More rudely silly than funny, action-comedy Land of the Lost is staged with color and a fair amount of forward-moving energy, but not much in the way of inventiveness or surprise. A big screen adaptation of the mid-1970s time-traveling children’s show of the same name, the movie is scant on plot but heavy on scatological humor, and over-relies on the well-worn performance shtick of star Will Ferrell. Like an early morning mist from its quasi-primordial setting, the result — tonally consistent, but consistently underwhelming — dissipates immediately upon conclusion, and doesn’t hold a candle to its star’s stronger efforts, like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Three years after a flame-out on an early morning TV show, Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) finds himself teaching middle school, his outlandish theories about time travel discredited. Graduate student Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel) finds him, and questions Rick about a particular unrealized invention. Rick slaps together a prototype machine, and he and Holly head to a dusty tourist-trap cave in the desert to test it, where they meet hillbilly proprietor Will Stanton (Danny McBride).

On their tour, the trio plunge down a waterfall and into a sort of hybrid alternate dimension, neither fully past nor present, where dinosaurs roam an apocalyptic wasteland littered with artifacts both historical and incidental. Stalked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex they call Grumpy (for his murderous disposition), the group finds an unlikely friend in a primate named Chaka (Jorma Toccone), whose primitive language Holly happens to speak. Standing in their way of finding Rick’s machine and getting home is a mass of reptilian Sleestaks, including one with designs on world domination.

If there’s a unifying success to Land of the Lost, it comes from the manner in which director Brad Silberling ably juggles its action mayhem with comedy, all under the banner of a single visual scheme. For all the intensity of its dino-rampaging, the movie’s visual effects all have a similarly shimmery, slightly welcoming feel — neither totally terrifying nor kitschy. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t give Silberling much with which to work. The television experience of scripters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas shows in a number of dawdling sequences. Changing the dynamic of the three main characters (it was a father and his two children on the TV show) would seemingly open up rich new avenues for comedic tension, but instead seems only designed to allow for the groping of Friel’s breasts. There’s neither enough rooted bickering friction nor cohesive cooperation to form a substantive connection to this motley crew; the characters are merely collective prisoners of a field trip through special effects.

Few actors do blithely self-centered, not entirely earned confidence as well as Ferrell, and that familiar spin he puts on Rick brings a few fitful smiles. Much of the film eschews his penchant for serial physical debasement, but, as if satisfying the request of a besotted audience member at an improv show, the filmmakers cram in a scene where Rick rolls up his shorts and tiptoes by pterodactyl eggs. Later again, there’s Ferrell in familiar shirtless mode, this time during a puzzlingly elongated poolside sequence which feels like a narrative placeholder for some other action, accidentally never actualized. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 103 minutes)

In 2002, Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding was The Little Film That Could, an ethnically specific romantic comedy that mainstream audiences discovered and celebrated as their own. It played in theaters for a full year, en route to a $240 million domestic gross and a cumulative $370 million box office haul. The question surrounding Vardalos’ latest film, then, the Greece-set My Life in Ruins, is whether one can ever really go home again. The answer, it turns out, is kind of, but not really.

A mostly hired gun here (though she does rate a producer credit), Vardalos stars as Georgia, a thirtysomething singleton who’s lost her job as a history professor and works in disgruntled fashion as a travel guide at Pangloss Tours in Athens. On the precipice of considering another life change, she struggles leading around a motley crew of tourists (a group that includes Richard Dreyfuss, Harland Williams and Rachel Dratch), trying to show them the beauty of her native country even as they seem more concerned with air conditioning, ice cream and shopping time. Worn down by their disinterest and a rival colleague out to show her up, Georgia eventually begins to let go and see things in new ways. After some mistaken identity shenanigans involving a secret admirer, the lovelorn Georgia even comes around to the possibility of a relationship with carefree, crush-worthy bus driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis, above right), whose mullet magically becomes acceptable once he simply shaves.

Written by Mike Reiss, a scribe on The Simpsons, and directed by Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality), My Life in Ruins is a relatively sweet and well-meaning film nonetheless done in by its own wild unevenness and over-the-top characterizations. A mirthless opening 15 or 20 minutes, full of painfully telegraphed shtick, finally gives way to some passably funny if very small moments, including a mispronunciation of the word “stick” and Dratch coining the collapsed slang “sh-load.” Vardalos, too, has a certain unvarnished charm, particularly in a few scenes with Dreyfus, that remind you of her breakthrough role.

