersection of all three have become rich documentary fodder over the past decade; nonfiction filmmakers, as much as anyone else trading in the feature narrative realm, go where the stories are. The worst of these movies goad and poke, playing merely to audience expectation about what feelings their subject matter should elicit. With The Oath, though, director Laura Poitras does something remarkable, and in its own way instructive and important: she constructs a three-dimensional portrait of a ex-jihadist who, nearly a decade removed from the commencement of the war in Afghanistan, still hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and in some ways remains more confused than ever.

Though imprisoned at the time, Abu Jandal (above) became an important figure in American intelligence circles in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. As Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and a self-proclaimed “emir of hospitality” for Afghan jihad recruits, he personally met and hosted all of the 9/11 hijackers, even though he claims (and there’s good reason to believe) he had no operational foreknowledge of their plan.

A nominally reformed family man (after serving more than two years in Yemeni prison, for charges stemming from the bombing of the USS Cole, he was released in 2003 as part of a government reeducation and reintegration program), Jandal is a taxi driver in Yemen when we meet him. He doesn’t make a great first impression. One glimpses some of the salving effects of domesticated life (Jandal waking up his
son Habeeb for 4:30 a.m. prayers, and instructing him in religious ritual), even as one winces at the pictures of an infant with an AK-47. Almost immediately, Jandal emerges as a bundle of contradictions, extolling the “stain” upon America’s reputation rendered by the World Trade Center attacks while also popping a Coke, a detail the director doesn’t miss. Later, he explains why, despite having fought on the front lines in Bosnia, he would not have participated in a “spectacular” attack like 9/11, even if asked by bin Laden; the next day, he reconsiders, and asks the tape of that interview to be deleted.

The offscreen foil for much of Jandal’s inner tumult is his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s personal driver and the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner to face America’s controversial military tribunals. The pair’s intertwined personal histories, and Jandal’s lingering guilt over his role in Hamdan’s fate, act as prisms which allow Poitras to explore and contextualize a world that has largely confounded Western media — that of the aggrieved and politically voiceless Muslim working poor.

Poitras, helmer of the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country, constructs The
Oath largely as a psychological character study of Jandal, so the natural ebbs and flows of one’s opinion of her subject seem to matter relatively little. She works in file footage (Jandal on 60 Minutes,
etcetera) alongside new interview material, but also lets audiences see him in a more natural and relaxed habitat, holding forth with younger Yemeni Muslims, some of whom might be sympathetic to a life of dedicated jihad. On a certain level, the educated, reflective Jandal seems to have a bit
of a narcissistic streak; he appears to like the attention that his erstwhile
association with bin Laden provides. Yet his regret and concern for Hamdan is genuine, as is a seemingly burgeoning realization that guns and violence do not solve everything.

In so tracking Hamdan, the film also provides an overview of the flaws in America’s schizophrenic treatment of war-on-terror detainees (Congress adopted a retroactive “material support to terrorism” felony charge after the 5-3 landmark 2006 Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case). The Oath‘s objectivity, its greatest narrative asset, naturally limits its potential commercial reach, since reactionary forces even beyond the reach of FOX News still peddle this brawny, mock-patriotic notion that the faintest strokes of grey morality give “aid and comfort to America’s enemies,” as if either complacency or contentment can themselves pack a C4 cap or trigger a dirty bomb, or were somehow in abundance in Afghanistan on September 11.

