Alvin, Simon and Theodore deal with the pressures of high school and fluctuations in popularity in this modest, agreeably family-friendly upgrade over the singing-and-dancing chipmunks’ muddled franchise debut. Featuring CGI critters who interact raucously with their live-action human custodians, this movie, akin to bouncy family adventures like the Stuart Little and Garfield franchises before it, heartily aims itself at and mostly successfully connects with a pre-teen demographic.

It’s hard to swallow some of the narrative plot points here, like the fact that hugely popular entertainers — which the chipmunks are supposed to be — could be instantaneously humbled by a couple doofus teenagers. Small swatches of dialogue, too (most notably including pointlessly empty movie references by Alvin to Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver and The Silence of the Lambs), come across as awkward attempts at hipster posturing. Forgetting for a moment how he would know about them, would Alvin be saying these things because he thought they were funny? And would modern teens even find them at all amusing?

The chief difference between this movie and its predecessor is the former’s unfussy confidence, though. Whereas the first film was full of pat set-ups and unimaginative staging, director Betty Thomas provides the brightly colored sequel with more zip and focus. Chase sequences or other action scenes are shorter, and more tightly choreographed. She’s aided, too, by a story that takes aim at low-hanging fruit. Pared down and mostly stripped free of clumsy attempts at exposition and emotional string-pulling, this sequel presents a story with a simple end point: a $25,000 competition to save a high school’s music program, and possibly restore the chipmunks’ luster. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 89 minutes)

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes arrives with the bristling, cocksure, indefatigable force of a film that’s been preordained as a franchise-in-waiting. And why not, really? This film has certain attractive “elements” — a rejuvenated, box office-minted Robert Downey, Jr., the hook of a conceit that toys with modernity while also haphazardly exploiting its period piece roots — and style to boot, in the form of burnished, photo-snap action. And for distributor Warner Bros., a fan of tentpole releases to be sure, those factors were enough to get all the checks signed during production. They’re just hoping audiences will feel the same way.

For the bulk of its running time, Sherlock Holmes breezily swings along on the charisma of its lead, and the unlikely but very real appeal of the movie as a sort of costumed “bro-mance.” The fact that his friend and partner in sleuthing, Dr. John Watson (Jude Law), is getting engaged and moving out of his residence has Holmes alternating between fits and depression. But when an aristocratic peddler of dark arts mayhem, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), escapes his sentenced hanging and sets about on a course of murderous, political power-consolidating mayhem, Holmes is able to lure his colleague back into the fold in an attempt to validate logic and reason over magic, and again bring Blackwood to justice. Adding additional (if nominal) intrigue to the proceedings is the fact that Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), an old flame of Holmes and spitfire in her own right, is somehow tied up in the affair, tasked by a mysterious boss with hiring Holmes to track down a piece of unusual information.

As ex-lovers, Downey and McAdams evince no great romantic chemistry, but then again the movie isn’t really concerned with sincere libidinal heat, just the added layer of air-quote tension and the ready-made excuse for double entendres that it provides to the story. If anything, this film is basically the big-budget action-adventure version of Superbad, a loose-limbed flick in which coy, often partially deflected masculine crisis and uncertainty drive and inform one’s affection for what’s unfolding on screen as much as the actual plot. Downey’s Holmes is a rakish, irascible Lothario, and he delivers his lines in snappish fashion, sometimes like he’s running sides with an assistant while simultaneously playing a game of ping-pong. Law is a suitable foil, exasperated and dapper, but not to a degree that it upstages Downey’s performance.

The action, shot by Ritchie with a punchy, characteristic flair for the over-the-top, is wildly improbable; one doesn’t really feel the characters, no matter their slippery intellect and lithe frames, are capable of either taking or dispensing some of the physical beatings and action that the story demands. A lot of the dialogue is also silly (Blackwood  intones to Holmes that they bound together on “a journey that will twist the very fabric of nature,” which is liable to make one either titter, or convulse with pained memories of 2002’s The Time Machine… possibly both), and the villain sketched so perfunctorily that one will wonder why he’s going to all this trouble when he could be living a much easier, and equally villainous, life.

Downey, chiefly, and also Law, to a certain degree, make Sherlock Holmes certainly tolerable throughout, and even quite fun in a few good stretches. At the end, however, the movie threatens to teeter over into complete nonsense. A scaffolding-set sword fight finale elicits no particular tension, or rooting interest, which is never a good sign for your big emotional pay-off. Truth be told, I can already feel this film receding into the recesses of my mind; there isn’t anything particularly vital or lasting about Sherlock Holmes. That’s far from the most damning criticism, I realize. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking, but not something anyone should feel the need to think about, or see more than once. That it reportedly already has a sequel in the works says a lot about the modern Hollywood machine. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 129 minutes)

It won’t be for this pleasant bauble — and there’s no way to tell exactly for what it will be, given his varied filmography — but Richard Linklater will eventually win an Academy Award. The Texas-born indie auteur brings to bear his characteristically spry touch to yet another very different sort of movie than he’s done before in the lively Me and Orson Welles, a romantic coming-of-age story set in 1937.

Rooted in real theatrical history, the film is about a fictionalized teenage actor, Richard (Zac Efron, a bit out of his element), who lucks into a small role in a re-imagined Julius Caesar being helmed by a brilliant, impetuous young director named Orson Welles at his newly founded Mercury Theater in New York City. The rollercoaster week leading up to opening night has the charismatic but frequently cruel Welles (an amazing Christian McKay, above) staking his career on this risky production, while Richard mixes with everyone from starlets to stagehands in behind-the-scenes adventures bound to change him. Caught up in an unlikely love triangle is Sonja (Claire Danes), the unapologetically ambitious assistant to Welles whom Richard tries to woo.

