Anna Wintour, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue for the past 20 years, sits at the center of this mostly engaging documentary, which details a production cycle of the magazine’s annual, trend-setting, behemoth autumnal issue, this one featuring Sienna Miller as its cover gal. The inspiration for Meryl Streep’s imperious character in The Devil Wears Prada, Wintour is the most powerful and polarizing figure in fashion; her whims can make or break a new designer or an emergent trend.

So does director R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue melt the facade of its icy subject? Yes and no. There’s a moment of human frailty in an admission that her siblings are “amused” by what she does, and the film opens with a knowing rebuttal of those that look down on fashion, but there’s little sense of stark definition of the guiding principles that inform Wintour’s dictatorial snap-judgments. This means that for those for whom fashion is a tertiary consideration at best, Wintour remains distant and unknowable — just another snooty, smart-talking boss above any rational dissection or accountability.

The superb 1993 political documentary that Cutler produced, The War Room, made the frenetic particulars of a campaign for the presidency seem invigorating and relatable on a personal level, and The September Issue similarly locates a humanistic pulse. While nicely complemented with interviews, Cutler’s fly-on-the-wall observational tack smartly trusts viewers to track small non-verbal details, and he’s rewarded with the sort of carping and back-biting that almost any employee will recognize in their own corporate culture.

The film’s main drama is wrapped up in the two-decade relationship between “frenemies” Wintour (above center) and Grace Coddington, Vogue‘s creative director. It’s a case of the pretty and pedigreed versus a life tragically altered: Coddington’s often seemingly low-held ground in various arguments isn’t made easier by her frazzled, slightly frumpy demeanor, or the fact that she’s scarred by an auto accident that’s left her vaguely resembling a sister of Eric Stoltz’s character from Mask. It’s this contrast that helps the film succeed as a portrait of teeth-grinding workplace friction, though. An audience feels Coddington’s angst, even if they don’t know Manolo Blahniks from Sketchers. (Roadside Attractions, 88 minutes, unrated)

The new Ashton Kutcher-as-gigolo flick Spread, its title evoking images of splayed-open legs, wants to be taken seriously. If the actor-ly, urban cowboy growl that Kutcher affects didn’t clue you in, the movie itself lets you know this over and over with its forced narrative parallelism, its aping of iconic shots from The Graduate and its copious, pelvis-grinding nudity which, you know, is totally a sign of how modern and gritty and real and deep it is. Yes, it’s another sins-of-grind-you-down-Hollywood morality tale, except one in which director David Mackenzie (Mister Foe) and writer Jason Hall do little to advance a narrative that connects on more than a shimmery, physical level.

Kutcher plays Nikki, a twentysomething loafer who trades on his looks and has an aversion to all things untrimmed from seeing his mom’s giant mound of pubic hair as a kid. Nikki uses his prowling charisma and easygoing charm to get beautiful (and hopefully older, well-to-do) women to buy him things. He has a friend, Harry (Sebastian Stan), who stores his stuff for him, but Nikki otherwise lives like Nick Stahl’s character in Terminator: Rise of the Machines (“off the grid,” except for a cell phone, naturally), without an apartment or car, doling out sexual favors for ladies and depending on them to land couches and beds for the evening, and beyond.

After some requisite Hollywood-is-hell voiceover, Spread immediately throws together Nikki and Samantha (Anne Heche), a stunning, middle-aged lawyer with a great house offering stunning views of the Hollywood Hills. Some club-set smooth-talk wins him an evening at her place, which he quickly parlays into a credit card for some stay-in breakfast, shopping trips and a new pad. Nikki can’t stand too much of a good thing, though — continued dalliances with an ex-girlfriend, Emily (Rachel Blanchard), also speak to that, until she wises up — so when he meets waitress Heather (The Invisible‘s Margarita Levieva), Nikki tries to add her to his list of conquests, only to find out that she’s a gender-flipped, mirror image version of him. After catching him cheating, Samantha throws him out, so Nikki begins anew his chase of Heather. But will their similarities unite them, or doom any chance at a relationship?

In certain ways, Spread feels like the adaptation of some lost Bret Easton Ellis novel, before he got into drugs and wild, satiric hyperbole, crossed, perhaps, with a story-strand from The Real World. The film nominally succeeds in sketching out the on-the-grift underbelly of the City of Angels, but its young characters don’t ring true beyond two-dimensional kids looking for hot hook-ups, because we never see any other manifested ambition, artistic or otherwise. What brought them to Los Angeles, and are they really trying to make it as actors and actresses, writers or musicians? How are their sacrifices in body, dignity or time feeding and fueling their pursuits — or are they only pushing them further away? (We know the answer to this, of course, but, damningly, it’s not because the movie shows us.) Spread is a flesh-peddling fantasy, nothing more, nothing less.

Some of the gigolo detail here is at least passably intriguing — Nikki’s explication of creating relationship equity through a points system, for instance. But director Mackenzie is no Larry Clark, and all of the player-gets-played stuff that Hall and Mackenzie want to explore simply doesn’t play at all, either emotionally or just logically. Nikki and Heather are uninteresting characters individually, and doubly so when stuck together. It doesn’t help, either, that the movie expends much energy telling us what Nikki thinks of his surroundings and situation in general, but not Heather specifically. The sizzle that pays for all this dawdling, faux-philosophical voiceover comes in the form of much interstitial fucking, and nudity. Before the screening I attended began, I jokingly asked a colleague what the over/under was on Kutcher shirtlessness… 17 minutes? How close I was; perhaps I should investigate a second career as a Vegas oddsmaker.

Wearing skimpy bikinis and often a lot less, Heche goes to great lengths to napalm any lingering memories of her time spent with Ellen DeGeneres, and probably comes out of the movie in the best light, because she at least sketches a believable, fully embodied “cougar” — a successful career woman more than happy to open her home and wallet, but one also capable of rapaciousness. The script requires her character to do some stupid things, but she makes you at least feel the sting of her pain.

As for Kutcher, meanwhile, one could certainly make the argument that Nikki, since he depends on the largesse of women for his survival, is completely, and always, playing a character himself — hence the accent, hipster suspenders and what not. But the script never digs into the character deeply enough to make that assertion fly. Consequently, Kutcher’s performance feels like a breezy, not particularly well thought out thing — like he’s just trading, loosely and lazily, on a glad-handing, amiable image and public knowledge of the fact that he’s married to an older woman. Spread thin, there are no new insights here. (Anchor Bay, 98 minutes, R)

A colorful, noisy, slapstick romp very loosely in the mold of his imaginative, hugely commercially successful Spy Kids franchise, multi-hyphenate Robert Rodriguez’s Shorts robustly embodies an age-old principle familiar to many parents: that a certain slice of adolescent entertainment is primarily about an all-out assault on the senses. A chopped-up and shuffled selection of a half dozen episodic stories built around the havoc created by a magical wishing rock, the movie connects best when taken as a sort of a love-action cartoon, an exercise in kiddie wish fulfillment. This means, yes, a lazy, poorly edited ending that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but also crocodiles walking upright, giant dung beetles and a rampaging Booger Monster. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Forget the videogame — it’s a real-life version of Guitar Hero when Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White get together for the music documentary It Might Get Loud, an exploration of the electric guitar that spans, roughly, three different musical generations, and encompasses all sorts of different modes of expression. Director Davis Guggenheim’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the film works as a sort of three-for-one biography, with just a handful of glancing, macro-analytical insights scattered and tossed in for good measure.