What one is left with in The Oath is a stirring, engaging film that elicits more questions than it answers. Near the end of the movie, we learn that the actionable intelligence
from Jandal’s (non-coerced) debriefing, spread out over two weeks, was so
important to the United States learning more about bin Laden and
Al-Qaeda that the very start of the war in Afghanistan was delayed in
order to allow for it to continue. We also see Jandal talk broadly about human rights, and then moments later argue against Al-Qaeda ever being drawn into the political process, saying, “When you accept the other as he is, then you’re in agreement with his infidelity and lowliness.” His fuse seems still lit, basically. So what gives? Radicalism isn’t just a flame to be snuffed out, the movie posits, perhaps unnervingly to some. After all, both water and fire are sometimes used to fight fire. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 96 minutes)

Happiness Runs is one of those movies that wears its air-quote truth like a protective cloak, to fend off criticisms of its narrative inadequacies: after all, if this is based on a true story, how could it possibly not be infused with hidden profundity? A semi-autobiographical slice of indulgent emo noodling written and directed by Adam Sherman, the film unfolds at a California hippie commune, where a passel of kids struggle with boundary-less situations and generally try (or at least talk about trying) to escape the hazy clutches of drug addiction and other self-destructive behavior.



The film centers on Victor (Mark Young, above right), a neglected teenager who’s ready to bust out into the world at large, if only his mom (Andie MacDowell) would give him some walking-around money instead of repeatedly signing it away to the charismatic guru, Insley (Rutger Hauer), who oversees life on the commune. Both Insley and Victor’s out-to-lunch father (Mark Boone Junior) seem more interested in hypnotizing and seducing women than anything else, but while others — including fellow teenager Jake (Shiloh Fernandez), who’s tested out sexual promiscuity in the world at large and returned to the commune — seem interested in emulating this lifestyle, Victor nurses a quiet crush on Becky (Hanna Hall, above left, of Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake), who’s returned to take care of her deathly ill father. Desperate to save Becky, but stuck in a rut that finds him the shortest side of a sort of wildly unhealthy love trapezoid which also involves Jake and Chad (Jesse Plemons), rival drug peddlers to the commune’s even younger kids, Victor trips through days and nights, uncertain of what to do.

We’re clued into the fact that Victor realizes the inherent shortcomings of theutopian ideals he’s been fed and raised on, but we don’t get to take that journey with him, nor ever see him truly, forcefully put his newfound perspective in action. He merely exists in wan, unfocused contrast to what unfolds around him. Sherman seems to conflate adolescent sexual promiscuity and a generally pervasive atmosphere of druggy abandon with foregrounded dramatic conflict, so Hall exhibits various states of undress and swings between guys while Victor kind of squints and wonders about it.

The kids aren’t all right, and we know that, certainly, but there’s nothing in this moralizing, self-consciously artistic, broad-strokes drama that really gets under one’s skin, or even particularly haphazardly connects with an aging puncher’s jarring force. The performances are as bland and generic as the words put in the characters’ mouths, and so Happiness Runs just unfolds languidly, a sort of less surly, more relaxed alt-hippie version of The Chumscrubber, in which the entire point seems to be how amazing it is that any teenager could ever even rise out of bed in the morning, given the damage done unto them by adults. (Strand, R, 89 minutes)

Teaming up for the fifth time, Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott exercise their gladiatorial instincts once again with Robin Hood, a beefy, brawny epic that, not unlike Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven before it, exudes a certain world-weary spirit. While the filmmakers and studios involved in most Hollywood summer flicks are trending ever increasingly toward streamlined, bantamweight fare, Scott is tracking in the exact opposite direction.

While not dour, per se, Robin Hood provides ample evidence that the veteran filmmaker wants (and indeed, maybe is incapable of delivering anything otherwise) to make films that kick up no small amount of dust, that look beautiful but have grit, that feature dirty fingernails alongside their aggressively modern foley mixes. In placing such an emphasis on chainmail authenticity and the events that lead to “Robin Longstride” returning from the Crusades and slowly growing into such a fanciful figure of legend, however, Scott and Crowe potentially run the risk of delivering a film that is so inconveniently, wildly out of step with mainstream audience expectation as to disappoint.



Based on a script from Brian Helgeland, Robin Hood opens on the edge of the 13th century, at the end of a 10-year religiously inspired military campaign by crusading king Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston). As they make their way home through France, Richard is felled, leaving capricious younger brother Prince John (Oscar Isaac) susceptible to the more cunning machinations of Godfrey (Mark Strong), a power player looking to stoke the fires of Northern discontent against the British crown, and pave the way for a French incursion.