The fast-moving screenplay is adapted from Robert Kaplow’s meticulously researched novel of the same name, and it offers up plenty of towel-snapping dialogue and amusing details, like Welles using ambulances as taxis, just because they’re able to navigate through traffic faster. Meanwhile, McKay nails Welles’ sonorous voice, as well as his seductive charm, humor and ego. When he first appears on screen you’re struck by the feeling that he’s too actively playing a capital-C character, in forward-leaning fashion. Then one comes to slowly realize, well… that’s exactly what Welles was doing, for much of his public career, and certainly here, in his early days. So that’s part of the genius of McKay’s performance — the sense that he’s an actor playing another actor who’s playing always another character, and then sometimes also a role in his own staged play. The only nagging problem is that the film’s Richard-Sonja romance utterly doesn’t play. Much more intriguing is Zoe Kazan as an aspirant writer whom Richard haphazardly befriends; you wish she’d wander into the Mercury Theater and boot Danes’ character to the side.

Welles at one point delivers a soliloquy in which he comments on someone’s “bone-deep understanding that existence is so without meaning that one must reinvent self,” and while Linklater’s canon is anything but nihilistic, his credits are so diverse as to seemingly underscore an offscreen appreciation of that sentiment. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 113 minutes)

Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel forms the basis of fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut, an exactingly constructed, mostly well acted period piece drama about a broken man who, in the wake of his longtime companion’s death, can scarcely see any sort of future on the horizon.

Set in Los Angeles in 1962, A Single Man, centers on George Falconer (Colin Firth), a 52-year-old British college professor struggling to find meaning after the sudden death of his boyfriend Jim (Matthew Goode). George is consoled, if rather brusquely, by his closest friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a 48-year-old Tanqueray depository wrestling with her own questions about the future. As George ponders suicide, a young student coming to terms with his own true nature, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), feels in George a kindred spirit, and makes it a point to reach out to him.

On a certain level, A Single Man seems to posit that isolation and loneliness is an inescapable and inherent part of the human condition, which makes the performance of Hoult (About a Boy), who communicates in batted eyelashes and seems a little too cutesy-pinup to pull off the necessary emotional maturity required in his increasing flirtations with his teacher, additionally problematic. Kenny comes across as an idealized angel ripped from the pages of some Calvin Klein ad, and not someone that George would be interested in, particularly given what we see of his relationship with Jim.

There’s also a bit of fussiness in some of the art direction, and by the time the third symbolic underwater sequence comes along, it feels a bit much. Still, Firth is absolutely excellent, and deserving of a Best Actor Oscar nomination, which should be a mortal lock. In almost single-handed fashion, he makes A Single Man worth seeing. (The Weinstein Company, R, 99 minutes)

It’s rare, the film so perfectly bittersweet that it can put a smile on your face even as it simultaneously puts a lump in your throat or a pang of wincing recognition on your face, but that’s the case with Up in the Air, which exists at the perfect intersection of snappy fun, modulated gravity and sociocultural relevance, in addition to being anchored by three of the year’s best performances. A terrifically funny and poignant work that arrives at all its emotional moments honestly, director Jason Reitman’s third film is a shoo-in for a Best Picture nod and many other Oscar nominations, and should solidify his position in the industry as one of the most sought after young directors working today.



Up in the Air stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchetman who flies from city to city handling layoffs for other companies. Ryan loves his road-warrior business life, and the massive accumulation of airline miles and hotel rewards program points that it affords him. When his company downsizes its travel budget and makes plans to switch over to a computer conference-call firing system, however, Ryan is forced to take upstart protégé Natalie (Anna Kendrick) under his wing and on the road for one last demonstration of how things work in person, just after he’s seemingly met his perfect mirror-image love match, Alex (Vera Farmiga). Also looming on the horizon for Ryan is the wedding of his younger sister Julie (Melanie Lynskey), to a groom (Danny McBride) he has yet to meet.

Up in the Air most readily recalls two Alexander Payne films, Sideways and Election, in that those movies dealt with, broadlyspeaking, male midlife crises in love and lust, as well as the at-odds interaction of a teacher and pupil. The barbed, sometimes dark humor that marked Reitman’s previous work in Thank You For Smoking and Juno is also seeded into the movie, and the banter, adapted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner from Thumbsucker author Walter Kim’s novel, is top notch. Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick (the latter so fantastic in the underrated Rocket Science) make for a wildly appealing trio, and the film as a whole leaves marks both light and dark. Book your ticket now. (Paramount, R, 109 minutes)

A sensitively told remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s same-named 1991 Italian film, Everybody’s Fine slots in respectably as the holiday season’s obligatory commercial drama of familial reconciliation, something for casual fans of About Schmidt and The Bucket List.

Robert De Niro
stars as Frank Goode, a blue-collar retiree and recent widower from a
small, south-central suburban New York burgh who, in the wake of a
sudden rash of visit cancellations by his adult children, embarks on an
impromptu road trip to individually reconnect with his four kids. Repeatedly
unable to link up with his youngest son Robert, a painter, Frank then
cycles through advertising executive Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and her
family, orchestral percussionist Robert (Sam Rockwell) and Las Vegas
dancer Rosie (Drew Barrymore), slowly coming to realize there may be
significant elements of their lives to which he is not privy.

A straightforward description of the movie’s plot is fairly pedestrian, and there exists the possibility of it slipping into something much more maudlin in the wrong hands. But the material benefits greatly from the elevating direction of adapter Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), who imbues the film with the rootedness of smart, small details (Frank’s brown Member’s Only jacket and 35mm camera, a wine stocker’s cheery ignorance about product) and winning supporting characters. If the metaphorical subtext is sometimes writ large, one doesn’t hold it against the film too heartily.

Mostly vacuumed free of agitation, De Niro also gets a chance to work in a more purely reactive mode than he has in a long time. There’s a quiet patina of regret to the proceedings, particularly in a notable, reflective conversation with Rosie, and a more mannered dream sequence in which Frank queries his children about their dissembling as he remembers them — as shifty elementary school age kids. The themes of empty nest parental disconnection totally mark this as a boomer-specific story, but Everybody’s Fine is also about the secrets we keep in families — sometimes unwittingly at first, to safeguard delicate or overly fretful loved ones — that then snowball into bigger and bigger deals. If that’s not emotionally resonant fodder for the holiday season, I don’t know what is. (Miramax, PG-13, 100 minutes)

Adapted by Joe Penhall from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, desperately bleak and heartbreaking novel of the same name, The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale of the survival of an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and his 11-year-old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they journey toward the coast across a barren United States which has been destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm.