Guggenheim structures his film in discrete narrative strands, but doesn’t waste time with talking heads trying to frame or debate the importance of his subjects’ bands, or respective places in music history. In fact, even bandmates or other intimates don’t win any screen time; the only interviewees are the three men themselves, which helps give It Might Get Loud a well-groomed intimacy.

Page, of Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, has probably the deepest reservoir of stories, and therefore the most fascinating back story, having started out as a session guitarist who laid down licks for commercial jingles on the side. For all the shit The Edge, of U2, takes for his zen-guitarist persona, it’s White — of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and whatever new side project he’s put together this week — who is the most interested and invested in artificial persona. He drafts a miniaturized version of himself for the movie’s biographical segment, and stages scenes where he teaches this younger “him” how to play the blues, and even kick down a piano stool for added effect. He also cops to the arthouse conceit of the White Stripes, and the fact that the costuming was all misdirection and window-dressing, all so that they (or he, really, since bandmate Meg White comes across as doing little more than what Jack tells her) could play earthy blues and folk music without facing a harsh, skeptical vox populi.

As I mentioned previously on the site, the movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if
there’s a lingering feeling that the roundtable
gathering that forms its spine — what Guggenheim called “The Summit,” and less a Charlie Rose-style chat than a meandering exploration of a couple of the gentleman’s big tunes, and adolescent breakthroughs — could perhaps have used a bit more
prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how sometimes even (or even especially) trite musical expressions achieve significant emotional lift-off. I know… it’s like dancing about architecture, this, especially since the movie quietly serves up contradictions (White talks about technology being “a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” even as he mounts a microphone into the carved-out body of a guitar, allowing for greater feedback and distortion) in a fashion that underscores how a lot of music, and indeed maybe art in general, is about learning and knowing the rules, and then consciously breaking or tearing them down.

There are some great song stories along the way, whether it’s Page recounting the drum set-up for “When the Levee Breaks” or the Edge stumbling across an early cassette recording of some “Where the Streets Have No Name” noodling, with Bono calling out time shifts in the background. What most pokes through, though, is the sheer joy attached to creative expression. “There was a thrill in doing, even if we were doing it badly,” says the Edge. Later, White (resembling a ghostly, slightly pudgy Johnny Depp) talks about the aggressive quality of music, and seemingly channels the spirit of a bullied-too-long sensitive soul who’s finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, saying, “It’s our chance to push you down now.” It’s a reminder that music matters so much because it has the capacity to make us feel other than what we perhaps are, and feelings so often can and do trump cold rationality. For the film’s trailer, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, 97 minutes, PG)

Partially a comedically inflected Agatha Christie conceit, and partially a money-grubbing farcical ensemble along the lines of Death at a Funeral or Daddy’s Dyin’ and Who’s Got the Will, British import Twelve in a Box is wholly a dreadful bore.

Written and directed by John McKenzie (Vol-au-vent), the movie brings together a dozen strangers for a school reunion lunch at a remote country estate. Once there, their host appears via videotape and offers them one million pounds sterling apiece if they can coexist on the grounds for 96 hours without anyone leaving. After a bit of arm-turning, an all-in democratic vote establishes everyone’s acquiescence and confirms the parameters of the contest, but from the start there are social frictions, and things only get more complicated when the eldest member of the group suffers a heart attack and dies. Throw in some standard-grade personal carping, a pair of would-be burglers, a staircase accident and an eventual visit by the police, and you have all the familiar ingredients for a souffle that doesn’t rise.

The explanation for this particular group of men and women — some classmates, many not — isn’t necessarily convincing (everyone who visited the school’s web site was logged, the eccentric benefactor explains, and he chose a dozen names at random), but Twelve in a Box stalls almost from the start owing chiefly to the fact that its characters are poorly delineated, and just not very interesting. The pacing is interminable, the banter not nearly as cute or witty as its makers fancy, and the nature and quality of the performances unsteady. Throw in pedestrian filmmaking, editing that doesn’t help whip the supposedly escalating narrative up into a dizzy tizzy, and the fact that the entire enterprise isn’t helped much by the fact that the movie features only one inarguable babe (that’d be Phoebe Sweeney), and the end result is grating, start to finish. Some of the plot twists are entirely expected (sexual dalliances, both attempted and realized), but an imaginative mind will easily outstrip the forced zaniness on display here. (Masses Entertainment, unrated, 93 minutes)

Unabashedly streamlined genre flicks get a bad rap — with critical indifference often seemingly being the best for which they can hope — because they’re so frequently made by hacks, or at least passed off to inexperienced filmmakers in the form of a less-than-totally-polished script. Writer-director David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway, though, is a structurally solid B-movie, marked by smart casting and carefully modulated performances, that delivers high on the popcorn-munching entertainment scale.

The story revolves around newlyweds Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich), who are honeymooning in Hawaii when they stumble across backpacking hippie couple Kale and Cleo (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton) and, just a bit later, Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez), an ex-special ops soldier and Southern debutante turned bad girl. With news of a gruesome murder on the main island, and word that authorities are looking for both a man and woman as suspects, Cliff and Cydney become understandably paranoid about their new acquaintances. Pig-hunting trips deep into the woods and stories of Nick’s past escapades and metal-plate-reinforced head don’t do much to quell Cliff and Cydney’s fears.

Oh, and did I mention that Cliff is a Hollywood screenwriter, so he starts trying gain the psychological upper hand on Nick by stringing him along, and making him think that there might be a potential movie to be written based on his life? The introduction of such a winking, Scream-like deconstructive element — scrupulously avoided in the movie’s marketing campaign — has the danger of making A Perfect Getaway collapse under the weight of its own smug self-satisfaction, but Twohy is such a deft juggler of form and entertainment, artifice and colorful flourish, that he pulls it off with aplomb.

Then there’s the casting. I’ve written before about how Olyphant oozes charisma, displays
crackerjack timing and knows how to sharpen a casual throwaway line into a dagger
with pointed subtext, and he again brings to bear all those qualities
in A Perfect Getaway, dancing merrily along a razor’s edge in
crafting a character who comes as equal parts affable, unhinged,
contrarian and dangerous. Zahn and Jovovich are smartly cast, too, and do a great job bringing their characters’ awkwardness and vulnerabilities to the surface in small ways.

Those with a working knowledge of the thriller genre and the stakes of identity reversal will perhaps gauge where this is all headed, but Twohy (Pitch Black), not unlike John Dahl (Red Rock West, Joy Ride), has a superb grasp of structure, combined with the knowledge of how and when to integrate specific, telling details — be it in the mocking of Nicolas Cage, the inclusion of a deeply personal story from Cydney, or a slippery, unforeseen moment of violence that results in what may most charitably be described as the world’s worst between-fingers paper cut — that elevate the material, and give it some bite, and punch. A Perfect Getaway isn’t perfect; post-twist, it enters a weird slipstream that plays out too long in flashback. But it’s effective even when you feel the strings being pulled because it makes you care about and have interest in its characters, and then ponder the changes in your degrees of relatability when those investments dip and swirl. As such, Twohy’s film slots alongside something like Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown as a fun, engaging exercise in marionette cinema. “Use me so good,” you’ll likely be saying. (Rogue, R, 98 minutes)

Sometimes failure is its own form of success. After all, take the case of writer-director Judd Apatow, who stuck out on the small screen with two critically beloved and cultishly embraced but ratings-challenged shows, Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, before finding mainstream redemption on the big screen in 2005 with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and two years later with Knocked Up.