Still, the film doesn’t arrive at most of its emotional moments honestly. There’s lots of talk about “kefi” (Greek for passion, spirit or mojo), and certainly enough beautiful scenery to root the movie as an exotic travelogue bauble, but Vardalos’ character isn’t strongly sketched enough to make it all work as a sort of How Georgia Got Her Groove Back. The supporting characters, meanwhile, are by turns so wacky, rude, sullen or spiritedly helpful (whatever the moment’s situation dictates) as to become wearying. Essentially, My Life in Ruins is just a series of moments aping other film moments we’ve all seen before. That it tries to piggyback so blatantly on the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding of course isn’t surprising, but it certainly proves that cinematic leftovers don’t always keep well. (Fox Searchlight, PG-13, 96 minutes)

Part of a new breed of highbrow “concept” horror that shrugs off and/or embraces the constraints of limited production means and instead picks at the nasty mental scabs of what truly unnerves, Pontypool is a unique thriller that has the twin advantages of a provocative premise and a superb cast. Together, these things hold an audience’s attention for the bulk of the movie’s running time, holding at bay some frustrations with a third act that doesn’t seem quite certain of which direction to head or what sort of energy level to embrace.

Adapted by Tony Burgess from his own book, Pontypool Changes Everything, and directed by Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo, The Tracey Fragments), Pontypool is a tightly wound, genre-bending psychological thriller, starring Stephen McHattie (Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl,
in Watchmen), about the wild spread of a deadly virus. Spare in design but exquisitely shot on the new “Red One” HD camera, the film sparks memories of the claustrophic feelings of American pre-independent cinema of the early 1980s, when even the inclusion of paid extras was a luxury that couldn’t be afforded.

Exuding gruff charisma, McHattie (above right) stars as radio deejay Grant Mazzy, who’s been kicked off the big city airwaves and has just recently taken a job as early morning host of Radio 660’s “The Beacon,” in the small Canadian town of Pontypool. The cramped quarters are a long way from the zenith of his days as a top-shelf shock-jock; in fact, the station broadcasts from the basement of the town’s only church, and Mazzy’s entire staff consists of producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle, above left) and Afghanistan veteran turned knob-twirling techie Laurel Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly).

What begins as just another brutal winter morning quickly becomes something more intriguing. Starting with their off-site “eye in the sky” helicopter reporter (in actuality a guy simply perched on a hill at the edge of town), and continuing with garbled phone calls from eyewitnesses, bizarre reports start streaming in of people committing horrendous acts of violence against one another — even biting and mauling their friends and family. But there’s nothing coming in on the official news wires. So is any of this really happening? In a twist worthy of Lost, the Beacon’s radio signal is then interrupted with a message in French that, among other things, warns against communicating verbal affection to loved ones… and translating the message into English. Whoops, too late: Mazzy has read it over the air.

As fractured reports of more violence trickle in, there’s also news of strange speech patterns — marauding hordes of people chanting incongruous slogans over and over. Trapped in the radio station, Mazzy and Sydney are forced to confront the possibility that this insane, seemingly viral behavior taking over the town might be somehow spreading as a result of their radio transmissions — through language itself.

With its talky, literate roots, Pontypool fits in with a new slice of genre films that consciously (sometimes a bit too consciously) eschew conventional horror formula, and the baser entertainments of brawny response. This time — in addition to the story choice of limited scope — it’s an avoidance of the word “zombie,” as if even its bare mention would somehow sully the proceedings. It may seem a quibbling criticism, but for Mazzy — a career on-his-feet thinker who has to chew up live air time with frazzled and/or incoherent guests — it seems dubious that he wouldn’t be a bit more forward-thinking and speculative about the goings-on in the outside world. That, in other words, he wouldn’t spit out the word zombie, even if only in disbelief.

This relates a bit to the overall flagging intellectual momentum of the film. It may be a bigger part of the source material, but the provocative, fascinating idea at Pontypool‘s core — rife with sociopolitical symbolism, both because of the film’s French Canadian setting and the context of recent world events, in which America has behaved with reckless impunity — doesn’t feel like it quite gets a full treatment on screen. The requisite “situational expert,” in this case a doctor (Hrant Alianak) who breaches the security of the station, adds frustratingly little of substance to the proceedings; writer Burgess puts him in a room with Mazzy, who would have all the same questions as the audience, and has the latter essentially clam up, and slow-peddle things. One doesn’t need definitve answers about the menace within the movie, but probing questions are essential to keep driving an audience’s bewilderment and anxiety.