Unfolding against this unforgiving, elemental backdrop in which survivors are pushed to the best and worst (but mostly just the worst) of what humans are capable of, The Road is essentially about a parent’s calcified hardheartedness in a vicious, nasty world, when circumstances prevent any “bright side” reading, and a child is introduced to intolerable cruelty far too young. The problem is that, as directed by John Hillcoat, the film is hopelessly muddled narratively, with one foot trapped in a more conventional American Hollywood narrative and the other rooted in a more esoteric European arthouse aesthetic.

Hillcoat and Penhall never commit in nervy enough fashion to a structure that would make audiences feel the same doomed isolation of the movie’s protagonists — snippets of solemn voiceover from Mortensen never particularly coalesce in any meaningful way — while leaden flashbacks to Mortensen’s post-incident life with his increasingly frantic and estranged wife (Charlize Theron) add precious little to the unfolding narrative, and various run-ins with drooling hillbilly cannibals give off the vibe of a slightly tony zombie movie.

Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe delivers a gorgeously depressive backdrop that allows one to sink into the movie and experience it as a sauna of hopelessness, but the more one reflects upon the film following its conclusion, the dimmer its achievements and hold become. Mortensen gives a committed performance, but Smit-McPhee lacks the acting chops to register as a stand-in for the scared child in all of us. The end result is basically, in the crudest shorthand possible, despair porn, a la Requiem for a Dream, only without any legitimately earned cathartic emotional release. Who knows, that may be how the world really ends. But most moviegoers will clearly prefer Roland Emmerich’s doomsday visions. (The Weinstein Company, R, 111 minutes)

Is Ninja Assassin a movie of much subtlety, and nuance? No, not it is not. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 99 minutes)

About this time of year, every year, there’s at least one spare, micro-budgeted indie film, a la Starting Out in the Evening, that features a ruminative, calling card performance by an aging actor. This year that film is That Evening Sun, and that actor is Hal Holbrook, Oscar-nominated a few years back for Into the Wild. Based on a short story by William Gay, and gracefully adapted for the screen by director Scott Teems, the movie might best be described as a coming-to-terms-with-age tale — part mournfully rustic, part delightfully crotchety, and entirely a fitting vehicle for Holbrook’s underappreciated talents.

The erstwhile big screen “Deep Throat” stars as Abner Meecham, an aging Tennessee farmer who absconds from the assisted living facility he’s been set up in by his lawyer son (Walton Goggins), and catches a ride back to his country farm to live out his days in peace. Upon his return, though, he discovers his property has been leased to an old enemy and his family. Not one to either suffer fools or be dictated to, Abner moves into the old tenant shack on the property and declares he will not leave until the farm is returned to him. But Lonzo Choat (Raymond McKinnon), the new tenant, has no intention of giving in to Abner’s demands, and so an increasingly edgy and dangerous battle of wills ensues.

Trading in slow pans, simple set-ups and outdoor locations that match the material, Teems doesn’t try to showcase a bunch of directorial razzle dazzle. Southern characters are frequently woefully misrepresented in American film, but, if you ignore the molasses-dipped names, That Evening Sun has an easy, unforced sense of authenticity that takes it a long way. There’s a Faulknerian specificity here, and Holbrook doesn’t overplay the emotion, expressing the grace notes of a man swallowed up by both frustration and regrets he won’t as readily admit. Abner’s decisions are sometimes a bit more impulsive than seem genuine for a man of his age, no matter the heart behind them. But That Evening Sun reminds us that feeling is often stronger than thought, in adolescence and old age alike. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, minutes)

A cleverly marketed mock-nonfiction thriller that unfolds with no opening or closing credits, only a title card thanking the families of those glimpsed onscreen, Paranormal Activity works best as an experiential exercise in shared skittishness. The story concerns a suburban San Diego couple, Katie (Katie Featherston, oozing real-girl relatability and resembling a corn-fed Jenna Fischer) and Micah (Micah Sloat), who, having recently moved in together, find themselves besieged by increasingly intrusive nighttime visits from an unseen and possibly demonic presence. A consultation with a psychic (Mark Friedrichs) doesn’t resolve matters, so as sleep-time eeriness is captured by a camera set up by technophile Micah, further conversation reveals Katie has been experiencing such hauntings for nearly two decades, since before her house burned down as a child.

Using first-person camerawork indicative of a genre trend (see both Cloverfield and Quarantine), writer-director Oren Peli trades in escalating uneasiness more than jump-scares. The dramatic hold of the duo’s arguments over how to best deal with the situation eventually starts to wane, and the back story fails to satisfy in any conventional way. But the interesting thing is the manner in which Peli consistently wrings deep-focus dread from a narrow hallway outside the couple’s bedroom. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 85 minutes)

There’s a voiceover monologue about talkers versus doers that opens Troy Duffy’s Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, underneath some requisite gunplay, and it plays like a salty, metaphorical direct-address from its maker, a rebuke of all the swirling, extracurricular chatter and lawsuits that rose up and stalled for a decade if not completely swallowed his just-budding cinematic career. Duffy, you see, is a thick-necked, heart-on-his-sleeve doer — a blunt dispenser of commingled fact and opinion in life, and an equally forceful and straightforward peddler of reconstituted “cool” on the screen. Fitting, then, that the sequel to his 1999 shamrock shoot-’em-up The Boondock Saints is a bit more comedic, a bit more convoluted and a bit more everything than its predecessor, which is a heady thing for eager fans of the stillborn cult flick, and fairly irrelevant to just about everyone else.

Boondock Saints II continues the tough, stylized saga of the MacManus brothers, Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery, above right) and Murphy (Norman Reedus, above left). Since the events of the first movie, the two avenging angels have been in deep hiding with their father, Il Duce (Billy Connolly), in the quiet valleys of Ireland, far removed from the violence of their past lives. When word comes that a beloved priest has been gunned down by someone from deep within the mob, and in a manner seemingly constructed to frame them for the murder, the brothers return to Boston to mount a bloody and, naturally, theatrical crusade to bring justice to those responsible. In transit (by cargo ship, no less), the pair hook up with a new partner in crime, Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.), who’s heard tell of their legendary slayings, and wants to join forces with them.