A foray into more emotionally rooted territory, Apatow’s new film, Funny People, is partially about the trappings of success, and if not failure outright then certainly the looming specter of it as a distinct possibility, in the form of friends and roommates passing you by and establishing professional beachheads. Of course, because it’s still an Apatow film, there are plenty of dick jokes too.

The story centers around George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a hugely successful comedic actor who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Alone and embittered, he starts venturing out to a Los Angeles comedy club, where he indulges in some self-destructive, Andy Kaufman-style stand-up. It’s here that George comes across Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), a struggling, would-be comedian who lives with his pals Leo (Jonah Hill), a fellow stand-up, and Mark (Jason Schwartzman), an actor on a successful but positively wretched kids’ sitcom. George hires Ira to help write some material for him, then stay on as his personal assistant; he soon confides the secret of his illness to Ira, and comes to rely on him both for emotional support and as a sounding board for his ideas on re-entering the world, personally and professionally, in a way that might bring him more happiness.

At around the movie’s one-hour mark, George starts trying to substantively reconnect with ex-girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann), who’s now married to Australian businessman Clarke (Eric Bana), with whom she shares two daughters. News that the experimental drug treatment George has been undergoing has seemingly staved off his illness would seem to clear the way for a possible romantic rekindling with Laura, who still has deep feelings for George, but… well, things are complicated.

Whether scoring zeitgeist points off of modern technology (anything with kittens is a surefire YouTube sensation, Leo points out) or folding in cracks about Rogen’s real-life weight loss, Funny People succeeds as a comedy, just in terms of laugh count, even in the long-form first act that comprises the spine of George’s illness tale. This is because the film is honest about George’s self-loathing, and the insecurity and anger that informs a lot of the best comedic acting out, be it on stage or in real life. It feels real, just in terms of the background and setting, and so you settle into a nice groove with it.

Things stall out in its last couple reels, though, partially owing to a subplot that sees Ira finally making a love connection with fellow comedian Daisy (Aubrey Plaza), as well as some cameos (Eminem, Sarah Silverman, Ray Romano) that drag on a bit too long. The former narrative strand is almost entirely extraneous (Ira’s self-actualization isn’t something we care much about), while the latter tidbits are more typical products of Apatowian largesse.

Funny People‘s chief problem, though, is that Apatow fails to convincingly solve — or even entertainingly chew up and spit out — his main character’s most pressing dilemma. Decamping for nearly 40 minutes at Clarke and Laura’s house, the movie grinds to a halt. We’re meant to see George struggle with coming to terms with the fact that his recaptured fantasy life with Laura may not be possible after all, and Ira struggle with figuring out how to tactfully express this to George, and we do in the broadest sense see these things, but Apatow’s writing here — both in the overarching construction of the scenes, and the specifics — too often feels sludgy and uncertain, perhaps a byproduct of letting Clarke drive so much of the action. George (thankfully) retains his spitfire irascibility, but in these passages and its more elegiac wind-down, the film lacks the pathos of something like Sideways, which managed to locate in the sadsack both the painfully familiar and the quietly noble.

Another thing that Funny People is missing, honestly, is an actor. Rogen is, well, a funny guy, and an absolute great fit for a lot of material, but he seems to hold back in some of the movie’s more baldly cathartic moments, and not out of a dewey-eyed deference to George that would make sense for his character. A fresh face may have benefited the role, as much as Apatow would loathe that. Sandler, on the other hand, has done dispirited and/or emotionally isolated before, in everything from The Wedding Singer (yes, seriously) and Punch-Drunk Love to Spanglish and the superb Reign Over Me, and, as strange as it may sound to some, he has just the right tears-of-a-clown range to pull off George’s swallowed contempt for the world that’s made him a star. I can’t think of another actor of his generation who could so readily and believably encapsulate the character’s highs and lows.

Finally, a note about all the dick, ball and masturbation jokes, which come to a head (no pun intended) with a stand-up rant from Ira in which he hypothesizes about Tom Cruise, David Beckham and Will Smith touching the heads of their cocks, just out of sheer masters-of-the-universe boredom, for novelty’s sake. The volume of this true-blue material is bound to be discussed, and pooh-poohed, by some reviewers, but it actually mostly makes sense; it’s just that the calculus overall is wrong, in my opinion. Some more clearly delineated lines between the senses of humor of Ira, George and even Leo (briefly glimpsed) would have been good, and made for some potentially rich contrast of uncomfortability. In Apatow’s world, though, everyone loves a dick joke. (Columbia, R, 146 minutes)

Paul Haggis’ Crash, of course, didn’t spawn sprawling ensembles centered around a single social issue or violent incident (this strain of American indie cinema owes a lot to Robert Altman, naturally), but its Best Picture Oscar victory did seemingly help jump-start a wave of self-deluded imitators who seem to feel that overt emotionalism ladled over a loosely connected narrative is a surefire sign of Important Filmmaking. That’s the case with Fragments, an achingly sincere slice of hooey in which those whose lives are touched by a random shooting react by acting out in different ways.

A gunman strolls into a diner in the small California town of Belmont and three minutes later, after shooting dead a handful of people, leaves a group of disparate survivors whose lives he’s changed forever. Single mom and waitress Carla Davenport (Kate Beckinsale, above left) starts neglecting her infant son, and latching onto the concern of a local doctor. After losing her father, Anne Hagen (Dakota Fanning) suddenly and aggressively finds religion, which freaks out both her mother (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and friend Jimmy Jaspersen (Josh Hutcherson), the latter of whom was with her at the diner. Gambling addicted, terminally ill driving instructor Charlie Archenault (Forest Whitaker, sporting a terrible wig), meanwhile, leaves town suddenly in search of a winning streak at a nearby casino. This leaves his single daughter Kathy (Jennifer Hudson) worried and unaware of his whereabouts.

Then there’s Dr. Bruce Laraby (Guy Pearce, above right), who wasn’t even at the scene, but stopped by for coffee on the way to work, and unknowingly held open the door for the gunman on his way out. Bruce reacts by taking a more hands-on approach with the migraine headaches of his wife, Joan (Embeth Davidtz), slipping her drugs to induce them so that he can swoop in and effectively “save” her by playing caregiver, thereby giving him an indubitable power that he cannot always statistically achieve in his hospital emergency room.

For the most part these stories unfold in discrete fashion, though Carla crushes on Dr. Laraby, and a silent Jimmy habitually avoids grief counselor Ron Abler (Troy Garity), whose services his parents (Jackie Earle Haley and Robin Weigert) are split over. Anne also counsels Jimmy — bullies him, really, via instant messenger, in one of the movie’s more cringe-inducing elements — to stay away from Ron. It’s this latter mystery, as much as anything else, that serves as the plot’s engine, driving it forward.