Robin Longstride (Crowe) is but a lowly archer, garrisoned for fighting, but he soon finds himself on the lam with a motley crew of fellow soldiers, including Little John (Kevin Durand). Using the dead king’s crown and a dead knight’s sword, the group secures passage back to England, letting the lies of their noble stock live on for a while. Haunted by a wish to a dying countryman, Robin feels compelled to return said sword to the fallen knight’s father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow), where he meets widower Marion Loxley (Cate Blanchett). Walter then concocts a scheme to welcome Robin back as his deceased son, which he asserts will offer legal protection for their already squeezed, almost starving estate upon his passing.

As Godfrey’s deceits are revealed, various parties inveigh upon Prince John to strike a conciliatory tone with the overtaxed, fed-up tribal factions of Northern England, in order to more effectively turn back the gathering foreign threat. The young king momentarily accedes, and the penultimate showdown in Robin Hood is a beach-set burly-brawl, in which Robin gets to wade out into the tide and smash swords with Godfrey, against a chaotic backdrop that serves as a period piece homage to Saving Private Ryan‘s opening Normandy sequence.

Despite Crowe’s insistence to the contrary, agitated Tea Partiers will likely find a political message here, sparking to the film’s anti-tax, yay-liberty! message that every man should be free to fend for himself. (They’ll conveniently ignore the fact that Robin’s country has been bankrupted largely by the hawkish over-extension of ill-advised foreign military entanglements.) But much of Robin Hood actually runs counter to what has helped entrench the character in popular consciousness. In fact, taking a page from so many comic book adaptations of late, the movie basically serves as an origin story/prequel to the Robin Hood who challenges corruption, and through his quiver and arrow gives voice to the poor. This is essentially Robin Hood’s walkabout — the period wherein he finds out about his deceased father and reaffirms the intestinal fortitude that informs his subsequent “outlaw” existence.

In and of itself that’s not a terrible thing, given the handsomeness with which this production is mounted, and the slow-burn charisma — notably from Crowe, but also some bit players — that powers the movie. It just makes for a thing to be settled into rather than whisked away by. The first hour is a bit sludgy at times, and other than the left-field decision to slap a suit of armor on her for the aforementioned beach siege, there’s not really much for Blanchett to do as Marion. Helgeland and Scott never seem to quite figure out whether their film is supposed to truly submit to the delicate flirtation between Robin and Marion (who, after all, has just lost her husband, no matter the fact that she scarcely knew him), and as such the latter just kind of floats around the film’s edges.

Finally, there’s the movie’s third act speechifying, the very idea of which is rather ridiculous; I don’t think monarchs encouraged in-the-round outdoor debate, let alone impassioned monologues of dissent. For all its investment in historical accuracy on the battlefields, it seems Robin Hood still didn’t figure out a way to completely avoid the Candyland shortcut allure of overly convenient dramatic license. (Universal, PG-13, 140 minutes)

For a moment, I thought about staying up for 72 consecutive hours after seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street, in an effort to see if sleep deprivation increased my admiration for its bleary-eyed performances, or otherwise gave the movie any shading and nuance not heretofore detected. Such an exercise in “method reviewing,” however, would be more comparative analysis than director Samuel Bayer’s reboot of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film deserves.

Despite hewing closely to the original in some of its set piece deaths, one’s familiarity with that horror genre touchstone is hardly a necessity. As with most movies of its ilk, the storyline here centers around a group of kids stalked by a ghastly figure, in this case the burned, dream-world presence of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), an old elementary school groundskeeper about whom the small burgh’s other adults have been harboring an old secret. Once the babe and the only guy whose jerky-surly demeanor seems capable of infusing some personality into the proceedings (Katie Cassidy, above, and Thomas Dekker, respectively) are dispatched, that leaves audiences stuck with high school drabs Nancy (Rooney Mara, younger sister of Kate Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner), as they try to unravel the mystery of why they’re suddenly being dream-stalked by the same menacing figure.