Connor and Murphy give Romeo some razzing, but eventually relent in the face of his puppy dog insistence, and upon touching down in Boston the trio start trying to get to the bottom of the criminal syndicate of Concezio Yakavetta (Judd Nelson, playing a caricature of Judd Nelson), a paranoid mobster whose father was executed by the brothers MacManus in the first film. Meanwhile, three cops (Brian Mahoney, Bob Marley and David Ferry) who in the first movie conspired with Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) to aid the MacManus brothers in flight worry that a sexy new FBI operative, Special Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz), may unravel their complicity in events. Bickering and bloodshed ensues.

First off, some sincere and significant credit must be given to Duffy for making a big play, narratively speaking. Not content to merely lazily plop the brothers down in another ramshackle, discrete vigilante set-up, he constructs an elaborate, interwoven tale — complete with flashbacks to 1958 New York — that attempts to tie together a modern-day mystery plot and all sorts of glass-shield subterfuge with the elder MacManus’ own backstory and falling out with a shadowy ex-friend and colleague known as The Roman (Peter Fonda). Duffy swings for the fences, and that’s a heartening thing, because it shows how much he cares about both his story and his own second chance. If there’s an “A” to be awarded for effort, though, the movie’s reach exceeds its grasp, especially in late, third act strands that draw The Roman into the proceedings and speculate, conspiratorially, how diminutive Italian shooter Panza (Daniel DeSanto) could have been smuggled into the country in the wake of September 11 security measures. These bits are unsatisfying, and honest or interesting attempts to pay service to them are sacrificed in the name of balletic squib fixes, even with a running time of just under two hours.

The main problem, though, is that Duffy’s constructionist sensibilities and visual aesthetic are so typically rote — the notable exception being a vividly imagined sequence in which Eunice, in guns-blazing cowgirl get-up, talks her colleagues through her interpretation of the MacManus brothers’ siege on Concezio’s lair — as to induce snoozing. When Duffy isn’t busy trying to wildly tie together all the players of the Boondock universe, the rest of the movie plays out like any number of other generic, C-grade, straight-to-video actioners, and the hand cannon mayhem is cut together in a choppy, music video style that pays no particular respect to spatial constraints. For all the first film’s putative focus on religious right, and notions of properly meted out vengeance, Boondock Saints II is a movie that just seems inexorably stuck in late-’90s, post-Tarantino interpretations of indie cool, when guns held at cocked angles and saying some badass shit was catnip to young, hard-toiling guys with dreams of making their own movie. A lot of guys like Troy Duffy, actually. (Apparition/Stage 6, R, 117 minutes)

Pulsing with a brash and seductive visual style but hamstrung by its ADD-riddled plotting, caffeinated travelogue Fix represents the directorial debut of multi-hyphenate Tao Ruspoli, and the first cinematic creative collaboration between he and real-life wife Olivia Wilde. After driving south down the coast from San Francisco, documentaryfilmmakers Bella (Wilde, below) and Milo (Ruspoli) spend one unwieldyday racing all over Los Angeles in an effort to get Milo’s bailed-outbrother, Leo (Shawn Andrews, of Dazed and Confused), from jail to court-mandated rehab before an 8 p.m. deadline, lest he be sent to prison for three years.

In a hand-held, self-operated fashion that strains credulity and also rather quickly grows tiresome, the trio (mostly Milo) documents their trip from a suburban police station in Calabassas through Beverly Hills mansions, East Los Angeles chop-shops, San Fernando Valley wastelands and Watts housing projects as they attempt to raise the required $5,000 admittance fee to get heroin junkie Leo checked into the rehab clinic. Along the way they encounter dozens of colorful characters, each with their own anomalous perspective on Leo’s larger-than-life personality and style. Most also have their own excuse for why they can’t help, the notable exception being Carmen (Megalyn Echikunwoke), a can’t-keep-her-little-model-hands-off-me crush of Leo’s who professes an equal infatuation with him, despite the fact that she has a boyfriend. With her assistance, Milo and Bella make a late push at securing the necessary cash.

Working from an idea rooted in real-life experience (his brother was a charismatic drug user who required habitual ferrying about), and a script co-written with Jeremy Fels, Ruspoli succeeds in crafting a movie that has the benefit of passion, and a soulful investment in its material. If only that were enough. Fix is gorgeously photographed, by Ruspoli (who operates the camera much of the time) and Christopher Gallo, and it also makes effective use of some nice music, including songs from Ima Robot, Simon Dawes, Beautiful Girls and Nico Stai. But the human drama at the core of the premise ultimately feels a bit underdeveloped; with montages galore, the movie becomes a slave to its insistent artiness.

The story proper, meanwhile, comes across as a series of laboriously stitched together air-quote moments, from Leo getting his car out of impound by convincing Bella to sign hers away, and collecting on a debt by stealing a restaurant-quality cappuccino machine to buying a bulldog that he insists is “police-trained,” and exchanging fist-bumps with motorcycle-riding gang-bangers. It’s too self-consciously cute by about half. By the time the film settles on the ironic, wink-wink, nudge-nudge premise of the group selling $2,500 worth of pot in order to fund Leo’s rehab, it’s already squandered much of the goodwill that Andrews’ affable, loose-limbed performance engenders.

In the end, Fix, which has been long delayed on its journey to the big screen, is through and through a festival film, as both its many special exhibition credits and thematic similarity to something like the recent Passenger Side attest. This means that while it focuses to a certain degree on fringe-dwelling characters, there’s a knowing distance kept from conventional dramatic plotting and payoff, and, in this case too, a lacquer of hipness applied to the proceedings. The milieus feel authentic and gritty, even if the characters’ actions — Bella’s understandable, quite relatable exasperation and frustration melt necessarily away into enabling acquiescence — keep an audience from becoming truly transfixed by Leo’s plight. For more information on the film, click here. (LAFCO/Mangusta, R, 90 minutes)

Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank can’t give any lift to Amelia, a soggy, unengaging biopic of Amelia Earhart, the American aviatrix who rose to fame with her transatlantic flights in the 1930s but disappeared in a later attempt to circumnavigate the globe. An attractively packaged but dramatically inert hagiography, the film feels so utterly designed not to offend, shock or confuse any potential age group that it ends up saying nothing of consequence about its subject. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Fox Searchlight, PG, 111 minutes)

Whether it’s Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill, Sandra Bullock in Speed, Edward Norton in Primal Fear or Ryan Gosling in The Believer, every so often there’s a feeling one gets watching a movie that the career of a young performer is about to explode into the stratosphere. The stand-alone or lasting quality of the film isn’t the most important thing, but rather the manner in which the actor or actress pops off the screen, and commands your attention in a variety of ways, large and small. A perceptive, engaging coming-of-age tale adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir by About a Boy author Nick Hornby, An Education is just that sort of film for 24-year-old Carey Mulligan (below).