Directed by Rowan Woods (Little Fish), Fragments is preciously assured of its status as a shattered-soul drama. The performances in general bend toward the physically signifying, and
Fanning’s wayward, grating turn in particular is powered by faithful speechifying, and
not rooted in any realistic emotion. (Through it all, it’s Pearce alone who holds serve, trading in a smart, less-is-more style that makes one wish the movie ducked out and followed him alone.) Vast portions of Fragments are stillborn — everything having to do with Charlie and Kathy, for instance — and others, like the Anne-Jimmy subplot, not satisfyingly sketched. Roy Freirich’s screenplay, originally titled Winged Creatures, confuses abstruseness for psychological penetration; it’s like he wrote it while listening to Aimee Mann, and convinced himself that minimalist metaphor and simple parallelism (Jimmy’s dad coped with the loss of his eldest son by clamming up!) would in and of themselves automatically confer significance upon what is otherwise a pretty wan narrative. Fragments is actually a more telling and appropriate title, though, because it tips one off as to the unsatisfyingly fractured nature of this story. (Peace Arch, R, 96 minutes)

This could rightly be considered only half a review, and thus uninformed, as I unfortunately got separated from the concluding reels of Mark Hartley’s new documentary Not Quite Hollywood about halfway through a screening. But the first detailed examination and celebration of wild Australian genre cinema from the 1970s and early ’80s has more than enough re-tilled salaciousness, wit and good-natured reminiscence — even in its first 45 minutes or so — to merit a look from cinephiles looking to expand their frame of bawdy reference.

In contrast to Stateside grindhouse flicks or same-era exploitation fare from Brazil and other South American countries, unabashedly commercial Australian films were often less compartmentalized than their international peers. “Down under,” movies of the Carter and early Reagan years — which were readily available in America on big city arthouse screens, as part of a wave of foreign cinema that was predicated on sales of the exotic, no matter the narrative specifics — were basically divided into just two camps: austere fare like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant and then… well, everything else.

In 1971, with the introduction of the R certificate, Australia’s censorship regime went from repressive to very liberal-minded virtually overnight. This fact, combined with the commercial mindset of many nascent Australian filmmakers who savvily created works that reflected the “wild Aussie” personalities and natural landscapes that they believed international audiences most of all wanted to see (and/or bagged on the British, a rival dating back to the country’s founding), helped usher in a wild and woolly period of anything-goes native cinema, full of abundant gore, nudity, gross-out gags and the like.

Hartley loads up his Not Quite Hollywood with clips of other movies, which contributes to a dizzying pace, but he also does a good job of tying together all the personalities on both sides of the camera, and highlighting both individual breakouts (Tim Burstall’s wild 1971 comedy Stork, say) and overall trends. Interviewees include Felicity director John Lamond, along with other members of the raincoat brigade (Barry Humphries in particular gets in some saucy asides), as well as more “legit” (or at least mainstream recognizable) figures like Oscar winner George Miller. Of course, because he’s such a film geek, Quentin Tarantino even pops up.

The overall snapshot that comes into focus is one of unashamedly gleeful creation and experimentation — of a young, artistic aristocracy plugged into a surging wave of social change, and just making cinematic hay while the sun was out. It’s a lesson that a lot of navel-gazing American independent filmmakers — mired in achingly sincere apings of Hollywood convention, designed to catapult them to “the big leagues” — could actually stand to take to heart. For the film’s trailer and more information, click here. (Magnet, R, 103 minutes)

Solid lead performances and sustained levels of moderate engagement mark Orphan, a slightly above average evil-tyke movie with an infusion of Electra complex and a good narrative twist only half-heartedly rendered. “Tweener” status may relegate what is in many ways an admirable effort to a shortened theatrical shelf life; Orphan is too dramatically involved and tony for gorehounds or impatient horror fans, and marketed in too base a fashion to lure the same adult crowd that made 2005’s Hide and Seek, a passably similar tale of shattered domesticity built around a little girl, into a $120 million worldwide hit.

After a miscarriage of their third child, John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) look to fill the void by adopting, expanding a family that already includes their 12-year-old son Danny (Jimmy Bennett) and much younger, deaf-mute daughter Max (Aryana Engineer). Visiting an orphanage, they settle on nine-year-old, artistically inclined Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman, above right), whose lilting Russian accent and proper dress and demeanor give her additional strikes of “otherness” with Danny and her new schoolmates.

As accidents and other narrowly avoided disasters with Esther at the scene mount, Kate grows panicked, and more suspicious of her new daughter’s true background. But John doubts Kate’s distrust, which in turn creates a rift that exacerbates old tensions and rekindles old arguments between the two of them. Esther picks up sign language quite readily, and uses this to manipulate Max to her advantage as she takes increasingly radical steps to seal off Kate and ingratiate herself with John. Things finally come to a head after Danny is seriously injured in a fire.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) gets a lot of mileage out of the snowy Connecticut environs, but screenwriter David Johnson’s yawningly conventional, thrill-infused ending — unfolding on a frozen lake that figures prominently in Kate’s fractured, addiction-addled past — bends too much toward parallel narrative cleverness. It’s true, too, that the third act twist necessary to explain the physical extremities of some of Esther’s actions could, and should, be explored in deeper and more satisfying ways than the exposition-laden phone call that sets off the penultimate gallop of the movie’s closing reel. Yet there’s also a satisfying humanistic component to the movie, many moments of uncommon tenderness for such a genre piece, and a solid performance from especially Farmiga, who nicely sketches Kate’s pain, sadness and self-loathing. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 123 minutes)

They say that after high school you can’t truly go home again, and that old expression holds especially true if you have a psycho hose beast for an ex-girlfriend, and you’re traveling with your hot new arm candy. That’s the basic re-tilled lesson learned in the moderately engaging new thriller Homecoming, a sort of junior varsity level Misery that earns some begrudging respect for embracing its streamlined agenda of entertainment, and not trying too hard to be something it has neither the scope nor nuance to be.

The story centers around jock Mike (Matt Long, of The Deep End), the star athlete/prodigal son of a small Northeastern town who’s now buried on the quarterback depth chart during his first semester at college. Returning home during a bye week to have his high school jersey honored/retired, Mike brings along Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup, above), a pretty city girl whom he’s recently started dating. Mike’s genial cousin Billy (Michael Landes), a local cop, tips him off that Mike’s ex-girlfriend Shelby (Mischa Barton), now the sole owner/operator of an inherited family restaurant, seems to think they’re still dating. Mike’s instinct is to steer clear, but Elizabeth wants to try to play nice, so they head straight to Shelby’s place for some local color and drinks. Elizabeth ends up getting a bit tipsy and, not wanting to make a poor first impression on Mike’s parents, convinces him to let her grab a hotel room for the night. One unfortunate mishap later, Elizabeth is hit by a car, and Shelby takes her into her house, under the twisted guise of nursing her back to health.