There’s a bit of an expanded backstory for Krueger here, but not much in Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay to make one feel anything very deeply. The introduced notion of “micro-naps” (a sort of auto-sleep function of the human brain that kicks in after two-plus days without sleep, and results in auditory and visual hallucinations) provides a ready-made template for some interesting narrative hiccups and head feints about how Krueger enters the consciousnesses of his victims, but the filmmakers massively drop the ball in this regard. Neither does the script have any sort of genuine, fevered investigative pop. Apart from a cursory dab of over-emoting spread thinly over two scenes, none of the characters seems particularly thrown for a loop that, you know, there is a character (at this point they don’t even know he is essentially the spirit of a real person) who can physically kill them only in their sleep; at one point Quentin just blurts out, “If you die in your dreams, you die in real life,” which seems like lazy self-diagnosis, even for a horror film that doesn’t particularly seem to aspire to anything beyond a healthy opening weekend gross. In making the thrust of the movie a search for who Krueger is rather than why he is suddenly tormenting them, A Nightmare on Elm Street comes across like nothing so much as a boring, gory junior detective procedural.

Bayer, the director of some of the most seminal music video clips of the past quarter century, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” has a firm grasp of the technology at his disposal, no doubt; he lights effectively for mood, and figures out a few evocative framing devices, though I could have done without the re-up of the iconic ob-gyn-style point-of-view bathtub shot, which manages to come across as both skeevy and inappropriately humorous at the same time. Chiefly, though, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a misfire of imagination. Its sound effects-driven “boo scares” evoke a small clutch of familiar responses, but Haley’s voice, as Krueger, is so heavily processed and amplified that it has a divorcing effect from the darkness of the plotline, which is the enveloping swirl of psychological trauma resulting from child abuse. That’s a real horror, and this Nightmare on Elm Street glosses over it entirely, using it only for cheap, gimmicky effect. (Warner Bros./New Line, R, 96 minutes)

Brendan Fraser makes a play for family audiences with Furry Vengeance, a slapstick misfire of epic proportions. Even by downwardly adjusted expectations and more forgiving standards of movies in which anthropomorphized animals do battle with humans, Furry Vengeance is witless and wince-inducing. Unsuspecting family audiences could be roped in during its debut weekend, but the movie should otherwise sink with deadly word-of-mouth, finding second wind in ancillary markets only as an innocuous video babysitter. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG, 91 minutes)

Its string of lesser sequels coined the derisive term “Death Wish cinema,” as well as unfortunately relegating Charles Bronson to something of a joke, but tony revenge tales with well-groomed or otherwise unlikely protagonists, from Jodie Foster’s The Brave One to last year’s first-quarter smash hit Taken, continue to crop up at the rate of three or four a year, and will always be a part of moviemaking as long as people have reason to fear for their families (which is to say as long as people have families). The gritty, engaging Harry Brown again proves this sub-genre is not purely some aggressive Stateside phenomenon. Michael Caine has cycled through his share of kindly butlers and gruff mentors of late, but his starring role as the titular avenging pensioner helps give this tale a robustness, mooring and social relevance lacking in many such films.

Harry Brown unfolds in London’s East End, against a backdrop of marauding, tension and despair. After his old pal Len Atwell (David Bradley), a fellow retiree, gets beaten to death by a group of thug teenagers, 76-year-old veteran Harry is devastated, and more than a bit scared. He doesn’t immediately start taking measures to try to make sure those responsible are brought to justice, however; like Len, he’s set upon at night, returning home from a local pub. His first act of violence is also one of defense, stabbing his attacker with a bayonet from an old Army rifle.