She stars as Jenny, an intelligent, headstrong, 16-year-old British girl itching to shake off the constraints of her suburban, all-girls-school upbringing circa 1961. Jenny swoons when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a dapper guy twice her age who knows about art and wine, and has jet-setting pals, Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). Her friends are equally agog and her practically minded parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) surprisingly open to the courtship, so no matter the disapproval of her teacher (Olivia Williams), Jenny decides to celebrate her impending 17th birthday by losing her virginity with David.

The fact that An Education has to be described even to the degree above is somewhat regrettable, because the prescribed path of its narrative motivations are artfully obscured for a good bit of its running time, which actually benefits the movie. The more one experiences it wide-eyed and nakedly, like Jenny, the deeper the identification. There’s a fantastic exchange late in the film between Jenny and her headmistress (Emma Thompson) in which the young student eschews a glass-ceiling life of modulated expectation, instead making a case for stridency and a life lived through experience, no matter the pain: “Just an education isn’t good enough anymore — you have to tell us what it’s for,” she says, registering just the right blend of anger and exasperation.

While some of the film’s cross-purposes casting (notably Pike, who’s mostly traded previously in ice princess roles, but delivers quite winningly as the happily unaware Helen) work quite well, Sarsgaard doesn’t seem to fully embody David’s silver-tongued charisma. Of course, it’s ultimately not his show, so in the end it doesn’t much matter, or at least not to a degree that sinks the film. In her performance, Mulligan locates both the braininess and restless hormonal energy of an adolescent who’s blooming before most of her peers. Bearing witness to her education, in all its naiveté, brashness, passion and pain, is illuminating. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 100 minutes)

Adam Goldberg wears a furrowed-brow scowl of perpetual distrust and discontent; even in screen romances he seems unhappy, or at least convinced that the world is basically a dreadful place. So in theory he could be the perfect guide for a piece like (Untitled), a loose-limbed comedy that casts a skeptical eye on the contemporary New York art scene, as seen by and experienced through a pair of quietly competitive brothers. In reality, though, Goldberg is let down by the material.

Josh (Eion Bailey) is a commercially successful painter, even though his work is sold discreetly to corporate clients out of a gallery’s back room. Self-important composer Adrian (Goldberg, above), meanwhile, fronts a performance art trio who peddle atonal, disharmonious works involving buckets, chains, duck calls and crumpled paper. When gallery owner Madeline (Marley Shelton) attends Adrian’s concert, she commissions a work from him and a weird quasi-love affair ensues, even though Josh had earlier introduced Madeline as his girlfriend.

Almost from the start, (Untitled) seems conflicted about what sort of agenda to pursue, or perspective to advance. Is it a satiric send-up of the modern art world, a wry debunking of avant-garde sensibility in general, or just a very specifically rendered comedy of upward social mobility? Where (Untitled) really drops the ball is in not getting into the brothers’ relationship in a more substantive way. With Madeline, there’s ostensibly a love triangle here, but director Jonathan Parker and his co-scripter, Catherine di Napoli, never plumb any deep conflict from it. Perhaps most damningly, Adrian embraces experimentation in the realm of music, yet has disdain for every other artist in the film, whom he regards as fraudulent, insincere, untalented or a sell-out. That’d be fine if the movie at least had Adrian self-justify his point-of-view, or argue about it with Josh, as they grapple with contrasting notions of success. But he doesn’t, so (Untitled) itself comes off as fuzzy and false.

Zak Orth quietly steals scenes as a collector (“a guy who did something with a computer and got rich,” as one character describes him) given a personality infusion by art, and Shelton gives an invested performance. True, too: there are bits and pieces of the movie — an inquisitive woodwind score, a few fun zingers, Madeline’s penchant for noisy clothes — that give it some punch. But the characters here don’t ring true, and a problematic ending only further sullies what comes across as a rich concept unconvincingly explored. (Samuel Goldwyn, 96 minutes, R)

With Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Spike Jonze quickly built up a reputation as a quirky auteur, so it’s hard to believe that Where the Wild Things Are is just his third film, and first in seven years. A creative, melancholic adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s strikingly imagined but admittedly slim children’s book, Jonze’s work is essentially a delicate portrait of a kid’s id restlessly coming to terms with growing up — a yelp for attention from a generation with dwindling adult role models. Just as Election was a film with teen characters that wasn’t really a teen movie, so too is Where the Wild Things Are a movie about a child that — though Warner Bros.’ marketing team may loathe to hear this — isn’t a children’s film. Despite star presence and largely swooning reviews, neither of Jonze’s other movies cracked the $25 million mark domestically. Critical praise will be paramount in positioning this film to adult filmgoers, since family audiences may find it too challenging. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG, 101 minutes)

Following on the heels of 2007’s delightful anthology Paris, Je T’aime comes this second entry in a series of cinematic valentines to culturally influential cities, conceived by producer Emmanuel Benbihy. (Rio, Shanghai, Jerusalem and Mumbai also await the loving treatment.) An eclectic group of filmmakers oversee the dozen short films, populated with familiar faces, collected here — Mira Nair, Allen Hughes, Brett Ratner, Shekhar Kapur, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Chinese actor Jiang Wen and even Natalie Portman. The shorts are mostly discrete tales about love, broadly defined, but with a few loosely interwoven characters to underline the theme. Naturally, it’s a somewhat mixed bag, and doesn’t hold together as well as one might hope, or expect from a feature. But the good news is that there’s something here for everyone.