Directed by Morgan J. Freeman (no, not this Morgan Freeman), Homecoming is attractively cast, and helped immeasurably by being rooted in an honest sense of place. I suppose news of Barton’s recent involuntary psychiatric hold could color one’s opinion of the movie, or make for an easy set for of smashing critical derision, but I found her performance here to be of a piece with the rest of the film, even if weighed down somewhat by a weird, generically provincial accent. She’s certainly aided by a screenplay that doesn’t dawdle with split narrative focus, preciously over-sketched detail or coy ambiguity. The movie makes no bones about Shelby’s psychosis; she wields an axe (indoors!) and tries to needle a drugged-up Elizabeth by trying on lingerie and announcing her coital intentions for the forthcoming evening.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Homecoming is written by a female (Method screenwriter Katie Fettig), or maybe it’s just the basic gender-based inversion of the narrative, in which both captor and captive sport extra X chromosomes, but there seems to be at least an attempt to keep the film from going too over the top in its violence — to make it tilt more toward realism than fancifulness. Well, until Shelby takes a ceramic toilet bowl tank top to the head, and then covers up the gash with some remarkably quick-concealing pancake make-up.

The other strikes against Homecoming, though, are for the most part only mid-grade irritants (Mike agreeing to see Shelby for a private lunch even though Elizabeth is missing and he hasn’t heard from her, for instance, or one character refusing to act definitively in self-defense once they finally gain advantage in a brawl), contrivances that come with the genre. These story problems aren’t ever expected to be solved, though, because the core audience for whom Homecoming was made has absolutely no interest in an extra 15 or 20 minutes in which conflict is more diffuse and parceled out, less physical. Much like its real life namesake, Homecoming isn’t age-appropriate for everyone, then — maybe just those in high school, or barely removed. Others will likely find the familiarity more humdrum than effectively nostalgic. To visit the film’s web site, click here. (Paper Street/Animus Films, R, 88 minutes)

Mike Myers notably likes to meticulously workshop his characters in live, improvisatory settings, but then retreat to craft a story and script out of material that’s been vetted through laughter. For Sacha Baron Cohen, however, deep-in-character comedy is its own special type of high-wire act, in which often unsuspecting members of the public at large are lured into loosely worked-up scenarios, and then submitted to the warped worldviews, invasions of personal space and/or socio-cultural manglings of his outlandish characters. That was certainly the case with 2006’s wild, subversive Borat, and it remains true — if to a slightly less shocking degree — of Cohen’s new globe-trotting road film Brüno, a very funny mockumentary that yet again wrings laughter from much of what collectively unnerves us.

The film is built around Cohen’s title character (above), the gay, self-absorbed, and more than a bit deluded host of an Austrian TV fashion show. After he causes a scene on a runway, is air-quote fired and dumped, and then barred from other fashion events, Brüno decides that he needs to head to America to achieve the celebrity he so richly covets. With lovestruck second assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) in tow, Brüno hits Los Angeles, improbably lands an agent and, between anal bleaching appointments, manages to score small screen work as an extra on Medium. After a disastrous focus group session for his own show in which the subjects recoil at his dancing, full frontal nudity and talking urethra, Brüno strikes out in attempting to craft a sex tape with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. It’s only then that Brüno comes to the conclusion that he needs to become famous by “solving a world problem,” and thus turns his attention to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace. If your head is spinning from the mere comedic potential of these set-ups, all this isn’t even mentioning Brüno’s mock-fellating of one of the members of Milli Vanilli at a seance, Paula Abdul using a Mexican day laborer as a chair, or footage from a real swingers’ party which ends with Brüno getting repeatedly belt-whipped by an angry, plastic-boobed dominatrix.

Owing to the fact that his modus operandi has effectively been outed on a much grander stage than his HBO work on Da Ali G Show ever afforded, Brüno isn’t quite as brilliantly transgressive as Borat, in sum; we more clearly sense the track upon which we’re traveling, in other words. Still, Cohen and director Larry Charles, also his collaborator on the aforementioned film, are masters in picking at the scabs of societal discomfort, whether it’s in the form of African-Americans confronting a gay (and admittedly wildly irresponsible) white man adopting a black baby, or gay conversion advisors being told they have “nice blowjob lips.” These bits are wild and funny, but also striking because they ask us to reflect on exactly why the unwitting participants feel so strongly the way they do, and whether we agree with their views.

While there are laughs to be had at the (good-natured, if raunchily delivered) expense of actual gay couplings, Cohen is mostly interested in using his character’s flamboyance to push buttons about reactions to homosexual men. Some of the movie’s humor is less sophisticated than this mission, though, revolving as it does around the breaking of rules or the breaching of simple interpersonal boundaries that have nothing to do with gay or straight. For all its emphasis on shock, however (and early on, Brüno pushes the envelope with respect to mainstream frames of flapping penis, only further underlining the gulf between studio fare and what independent movies can realistically get away within respect to nudity and sex), the movie also isn’t afraid to indulge in a couple moments of glorious slow burn, as when Brüno goes camping with a trio of good-ol’-boy hunters and remarks that “all the stars in the sky make one think of all the hot guys in the world.” The long uncomfortable silence that follows is hilarious, and speaks volumes.

The film’s two most jaw-dropping and completely anxiety-inducing moments are counterbalancing examples of Brüno‘s mixture of styles. The first, an evisceration of stage parents who will do anything to see their kids succeed as child models, has nothing whatsoever to do with Brüno’s sexuality. Auditioning babies for a photo shoot with O.J., his own adopted child, Brüno keeps upping the ante to see if the moms and dads will object to anything (mock crucifixions, Nazi uniforms, heavy equipment with a lack of safety harnesses, or just “working around lit phosphorus”). Errr… they don’t.

The movie’s amazing penultimate sequence — in this case a stain on the state of Arkansas specifically, but more tellingly and lastingly a statement on the short fuse of mob mentality — finds Cohen portraying the mustachioed ringmaster at “Straight Dave’s Man-Slammin’ Cage-Wrestling Event.” Whipping the crowd into a furor, and leading a chant of “Straight pride!” before the evening’s festivities are set to kick off, things take a turn for the worse when someone shouts an anti-gay slur at Dave. He challenges them to a fight, and then… Well, with Brüno, Cohen has again delivered a comedy with the capacity to both make you think and genuinely recoil. (Universal, R, 82 minutes)

There’s an unfortunate disconnect, or chasm, between art and those that are removed — in either geographical distance or, more often, income bracket and social standing — from its creation and most readily accessible exhibition. Megumi Sasaki’s Herb & Dorothy, though, shows that gap to be largely an artificial construct, telling the fascinating true story of a New York City couple who amassed an impressive private art collection despite their modest means.

In the early 1960s, Herb and Dorothy Vogel threw themselves into minimalist and conceptual art, at least partly because abstract expressionism and pop art — two other on-the-rise sub-genres of the time — were too expensive for their budget. She was a librarian and he a postal clerk, and their collecting — funded by his salary, since they lived in spartan fashion off hers alone — was guided by only two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, which they also shared over the years with a couple cats.

Within these simple limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries. Now married for 45 years, the Vogels managed to accumulate over 2,000 pieces, and in 1992 decided to bequeath their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Weaving back and forward in time, and judiciously mixing archival footage with loads of new material, Herb & Dorothy tells the story of the pair’s unlikely rise to prominence in the art world, and how they came to be the most important benefactors of their era for many young artists who were at the time not receiving any other sort of attention elsewhere.