Meanwhile, dedicated and by-the-book detective inspector Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer), along with her more skeptical partner, Andrew Childs (Iain Glen), are tasked by their boss with bringing this area under control, before its tensions completely boil over. They interview Harry, and arrest a gaggle of local ne’er-do-wells in Len’s death, including sneering sociopath Noel Winters (Ben Drew). Unable to completely crack their wall of silence, however, they eventually have to let the kids go. It’s at this point that Harry becomes a more proactive force of violent counterweight. Alice has suspicions about what Harry is up to, and works to bring him to justice, but isn’t able to seal the deal before a mini-riot at the neighborhood’s high-rise dwelling puts many more people in jeopardy.

Working with cinematographer Martin Ruhe (Anton Corbijn’s Control, Julie Delpy’s The Countess), debut feature director Daniel Barber crafts an unnerving, kinetic, point-of-view opening to the movie (some of the kids take cell phone video-camera footage of their exploits), but never allows Harry Brown to tip over into a jittery piece of caffeinated vengeance. It’s perfectly modulated, balanced between austere and modern. The grimy, brown-and-grey color palette convincingly communicates a setting that is oppressive and stifling for all those involved — it conveys the squalor, lack of opportunity and attendant acting out for adolescents, while also capturing the resultant fear of a general, law-abiding populace who has to keep their eyes down lest they be accused of looking askance at someone.

Martin Phipps and Ruth Barrett’s score ably portends doom, rumbling like an ominous church organ at times, and while Gary Young’s script isn’t necessarily revelatory, it does allow for a small handful of twists. Its chief asset may actually be its cleanly delineated structure, which allows for a couple remarkable long-play scenes to unfold slowly and naturally — one in a drug den, where Harry goes to try to secure a gun, and another an interrogation sequence in which Alice remains cool and collected in the face of Ben’s nasty rants. While matters of violence are at its core, Harry Brown isn’t a movie that feels the need to goad or prod viewers all that unnecessarily with flashes of stylistic excess, and this works quite well, in lockstep with its shuffling protagonist. It’s a kind of urban western, in a way. Things only get a bit hairy in its gone-to-hell finale, which (unsurprisingly, I guess) favors brawny crescendo over something more muted.

Through this all, Caine delivers a performance befitting his experience, and in line with some of his strengths — an ability to convey anxiety or swallowed fear within physical stillness. Informed by the crumbling social structures around him, Harry’s journey is an honest one. It may not be marked by choices all of us would make in our own lives, but it rings true. Because, after all, the capacity for violence exists in all of us. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 101 minutes)

Brian Cox and Paul Dano, costars in Michael Cuesta’s arresting L.I.E., reteam for Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kári in the form of The Good Heart, a spare drama of unlikely mentorship that makes good use of its two actors’ talents and rapport, but ultimately comes off as a self-conscious collection of grimy, fringe-dwelling “types.” The rising profiles of its two stars — including Dano’s lauded turn in There Will Be Blood, and Cox’s commercial recognizability from X2 and two of the three Jason Bourne films — will help lend Stateside arthouse intrigue and credibility to what is otherwise a fairly thinly sketched tale of fated emotional awakening. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Magnolia, R, 94 minutes)

In his feature debut In My Sleep, writer-director Allen Wolf delivers a solidly structured if never truly riveting thriller, in which levers of dramatic engagement are competently pulled for about half of the film’s running time, at which point it starts to quickly unravel into a labyrinthine tangle of soap-y contrivance and improbably centralized conflict.

Philip Winchester (above right) stars as Marcus, a virile, single Los Angeleno who suffers from parasomnia, in which he wakes up in the morning completely oblivious to what he might have done the night before. He takes some meds for this, but the pills only seem to work sporadically. One morning, he wakes up covered in blood. Later that afternoon, things take a dramatic turn for the worse when Ann (Kelly Overton), the wife of his boss and longtime best friend Justin (Tim Draxl), turns up dead. Could Marcus really have murdered her, either in some sort of rage or jealous fit?