The lighthearted, ironic and flirty entries (including, surprisingly, a wryly funny prom date tale cooked up by Ratner and co-scripter Jeff Nathanson) are mostly the best. A notable exception to this rule, though, is a sidewalk encounter between Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper — one of two superlative, chatty, can-I-bum-a-smoke? submissions from Yvan Attal, and a beautifully melancholic segment that would have provided the perfect closer for the movie if it had been ordered properly. The worst entry? Working from a script by the late Anthony Minghella, Kapur misfires with a dewy, dreadfully sentimental tale starring Julie Christie as an aging singer and (no joke) Shia LaBeouf as a hunchback hotel bellhop. The target is poignance, but the movie grinds to a halt here, courtesy of LaBeouf’s ridiculous accent and some equally affected filmmaking.

Like the city it honors, New York, I Love You is a jumbled, chaotic affair, full of seduction, brio, contradiction and a pinch of pretentiousness. It’s not perfect, not by a stretch, but in lump sum it does intriguingly showcase moments when regret and/or romantic constipation are finally swallowed, and surging feelings of possibility return. And that’s worth celebrating, now and always. (Vivendi Entertainment, 110 minutes, R)

In college, where self-indulgence and pretentiousness are practically
their own electives, especially in the creative arts, a theater
acquaintance who dabbled in his own brand of snarky, self-referential,
low-fi music, wrote a song (for another friend’s original stageplay,
it’s worth noting) in which he wearyingly noted it was “time to go put
on the ‘Good work!’ facade.” The Blue Tooth Virgin intriguingly
transposes this notion of necessarily glad-handing feedback to
Hollywood and the independent film realm, and chronicles the hurt and
petty jealousy — common to almost any creative individual, as well as
anyone who’s felt the sting of a loved one or family member’s shrug —
that comes bubbling to the surface when niceties fall away and shared
opinions aren’t all rosy.

The film centers around two Los Angeles wordsmiths, Sam (Austin Peck, above left), an aspiring screenwriter with a cult success, short-lived TV credit to his name, and David (Bryce Johnson, of Sleeping Dogs Lie), a successful magazine editor at a locally based laddie publication. The duo have been friends for years, but when David doesn’t appreciate Sam’s latest script it opens a fissure in their friendship that spreads through the rest of their lives. Ultimately, both guys must reevaluate their motivations for writing, their need for outside praise and validation, and what it means to see yourself as you actually are.

Written and helmed by Russell Brown, a still-young multi-hyphenate with the benefit of both previous directorial know-how as well as different industry experience and the perspective which that provides, The Blue Tooth Virgin is named after the achingly arty screenplay Sam passes off to David for feedback. A noirish character study (because Sam is really all about character, as he frequently intones) full of transsexuals, private investigators, time-traveling and mystery, the narrative within the movie seems like a cheeky nod of homage to Tom DiCillo, who’s aped the well-traveled grooves of independent cinema in movies like Living In Oblivion and The Real Blonde. It’s the perfect leaping-off point for a discussion of what film could and should mostly be — a challenge to audiences, or a salve?

The nice, conversational rapport between Peck and Johnson — a sort of budget lookalike for Paul Walker — is the film’s strongest selling point, and Brown imbues his work with real, lived-in dialogue that captures the ways we frequently muddy our feelings in trying to dance around directness. There’s the danger of the movie becoming too insular, an inside-the-Beltway-type circle jerk of specifically artistic competitiveness and grievance. Brown mitigates this somewhat with an argument between Sam and his white-collar wife, Rebecca (Lauren Stamile), that, while solid in theory, needs to be anchored a bit more in tongue-loosened drunkeness than how it plays.

Interestingly, and decidedly for the better, The Blue Tooth Virgin also trades in long-form scenes that serve as call-and-response mirror images of one another. (Quotations on the turmoil of the artistic process help serve as chapter divides within the film.) Though this tack could be sacrificed and tweaked a bit up front for more energy and surface appeal, it helps him more or less get to the meat of his conceit, and pays dividends later in the movie, in a pair of engaging scenes in which Sam and David crawl inside their own heads (the former with a New Age-y creative consultant, the latter with a more conventional therapist) and try to root out what their writing means to them. Captured in simple, point-and-shoot, low-fi strokes, The Blue Tooth Virgin doesn’t aim for grand-gesture profundity; it’s nervous and ambivalent about “correct” notions of modern cinematic storytelling, as reflected in the gulf of opinion between its characters. But it entertainingly captures the ever-present tension between art and commerce, and again sets on a tee the age-old question: is it an audience that makes a work a legitimate piece of art? (Regent, R, 79 minutes)

Possibly no actor working in movies today looks better in rumpled cotton than Clive Owen. George Clooney gives him a run for his money, but from Closer, Derailed and his series of BMW shorts all the way through to Children of Men, The International and Duplicity, the sheer volume of screen material featuring Owen looking fashionably weary and rundown helps make this slice of cut-rate domestic fatigue seem a bore by comparison. Owen’s trademark tousled charm carries stretches of The Boys Are Back, a too-loose widower’s tale, but otherwise overly familiar dramatic plotting elicits lukewarm positive feelings at best.

Owen plays sportswriter Joe Warr, who, in the wake of his wife’s tragic death, finds himself suddenly thrust into single parenthood. Baffled and overwhelmed, Joe embraces instinctual exuberance, trying to chase down some sort of a return to normalcy by simply saying yes to everything. This works for a while with six year-old Artie (Nicholas McAnulty). But when Joe invites Harry (George MacKay), his teenage son from a previous marriage, to fly in from England and stay with them, the household’s unabashed lack of rules prove problematic for all involved, including a young single mother (Emma Booth, sort of an Aussie Gretchen Mol) whom Joe is circling, seemingly as much for free childcare as romance.

Australian director Scott Hicks, who burst onto the scene with 1996’s Oscar-winning Shine, returns to film his homeland for the first time since that movie, but can’t achieve satisfying emotional liftoff. It’s both a bit of a surprise and somehow not shocking at all to learn that the film is based on a 2001 memoir by Simon Carr, since The Boys Are Back feels rigidly constructed to hit every potential beat of conflict, from general emotional withdrawal and friction with the in-laws to a poor decision to leave the kids home alone.