The movie’s roster of industry interviewees is a long and impressive one, including artists like Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close — who deems them “mascots of the art world” — James Siena, Lynda Benglis, Will Barnet and Robert and Sylvia Mangold. Their reminiscences are candid and most frequently warm; Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the married couple responsible for the breathtaking 2005 exhibition of The Gates in New York City’s Central Park, recall exchanging a piece of prep work art for several weeks of cat-sitting services. Most artists seem to regard the Vogels in an avuncular light, though there is some discussion of whether some of their lowball offers amounted to exploitation.

If there’s a big knock on Herb & Dorothy, though, it’s that Sasaki’s film lacks a stabilizing leg of sustained familial exploration; while some time is spent sketching Herb’s childhood and the couple’s meeting, it’s almost half an hour into the movie before Dorothy’s brother and sister-in-law are introduced, and their too-brief comments — which hint at a sort of understandable bafflement and separation that serves as a suitable stand-in for the confusion a lot of folks feel with respect to the endeavors, occupational and avocational alike, of their loved ones — about the couple’s wildly different lifestyle is never given full due. This is a naturally sweet story, but there should still be more of a pinch of friction, either in exploring how Herb and Dorothy’s collecting ostracized them from friends and family, or, honestly, how their pack-rat collecting extended far beyond critical mass, and fire safety regulations. This wouldn’t unduly demean the subjects, or diminish their collection, but it would further humanize them, and only to serve to underscore the passion for art that has shaped and driven their lives. (Arthouse, unrated, 87 minutes)

It’s been a decade since Jennifer Lynch, daughter of noted filmmaker David Lynch, made her directorial debut with the wildly divisive Boxing Helena, and her return behind the camera, the thriller Surveillance, has on the surface the trappings of something much more traditional and straightforward. Naturally, though, because it’s filtered through the younger Lynch’s canted, nurture-influenced prism of warped “normality” and co-existing extremes, there’s a ghoulish, off-kilter quality to the proceedings. A sort of dread-heavy, wholly engaging partial misfire — the film feels awkwardly stitched together, and it ultimately bites off more than it can chew — Surveillance still tackles a provocative premise: that truly nasty violence can be birthed from wildly different sources, even marginal places of flattened affect, proper order and limited means.

The story centers around FBI agents Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) and Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman), who are dispatched to a ghostly highway town to investigate a string of grisly unsolved homicides. The chief witness is a nine-year-old girl, Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), who saw her family murdered in the open daylight by a pair of masked marauders. Other participants in the trauma include tweaker Bobbi (Pell James, above left) and her equally spun-out boyfriend (newcomer Mac Miller), Ryan’s older brother and parents (Cheri Oteri and Hugh Dillon), and two sociopathic cops (French Stewart and co-writer Kent Harper) who twistedly assert their authority over random passersby by shooting out their tires and engaging in self-satisfied games of psychological manipulation. As Elizabeth and Sam partition the survivors and query each one with the assistance of closed-circuit video units, the bulk of the rest of the film unfolds in this flashback structure, studded with lies and whitewashes absolving participants of culpability.

Four-plus minutes into Surveillance, we’ve glimpsed a coffee percolator in close-up, as well as inter-departmental law enforcement friction the sort of which marked Twin Peaks and its film prequel. A bit later antlers are glimpsed on a wall, and we also see a fetishistic depiction and almost orgiastic enjoyment of cigarettes. In other words, there’s plenty of markers to link back to some of Lynch’s father’s favorite visual touchstones. There are some definite flashes of dark humor, too. Still, this isn’t merely Lynch Lite — there’s a transgressive foreboding largely unchecked and unbalanced by virginal positivity — and anyone investing too much energy into a direct, biologically correlative reading will eventually come to a wheels-spinning resting place.

Lynch’s film is most evocative of her father’s work in the broadest sense; there’s inherent risk and verve in the project, despite a narrative premise that on the surface seems simple, and possessing of a certain doom-glam cachet. Lynch does a good job juggling the movie’s puzzlebox qualities, and its third act features a boffo twist, the extra-narrative implications of which are a pleasure to swirl around in your mind. Yet Surveillance doesn’t quite fully add up, or completely align, both because it feels slightly off in its editing and construction, and because some of its characters remain ciphers. It’s in this sense that the film is a misfire, albeit one you wouldn’t trade for more conventionally telegraphed American indie product.

Its hiccups and unravelling are more sins of excited commission than laziness, and don’t mitigate the weird pleasures of Surveillance‘s cross-cast performances, with experienced comedic performers Oteri and Stewart going dark places and Ormond playing more cool and kinky than perhaps we’ve ever seen from her before. The film looks fantastic, too. Working on the Saskatchewan plains of Canada with cinematographer Peter Wunstorf (the second unit director of photography on Brokeback Mountain), Lynch crafts a work of spare desperation, where unchained menace blows in with the wind. In the end, just pondering that fact may be more chilling than the laboriously crafted backstories of a new crop of backward-looking horror slashers. (Magnet, R, 97 minutes)

The arrival of Michael Bay‘s latest film needs no real introduction. A sequel to 2007’s global smash hit Transformers, it’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and it is a posed, pop-art, cinematic ejaculation of instinctive, unthinking extremes.



I can’t fathom exactly how its works as a toy-spewing, collectible-spawning franchise marker, given the lack of anything resembling emotional investment in the material, but huge worldwide grosses again seem likely given the film’s state-of-the-art special effects. On its own merits, though, as a stand-alone movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a clamorous, metallic mess. In aping convention and breathlessly sprinting out ahead of itself to get to the next Big Moment — setting fire to Shanghai with a battle! an evil robot disguised as a sexually aggressive babe! the springing of an old Transformer from the Smithsonian Museum! the destruction of Egyptian pyramids! — the movie confirms its basic soullessness. It’s further proof that when Bay has someone (a producer, or studio) to really sit on him, his kinetic style can be harnessed for good-time pop thrills, as with The Rock, or Bad Boys. When given free reign to dictate length and shape tone on a whim, however, as with Bad Boys II, say, Bay’s worst instincts almost invariably win out.

The plot finds Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) leaving California, improbably, for college on the East Coast. This means goodbye to his slinky girlfriend Mikaela Barnes (Megan Fox), whom he won’t come out and say that he loves, as well as his doting Autobot car, Bumblebee. With Megatron, the leader of the evil Decepticons, buried in the ocean, Optimus Prime, the leader of the good-guy Autobots, scours the Earth popping caps in the asses of “punk-ass Decepticons” (the movie’s words… sigh) looking to somehow reform and regain power. In short, their plan involves recovering an important key/fragment and harnessing Sam’s knowledge, which will in turn allow them to activate a long-buried machine and destroy our sun. Globe-trotting mayhem ensues.

Paradoxically, for a movie designed from the get-go to be a 2,000-calorie, sugar-infused, summer movie snack cake, there’s actually an awful lot to say about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; it’s just arguable whether any of this advances any particular noble or notable agenda, beyond raising the hackles of a fan-boy set who will largely do anything to avoid not seeing the emperor’s new clothes. Bay aims for fleeting topicality with the insertion of a swine flu joke, and finally goes meta by having Sam’s room adorned with a poster for Bad Boys II. And there’s plenty of air-quote humor, though instead of a minutes-long sequence in which Sam’s parents think he’s masturbating in his room while Autobots rampage outside, as in the first movie, this time it’s two jive-talking Autobots (one with a gold tooth) who seem nipped from some traveling minstrel show.