Making friends with his photographer neighbor Becky (Lacey Chabert, above left), Marcus starts to investigate his own actions, and have himself handcuffed to his bed at night, in order to restrict his roaming. Oh, and despite the fact that he’s just lost a good friend, and has problems not concretely linked to this sudden trauma, Marcus also starts attending Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings, where he immediately befriends a mysterious woman, Gwen (Mad Men‘s Abigail Spencer), who offers to help test the aforementioned blood found on his clothing.

Obviously budgeted fairly tightly, In My Sleep has the beating heart of a slice of noir, but a production design and tone that never quite seems in lockstep with the material. Non-discrete lighting throughout renders the look of some already chintzy sets distressingly the same —
whether it’s an apartment, a doctor’s office, or Marcus and Justin’s day
spa/massage parlor. And despite some macho stuff seeded throughout (Marcus does well with the ladies, which seems incidental to the story), there seems to be a gay-baiting subtext to the picture, given the almost comical amount of chiseled, B-cup shirtlessness Winchester displays, some jostling, grabby competition that he and Justin exhibit early on, and also the manner in which the movie embraces surface emotionalism as its stock-and-trade currency.

Weird as it may sound, the rhythms of In My Sleep most essentially recall the act of juggling, insofar as its execution doesn’t offer any surprises, per se. (Either the items will fall to the ground, or they won’t.) Wolf does a good job of introducing enough clubs to the game — spreading around the possibility of culpability — to keep things interesting, at least on a surface level. The main problems are that the film lacks a strong, separate investigative presence (apart from a police detective who pops up lamely and only occasionally); its hearty investment in Marcus’ tortured adolescence — complete with
flashbacks to his philandering father — never catches fire; and its PG-13 rating seems out of step with the more lurid potential of the story, so psychosexually overloaded is its narrative.

Some of Wolf’s twists and inventions (like Marcus apparently giving himself a wrapped knife at his own surprise birthday party) spark the imagination, and induce a tingly sense of dread — is someone with a knowledge of Marcus’ condition screwing with him, or has he hatched an more complex game of criminal cover-up deep within his subconscious? But Wolf unfortunately never takes these flashes of imagination to their most interesting points of logical conclusion. Ergo, when the end arrives, complete with desultory grappling, it induces yawns, not thrills. (Morning Star, PG-13, 105 minutes)

Representing yet another broadside in Hollywood’s seeming war on original material, graphic novel adaptation The Losers delivers an intermittently punchy but essentially unmemorable take on a very standard, familiar soldiers-gone-mercenary revenge tract. On a mission in the Bolivian jungle, an elite U.S. Special Forces unit, led by Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), refuses an order that would result in the collateral damage death of two dozen children. Betrayed and presumed dead, the group makes plans to even the score with the higher-up who authorized the attack, a shadowy enemy from within known only as Max (Jason Patric). They receive bankrolled help from Aisha (Zoe Saldana), an enigmatic operative with her own agenda. Takedown-style vengeance ensues, against a backdrop of Max trying to get a weapon that will allow him to stage a terrorist incident and kick-start a new front in the global war on terror. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 97 minutes)

A solid concept and the promising comedic pairing of Steve
Carell and Tina Fey fall victim to sloppy filmmaking and a needlessly convoluted mystery plot in Date Night, a disappointing comedy that fails to fully deliver the indelible stamp
of personality that makes either of its lead performers special. Screenwriter Josh Klausner, working from an idea hatched by producer-director Shawn Levy, creates a story far more complicated than necessary. At a certain point the movie essentially becomes a live-action Tex Avery cartoon, and any semblance of adult emotional connection is irrevocably severed. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 88 minutes)

Take note, fans of A Simple Plan, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Unfaithful and (just perhaps) fellow Down Under import Lantana. A twist-filled Australian drama centering on an adulterous couple whose scheming leads to arson, blackmail and multiple deaths, The Square evokes tangential memories of the classic board game Candyland’s Molasses Swamp, because every step of attempted extrication its protagonist takes only seems to plunge him further into trouble.