The story meanders to and fro, and could have used much more connective tissue between the two boys, which would have made the come-stay-with-us connection that the movie eventually sells as Joe’s younger son feeling for Harry that much more believable. The stunning South Australian countryside, as captured by Hicks and cinematographer Greig Fraser, gives The Boys Are Back an achingly convincing sense of place, and the acting is OK, certainly. But the small moments of heartbreak arrive with such infrequency as to leave one daydreaming of a Vegemite sandwich. (Miramax, 100 minutes, PG-13)

Its title conjures up images of frothy romantic comedy banter, or at least swooning courtship, but the leaden Love Happens, starring Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston, is a virtually spark-free romance, and devoid of laughs to boot. An attractively shot yet thoroughly inert “tweener,” the movie isn’t dramatically persuasive enough to qualify as a tearjerker, and neither does it move past flitting, light human moments of recognition into substantive comedy. Left to qualify on personality alone, then, Love Happens just happens to sink. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 109 minutes)

In his screenplays for Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, Guillermo Arriaga traded in a non-linear style, jumping back and forth from different settings and through different periods of time, and interlacing emotionally charged, seemingly discrete, sometimes convoluted narrative tapestries in a manner that, to critics, made his work seem as much about the artifice and construction as the actual characters. His directorial debut, The Burning Plain, evidences all these same old tricks, but generally ranks out among the better of his works, excepting a bit of curious overwriting.

In Mexico, a young motherless girl, Maria (Tessa Ia), lives happily with her father and his best friend until a tragic accident changes her life. In the New Mexico bordertown of Las Cruces, two teenagers, Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Santiago (J.D. Pardo), find love in the aftermath of their parents’ sudden deaths. In an abandoned trailer, Mariana’s mother, Gina (Kim Basinger), embarks on a passionate affair. In Oregon, restaurant manager Sylvia (Charlize Theron) masks a sexually charged storm within via a cool, professional demeanor. When a stranger from Mexico confronts her about her mysterious past, though, Sylvia is launched forward into a journey through space and time that inextricably connects her to these disparate characters, all of whom are grappling with their own tragic romantic destinies.

Stylistically, The Burning Plain is more of a piece with Tommy Lee Jones’ dusty, restrained work behind the camera on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which Arriaga also wrote. Smartly eschewing the frantic nature of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s directing style, Arriaga also showcases a nice touch working with his actors; the performances in the movie are subdued and naturalistic.

Strangely, most of the film’s faults lay in its writing and construction. While his work is characterized by a novelistic depth where a character’s actions need not be explained immediately (or sometimes at all), Arriaga still doesn’t seem to completely trust his audience. Action is sometimes edited at odds with the emotion of a given scene. More bafflingly, Arriaga seems not content with the mere presentation of metaphor; he instead drags the movie’s subtext up to the surface, ladling on talk of capital-S scars both physical and emotional. This grates, but makes the rightness of the film’s slightly removed ending all the more acute, and striking. (Magnolia, R, 111 minutes)

Marrying their cranked-up, high adrenaline style and penchant for adult content with their most ambitiously plotted narrative yet, Gamer writing-directing tandem Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor craft a violent, wild ride that triggers all the proper demographic tripwires of sensory overload, but also fails to satisfyingly explore the intriguing story it sets out to tell. If ever a movie tired of itself before an audience, this might be the one. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 95 minutes)

There’s something about Mary Horowitz, the manic, speed-freak character for whom Sandra Bullock goes dirty blonde and dons red, go-go-style boots in her new movie. In Mary’s hands, forced joy is a weapon, only it’s not nearly as charming as Sally Hawkins’ character in Happy-Go-Lucky. And yes, there’s something about All About Steve, too, a special sort of trainwreck that unfolds like some fever-dream, recycled-parts mash-up of Anchorman, Mad Love, the old Heather Graham flick Committed, and a tossed-off, drunkenly self-amused improv sketch. It’s a terrible movie — a strangely terrible one, really — meriting debate only insofar as whether personal preference rates it above, below or in between Premonition and Speed 2: Cruise Control as Bullock’s biggest career misfire.

A crossword puzzle writer for a small Sacramento newspaper, the aforementioned Mary is a preternaturally wired, possibly bipolar singleton who’s staying at home with her parents while her place is being fumigated. She chatters to herself incessantly, and walks in a funky, stilted manner that underscores her endearing wackiness. Oh, and she wears red, knee-high boots. Always. Mary’s latest blind date, with Steve (Bradley Cooper, further exercising his frost-tipped glory), a hunky cable news cameraman, lasts all of four minutes. (He’s freaked out by her sexual assertiveness.) For all her book smarts, though, Mary definitely can’t read social cues. She’s head-over-heels gaga for Steve, and somehow takes his sudden, excuse-laden departure as an indication of interest in a continued relationship.

So when Steve leaves town for some from-the-field work with Hartman Hughes (Thomas Haden Church), a blowhard assignment reporter angling for an anchor’s chair, and their perpetually exasperated producer Angus (Ken Jeong), Mary gives chase. As much for self-amusement as anything else, Hartman baits the hook, telling Mary that Steve secretly cares for her, and his increasingly vehement denials are only a sign of confusion. So, to quote early U2, if Steve walks away, walks away, walks away, walks away, she will follow. Subsequent media-swarmed backdrops for their screwball encounters include a hospital housing a baby born with three legs, a combined hurricane-tornado catastro-fuck, and a collapsed mine shaft full of deaf kids.

As penned by Kim Barker (License to Wed) and directed by British-born Phil Traill, right out of the gate All About Steve establishes itself as unfolding in a world where nothing really makes sense; just like the catch-all decor of Mary’s room (a Black Power poster, Burt Reynolds’ infamous Playgirl centerfold, a lava lamp and, oh, a guinea pig to whom she talks), the movie itself is a collection of things — characters, settings, story beats, always a bit jarring and frequently directly at odds — thrown haphazardly together. At a time when newspapers are going out of business, Mary makes a pitch for more than the single puzzle she cranks out each week, but her boss helpfully advises, “Less work, more everything else.” Later, as Mary gives chase after Steve, and he checks in with his mother by phone, there’s no mention of the latter’s connection to or opinion of Mary, which seems weird, since the movie three times mentions that the blind date was arranged by their respective parents. This is but one of many examples of things that could be easily fixed and smoothed over in the script stage, but for some reason weren’t.