Everything about this sequel is bigger-better-faster-more, to the point where any sense of nuance or naturally building tension that writers Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Ehren Kruger might have tried to worm into the narrative is blasted to holy hell. Not content with your run-of-the-mill staging for a brief underwater sequence in which Megatron is resurrected, Bay throws in CGI octopi to ostensibly emphasis depth. Ergo, it makes total sense that Sam’s new college roommate has a Mountain Dew drink machine in his room — after all, that’s extreme! It’s also therefore a somewhat telling metaphor that when Sam, his roommate and Mikaela flee a marauding Decepticon and take refuge in the university library, books are blasted to and fro. An indictment of the intelligentsia and their critical snobbery, or just a middle finger at outmoded entertainment? Take your pick.

As one might expect, there are a handful of moments of dazzling technical proficiency, but the brawn here is never really thrilling, and the supposedly climactic desert battle sequence seems to drag on forever. Part of this is because, for me at least, there’s still something less than wholly engaging about anthropomorphized hunks of metal stabbing one another through the face, or ripping out each other’s “hearts.” The metal blends together, in a way, and there’s no nervous, cathartic charge the way there can be in other fight sequences. All the humans in this story feel unnecessary, in other words. Which may make this the ultimate example of Bay’s technical filmmaking prowess. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG-13, 149 minutes)

In The Answer Man, Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) is the hermetic author of Me and God, an internationally bestselling book that in the late 1980s redefined spirituality for an entire generation. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of his still wildly popular tome, a Q&A dialogue between the Holy Creator and a man wracked with pain, Arlen faces an editor (Nora Dunn) who’s looking for some public accessibility after indulging his seclusion for two decades.

In this crucible, Arlen’s back seizes up, and his sheltered life suddenly intersects with two people who slowly begin to erode his caustic worldview. First there’s Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci), a bookstore owner fresh out of rehab, and searching for both stability and meaning in life. Then there’s Elizabeth (Lauren Graham), a massage therapist and single mom who puts up a facade of progressive properness for her 7-year-old son — feeding him protein shakes and classical music as she herself sneaks cigarettes and rock ‘n’ roll — even as his behavior at school indicates he’s starting to feel the effects of his absentee father.

Owing to Daniels’ starring role as a cranky, screwed-up intellectual, first-time writer-director John Hindman’s film will doubtlessly spawn comparisons to Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, and there are some similarities between the two erudite works. Honestly, though, the point of comparison that first leapt to my mind was As Good as It Gets, another movie in which ingrained personality issues mark and color a fitful romance between an older man and a younger single mother. There’s also a pinch of Finding Forrester, in the reluctant bloom of a gruff flower kept too long indoors.

In the most immediate sense, though, there’s plenty of fun, philosophically-tinged pleasures all around the edges of this barbed, humanistic, romantic comedy, both in the dialogue and the tenor of its performances. There’s some smart, quietly affecting work from both Graham and Daniels, and Pucci gets to showcase a bit more of an adult sensibility than he has in movies like Thumbsucker and The Go-Getter. But The Answer Man will also connect with those who have a soft spot for “show-up-wounded”-type love stories, adult and otherwise. We are all hurt or searching, the film essentially posits, but it’s how we focus ourselves and help others that most defines us.

If there’s a substantive knock, it’s that the Hindman’s end game feels, in varying amounts, pat, rushed, and false. It’s not entirely cheaply cathartic, but portions of the movie’s finale don’t jibe with what we’ve been told about the deeply rooted spiritual impact of Arlen’s book, and overall it doesn’t quite work. Even The Answer Man doesn’t have all the answers, it seems. But that’s OK. Life is an imperfect journey. (Magnolia, R, 95 minutes)

The big, blustery physical comedy of Jack Black makes for a mostly amusing fit with Michael Cera’s quiet comedy of self-negation in Year One, a ramshackle banished-buddy picture which connects more on the strength of its scene-to-scene joke writing than a startlingly grand execution of its premise. Pushing far away from one’s brain any recollections of of historical or religious antiquity is of paramount importance given the historic license the story takes. Once that is accomplished, though, there’s airy delight in the mixing of slightly contemporized but socially inept consciousnesses with a primitive setting.

When oafish hunter Zed (Black) eats from the forbidden tree of knowledge and later accidentally sets fire to his village, he’s banished. Reluctantly accompanying Zed out into the wilderness is his reserved gatherer pal Oh (Cera, sporting a generally ridiculous wig that undergoes an unexplained metamorphosis three-quarters of the way through the movie); left behind are their respective crushes, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple). Discovering that the story of the world’s edge is false, the wandering pair comes across hothead Cain (David Cross), and bear witness to his murder of his brother, Abel.

Again fleeing, Zed and Oh come across Abraham (Hank Azaria) , who warns them of the sins of the nearby city of Sodom. This sounds like a great place to Zed, however, and so off they go, to partake of its pleasures. Once there, they again cross paths with Maya and Eema, who have been sold into slavery, as well as Cain. While Zed tries to devise a plot to free the ladies, Oh fends off the advances of the king’s creepy, flamboyant high priest (Oliver Platt).

Though somewhat similar in some of its targets to Monty Python’s Life of Brian or Mel Brooks’ sprawling History of the World: Part One, Year One is more assertively a hodgepodge of different eras, in this case commingling polytheism alongside Judeo-Christian Biblical stories separated by hundreds of years. Trying to hold onto and make any sense of the manner in which intersects chronologically factual human history or cognitive development is akin to swimming upstream into a headstrong current. It doesn’t help, either, that the movie can’t seem to decide whether Zed and Oh are accidental masters of their fate (upon arriving in Sodom, they briefly become royal guards), or habitual victims of circumstances and their surroundings. The sooner one relinquishes the notion that this is more than anything than just an unfettered spit-balling of widely generalized life in a dusty, bygone era, the more simply they’re able to appreciate the movie’s otherwise generally solid joke-writing and characterizations.

The lead performances certainly don’t differ wildly from the personas that the two actors have cultivated; Black plays a libidinal, instinctive chatterbox, while Cera trades in wallflower asides and nervous, awkward silences. In their juxtaposition and interplay, however, there’s something approaching a sincere freshness. This owes to age and demeanor, yes, but also size — something that director Harold Ramis isn’t afraid to exploit through both written material and physical gags large and small. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Columbia, PG-13, 96 minutes)

While its behind-the-scenes machinations are mined for laughs in another superlative film this summer, In the Loop, war is also very much at the heart of The Hurt Locker, a punishing, devastatingly well-made Iraq-set thriller with an implosive but no less powerful emotional impact. Eschewing the whirling, bird’s-eye helicopter shots of so many armed conflict flicks (this is most assuredly not a Tony Scott film), director Kathryn Bigelow tightens her focus in laser-like fashion, examining the effects of combat and danger on the human psyche.



Unfolding in Iraq in the summer of 2004, the movie opens on Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), part of a small, elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal squad specifically trained to handle the homemade bombs killing thousands of Iraqis and accounting for more than half of all American deaths in the country. A high-pressure assignment, the job leaves no room for mistakes, as they learn when they lose their team leader on a mission. When cocksure Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) takes over the unit, Sanborn and Eldridge are unnerved by what seems like his reckless disregard for both military protocol and basic safety measures. As chaos swirls around them, Sanborn and Eldridge try to come to terms with James’ behavior, even as it seems to endanger them during the dog days of their respective tours.