Middle-aged construction supervisor Raymond (David Roberts, above) becomes entangled in an affair with a beautiful but troubled neighbor, Carla (Claire van der Boom), whose mulleted husband Smithy (Anthony Hayes) is a menacing figure up to no good. When Carla comes across a mysterious stash of cash hidden by Smithy, she proposes to Ray that they go all Steve Miller Band, and take the money and run. Though reticent at first, Ray hires criminal drifter Billy (co-writer Joel Edgerton) to cover their tracks with an arson scheme, which goes tragically wrong and accidentally fells Carla’s mother-in-law. The couple is understandably freaked… and that’s before the first blackmail note arrives. Someone knows of their illicit love affair, it seems, and as Ray tries to simultaneously get to the bottom of the extortion, finish paying off Billy and execute an on-the-fly cover-up, things only get worse for the lovers.

Director Nash Edgerton works in a sort of plain-faced, stylistically muted fashion, and doesn’t really, until the end, try to artificially goose the dramatic stakes. The Square, perhaps much to its credit, doesn’t waste time trying to get into the details of either party’s domestic unhappiness. Action instead drives the plot, which mostly works since the acting is solid across the board. There can be a certain pleasure to the mere tightening of screws, and that’s chiefly where The Square gets its kicks; weather, happenstance and bystanders’ nosiness all seem to conspire against our lovers. The movie is seeded, too, with sometimes amusing details that raise tension in peripheral, atypical ways (having watched their owners go at it, Ray and Carla’s dogs form a bond), even though many of them never conventionally pay off. It’s a case for fidelity, if only because the alternative seems so downright exhausting. (Apparition, R, 102 minutes)

The subject of elder care is rarely legitimately addressed or explored in American film, perhaps because creative types see what a third rail it is in politics (prescription drug benefits! death panels!) and just figure, Jesus, why would I want to get involved in that? Multi-hyphenate Gianni Di Gregorio (below right) wades into the breach, though, with Mid-August Lunch, a movie of gentle rhythms and deadpan amusements built around a dutiful adult son’s attempts to placate a group of feisty ladies.

Starring in his directorial debut, and
drawing upon events from his own life, Di Gregorio places himself at the center of a trying Roman holiday. The plot? Armed with only wine and a fatalistic sense of humor, middle-aged Gianni resides with his 93-year-old mother (Valeria De Franciscis), a fallen aristocrat, in their cramped apartment. His condo co-op debts are mounting, but building manager Luigi makes Gianni a proposition — if he looks after his mother (Marina Cacciotti) during Ferragosto (Italy’s biggest summer holiday), Luigi will wipe the charges clear. Gianni wearily accedes, but then Luigi also shows up with an aunt (Maria Cali), and soon Gianni’s doctor unloads his own mother (Grazia Cesarini Sforza) upon him as well. Can Gianni juggle the at-odds dietary concerns and fickle personalities of such lively grand dames?

Di Gregorio, co-writer of the very different Gomorrah, possesses a warm, unruffled charisma that goes a long way toward helping ease one into the sleepy tone around which this delicately balanced comedy of
manners is constructed. The leathery De Franciscis is amusing too, carping over the gift of a bundt cake by noting that it came covered by a hand towel, and isolating herself in her room after quickly deciding these interlopers don’t interest her. Watching the movie I was reminded of a truth I witnessed in my own grandmother — that settled ways and comfortable routines can be fundamentally misread by sensitive souls as more personal judgments — and the unspoken corollary to that: that we always say we want the best care for our aging parents, but the reality is that it often entails challenges entirely unrelated to immediate medical concerns.

There’s no grand drama or payoff to Mid-August
Lunch — this is essentially Polaroid-type, snapshot cinema, in which Gianni juggles and tries, and nothing exists outside the carefully prescribed boundaries of meal time, pillow fluffiness, control of the television and dietary concerns. That fact, as much if not more so than its Italian roots, may automatically limit the film’s audience. But there is truth here, and in truth there is always some value. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 76 minutes)