Similar to something like Alone in the Dark, though, All About Steve actually does manage to wring some legitimate laughs from a willing audience member who doesn’t become surly, mainly because, against all advisable logic, it continues to try to tap into some sort of sincere emotional investment in the unfolding events. The laughs — minor chord bewilderment, really — never align with filmmaker intent, though, especially since the characters are one-note collections of tics, need or function, respectively. Ergo, when Mary finally makes the teary revelation that she wears her trademark red boots because “it makes [her] toes feel like 10 friends on a camping trip,” one might laugh… at what they’re being asked to feel.

This isn’t to say All About Steve is a total camp classic, however — a movie that can be repeatedly enjoyed with friends and the right libations. First off, it’s just lazy — the type of comedy where, in lieu of actual character development, people merely sit bewildered while Mary makes a string of inappropriate personal confessions. More than that, though, Barker’s script is downright insulting, positing, among other things, that there are chipper, wide-eyed disaster junkies that can spontaneously pop up at media-swarmed events in different states, as if they’re just following Phish around for the summer. The performances are invested, full-throttle-energy-type things, but rather quickly reach a point of diminished return, and eventually overload. It’d be the polite thing, one supposes, to say that Bullock deserves better than this sort of vehicle. But then one ponders her producer credit, and judgment in general. Mary Horowitz may not be the only one in need of some power-of-attorney advice of restraint, it seems. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 99 minutes)

As Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have so graciously continued to help prove, AM talk radio provides a valuable service — distracting the nutty, impressionable and obsessed enough to (mostly) keep them from violently acting out. Big Fan tests that hypothesis, though.

A sort of indie throwback to low-fidelity 1970s cinema, as well as a companion piece to the obsessive thriller One Hour Photo, debut director Robert Siegel’s exactingly sketched character study also shares much in common with his breakthrough screenwriting effort of last year, The Wrestler. One lead character is more proactive and engaged, the other a hermetic loafer who lives vicariously through a religious devotion to his beloved New York Giants, but both films center on broken-down, scruffy guys searching for human connection.

Thirty-five-year-old football fanatic Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt) still lives at home in Staten Island with his mother, and spends his working hours as a parking garage attendant sketching out scripts for his sports talk radio calls, where he engages in long-distance wars of words with a Philadelphia Eagles fan (Michael Rapaport) he’s never met. Though he can’t afford season tickets, Paul nonetheless devotedly treks down to the stadium parking lot each weekend there’s a home game, tailgating and hanging around to watch the game on a TV hooked up to his car battery, as if somehow his mere proximity to the actual event will tip the scales in favor of his team. When Paul and his pal Sal (Kevin Corrigan, above center) get a glimpse of their favorite player (Jonathan Hamm) one night, they impulsively follow him back to Manhattan, then lurk nervously in the background for hours at a fancy strip club, trying to figure out a way to approach him. When they finally do — and let slip how long they’ve been following him — the situation becomes violent, and Paul is injured. Humiliated and, more pressingly, worried about the incident’s effect on his team, Paul becomes more and more irritable and isolated.

Comedian Oswalt gives a great, perhaps even career-altering performance, shading Paul’s embittered investment in only the things in life over which he has no control, and making him a sad-sack figure that’s not just some two-dimensional loser. It certainly helps that Siegel gets all the accompanying details right, from the assortment of plastic hangers in Paul’s closet and the fantasy magazines scattered across his nightstand to his hectoring mother and garish, surgically-enhanced, tan-in-a-can-sporting sister-in-law, who looks like a prime candidate for a spot on the next installment of VH-1’s Rock of Love. So when Paul puts on his football jersey and curls up on his bed, crying, you know his pain in a way that’s rooted in reality. You’ve laughed at him, and now you feel an awkward identification at the choking, claustrophobic introversion on display.

The quiet savvy of Big Fan‘s finale, and how it makes a stinging and yet insightful comment on the culture of obsessive fandom, lies in the manner in which Siegel deftly toys with thriller conventions. He’s enough of a movie fan to play off of audience expectation with the precision of a jujitsu master, and Big Fan benefits accordingly. (First Independent, 85 minutes, R)

Though it released in rolling fashion earlier in August, the gripping, emotionally devastating Sundance-minted documentary The Cove merits autumnal mention here because of the special timeliness of its narrative — the dolphin slaughter that it places under the microscope takes place annually in September.

Directed by National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, The Cove tells the amazing true story of how Psihoyos, former Flipper trainer turned activist Richard O’Barry and an elite team of eco-warriors, filmmakers and free-divers embark on a covert mission to penetrate a tightly guarded fishing cove in Taiji, Japan. There, while being harassed by both local government officials and fishermen none too happy with the prospect of negative publicity, the Cove team shines a light on a dark and deadly secret that involves the capture and sale of thousands of dolphins, the annual slaughter of 23,000 more, the bureaucratic intrigue of industrial whaling international vote-trading, and mislabeled, mercury-spiked dolphin meat (beware, Jeremy Piven!) being packaged as part of compulsory Japanese elementary school lunches.

While it blends heartfelt reminiscences from O’Barry with a handful of interviews of people who will actually speak on camera, The Cove is, truth be told, mostly pieced together like a Steven Soderbergh heist flick, not some staid non-fiction film. Proving that some good actually came of the steaming pile of excrement that was Evan Almighty, the filmmakers tap one of that movie’s prop masters to help construct fake, hollowed-out rocks to house cameras. In clandestine fashion, the team then hides the cameras, along with underwater microphones, to capture the brutal carnage.

Psihoyos and editor Geoffrey Richman take a page from James Marsh’s Man on Wire, wringing drama from a foregrounded event; the bloody end result, even though you “know” what’s coming, packs more of a queasy punch than a dozen prefabricated Hollywood thrillers. The Cove is definitely, unapologetically subjective — a piece of social activist cinema all the way, complete with the call-to-action of David Bowie’s “Heroes” blasting over the end credits — but it’s also truly heartbreaking. You won’t feel good about feeling so wrapped up in the movie, sure to be short-listed for Academy Award documentary consideration, but you will feel. That much is certain. For more information, click here. (Roadside Attractions, 91 minutes, PG-13)