Based on the first-hand observations of journalist and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special Army bomb unit in Iraq, The Hurt Locker is scripted with such insight and tunnel-vision devotion to character that it could actually be retro-engineered as a stageplay and still retain much of its punch. This isn’t a big, swaggering conventional war drama; in some ways it’s almost incidentally one, save for the psychological toil of warfare under the microscope.

The wry, mordant banter of the soldiers is often revealing. “Aren’t you glad the Army has all those tanks parked there so if the Russians come along we can have a big tank battle?” one specialist asks his cohort. Yet Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd — who similarly located the solemnity of courage and doom in United 93 — also find compelling shorthand images with which to seed their film, as with a hobbled cat limping along the dusty, war-torn roadside.

Through it all, there are set piece moments of exquisitely fine-tuned pressure-cooker tension, executed by Bigelow with a steely precision and skill that matches her protagonist’s on-screen bomb-defusing talents. One sequence finds James having to examine the body of a young boy that may have been booby-trapped; another scene finds him locating and disarming a hidden improvised explosive device, only to pull up a spider web of buried red ancillary wires, stretching 12 to 15 feet in every direction.

The Hurt Locker is perhaps most notable, though, for the manner in which much of its emotional impact lies outside the parameters of the picture and its contained, if ample, drama. Without giving away anything, suffice it to say that the film plays as a sort of tragic prequel to a post-traumatic stress disorder drama one might see five or six years hence. The greatest tragedy of war, you see, is that it isn’t really over when it ends. (Summit, R, 130 minutes)

Discussing the slow-drip revelations of steroid use in baseball with a friend recently, I made the point that if a professional athlete didn’t know what he or she was putting in their body (as Barry Bonds and now Manny Ramirez have each claimed, among others), it was only because they didn’t want to know. My friend agreed. If your livelihood depends on peak-performance physical fitness, knowing the details of any supplement you ingest takes on extreme importance.

That point is still valid, I think. And yet, watching Robert Kenner’s powerhouse, revelatory documentary Food, Inc., one comes to realize just how much of our diet is outside our personal control, almost no matter how healthy we aim to be. Unless you grow and locally source all of your own food, we are each, to varying degrees, prisoners of a system in which mega-companies like McDonald’s — to use but one example, since it’s the world’s largest purchaser of beef — can virtually dictate the terms by which cows are raised all across the United States. This means that even if you’re not pulling into the drive-thru for a Big Mac, you’re apt to buy ground beef from cows fed with corn, something they weren’t biologically designed to eat.



The astounding ubiquity of corn and its many spin-off uses, including high-fructose corn syrup (all deliciously subsidized by governmental policy), serves as the leaping-off point for Food, Inc., which features interviews with author-experts such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), as well as forward-thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joe Salatin. Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from the pastoral fantasy — red barns, white picket fences, rolling green hills — American consumers have been, ahem, fed.

In the wake of documentarian Michael Moore‘s box office successes and Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, politically agitative nonfiction works have a certain cachet they didn’t have a decade ago. Apart from its thought-provoking value in this arena, though, what helps truly distinguish Food, Inc. are three things. First, the polished sheen of its production; there’s just a pinch of the wry, pop vibrance of Super Size Me. Second, a counterbalancing optimism as to how to make positive changes. And third, true heart. In fact, the inclusion of a story strand concentrating on a Colorado mother who lost her two-year-old son to E. coli from a hamburger gives Food, Inc. a tangible emotional connection that a lot of mainstream dramas, let alone like-minded docs, simply don’t have.

In revealing surprising truths about what goes into the foods we eat and how they’re produced, Food, Inc. not only makes obvious links between our high-caloric modern choices and rising obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes rates, but also the relative collective impotence of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and FDA. In clear, concise terms, Kenner correlates how efficiencies achieved in food production and packaging are precariously built on a house of cards, since the trade-off comes via a food supply now controlled by an ever-dwindling handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health and the livelihood of the American farmer.



Perhaps most chillingly emblematic of this is Monsanto, whose genetic modification of a soybean resistant to the weed-killing chemical spray Round-up has given them a patent on the seed. With skull-crushing efficiency, including lawsuits and private investigator enforcers, the company has driven small farmers who don’t adopt their seed out of business, growing their market share from two to 90 percent in just over a decade. In a few years, it may be possible that regular soybeans won’t be domestically available at all.

No matter how much of a cinephile one is, it’s reasonable to say that only a handful of films in any given year might actually impact your life. And it’s a tough thing — to be interesting and progressive, persuasive and affecting, all in almost equal measure. And yet Kenner pulls it off. Food, Inc. certainly isn’t the sort of film that puts a feel-good spring in your step, but it appeals to both the head and heart in such a clear-eyed fashion as to make you want to take better care of yourself as well as those around you. And that’s a powerful thing. (Magnolia, unrated, 93 minutes)

A relatively straightforward hostage thriller with the benefit of two A-list leading men in John Travolta and Denzel Washington, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a professionally mounted genre exercise which tries to please both thriller and social drama crowds, and suffers mightily as a result. A streamlined update of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 original, director Tony Scott’s film ultimately collapses under the weight of its clashing, disparate styles of storytelling and acting.

Eschewing title cards or lengthy opening credits, Pelham‘s set-up is efficiently handled: preening thug Ryder (Travolta) and three gun-toting pals seize control of the front car of a New York subway train in the middle of an afternoon, demanding a multi-million dollar ransom for 19 hostages. Walter Garber (Washington) is the city employee who first fields their call. Ryder sets a deadline of one hour, threatening to kill a single passenger for each minute his pay-off is late. With time ticking and options limited — the titular subway car is isolated underground in an area that precludes police response — the mayor (James Gandolfini) and his aides scurry to secure the necessary funds. Meanwhile, Ryder refuses to speak to hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), drawing Garber back into the proceedings and eventually coaxing out personal details — Garber is the target of a bribery investigation — that may compromise his professional future.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s adaptation scores some points for some of its subtle tweaks in characterization; Gandolfini’s mayor, unburdened by the niceties of potential re-election, is particularly well drawn and acted. There are also certain narrative parallels to Phone Booth, in which a man is manipulated by a killer and similarly held in limbo for his sins — nominally the fate of Garber, once Ryder gets into his head. But several plot points both small and large fail to connect, whether it’s the misguided attempt at human connection with a hostage talking to his girlfriend on a laptop webcam, or Scott’s decision to intercut the unfolding subway drama with a high-speed police escort of the ransom cash.

Crucially, Pelham‘s script also raises the issue of a limit on the amount of money that can be readied for a situation like this, then has Ryder initially, and pointedly, ask for a penny more. Despite the fact that this knowledge might help investigators source Ryder’s true identity, it is never communicated to Camonetti, or indeed, further discussed at all. It’s a wink for the audience, but makes everyone working to solve the hostage crisis look incompetent.

Apart from their characters’ antagonism, even Washington and Travolta seem at odds, as if acting in different films. The former is cool and collected; Travolta, though, is flamboyantly unfocused and over-the-top, which doesn’t seem to match up once Ryder’s true identity is revealed. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Columbia, R, 107 minutes)