Also, Mazzy is such an interesting character — and, in a superlative performance, McHattie embodies him
with such grizzled, devil-may-care confidence, coming across as a
long-lost sibling of Hugh Laurie on House — that it’s a bit of disappointment that Pontypool doesn’t pick up its pace of interaction early on, allowing for more robust interpersonal interaction that would help shade and color Sydney and Laurel Ann, who feel a bit like unequal sides in this narrative triangle. As is, though, there’s an eerie sense of hairline-fractured calm that hangs over the entire picture (in that sense, it’s very Canadian), and it’s again worth stressing that there is a Kafkaesque grip here that not a lot of movies attempt, let alone succeed at. McDonald directs the hell out of the material — utilizing an ascetic aesthetic, making smart framing choices — and there’s apparently already a sequel in the works. For these reasons and more, fans of claustrophic, character-rooted thrillers like Misery or Cube that also have a certain appreciation for arthouse fare will find plenty of merit in Pontypool. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

Clearly delighting in a return to roots, Sam Raimi downshifts a bit
from the high-flying theatrics of the billion-dollar Spider-Man
franchise with Drag Me to Hell, a slickly made, engaging horror film that evokes the spirit of much of the director’s early work, particularly the Evil Dead series. Mixing different modes of horror storytelling with dark touches of humor, Raimi hits story beats colorfully and with a heavyweight boxer’s precision, proving gore isn’t necessary for a cathartic horror-thrill ride.

Los Angeles loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) has a good life; she’s happy with her boyfriend, Clay Dalton (Justin Long), a young professor at a nearby college, and seems to have the inside track on a promotion. In an effort to impress upon her boss (David Paymer) that she can make tough-minded decisions with an eye on the bottom line rather than human compassion, Christine denies a third extension on the home mortgage of an old woman (Lorna Raver), which means certain foreclosure. Feeling that she has shamed her, the woman viciously attacks Christine after work in the parking lot, and places upon her a curse. Feeling creeped out, Christine consults with a psychic, Rham Jas (Dileep Rao), and learns the specifics of the gypsy curse: that she will be tormented for three days by a spirit that will eventually come to claim her soul. Increasingly panicked attempts to alter that destiny ensue.

Drag Me to Hell trades in an aggressive sound design; the movie is constructed and mixed like a Michael Bay action film. In winking fashion, it also includes plenty of conventional horror signifiers — creaking windows and wind-slammed garden gates, mewing cats and clattering pans. Yet the movie also exhibits a smart sense of exacting construction. Working from a script with his brother Ivan, a frequent collaborator, Raimi seeds his story with alternately small and amusing details (farmgirl Christine used to be overweight, which quietly feeds her insecurity and anxiety over being accepted by Clay’s rich parents) that help give the movie the feeling of an anchored drama. Overall, the emphasis is definitely on the thrills, and horror, but comedic grace notes are interwoven throughout too.

Raimi proves himself, too, to be a master manipulator of genre mood, efficient with effects both practical and computer-generated. Ominous shadow play and a handful of low-angle tracking shots are intermingled with other trademark Raimi flourishes, like his resurrected fetish, from Evil Dead, for wildly over-the-top, hand-to-hand violence perpetrated by and against seemingly possessed old ladies. These low-fi bits help give the film’s artificial visual effects greater punch and value.

Drag Me to Hell may be rated PG-13, but it’s unlikely that most horror buffs will feel cheated. Raimi gleefully dispenses with the usual sacred cows (neither children nor kittens are safe), and also leans on wild gross-out moments to goose his audience. There are effusive sprays of slimy phlegm and vomit, as well as one comedic blood-gushing sequence, all of which would make Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote proud. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)

Based on Noel Coward’s stageplay of the same name, Easy Virtue is an engagingly acted, smartly scripted film — and that rare period piece that refuses to yield to predictably stuffy interpretations of what does and what doesn’t constitute familial screen conflict in times gone by. How is this best illustrated, you ask? Why, there’s a scene in which Jessica Biel crushes a little dog to death with her ample derriere. Yes, seriously.

Starring Biel and Ben Barnes (above), the film centers around John Whittaker, a young Englishman from a prim and proper family who falls madly in
love with Larita, a sexy and glamorous American woman who, improbably enough, makes a living driving a motorcar. They marry
impetuously, but when the couple returns to the stuffy Whittaker family
home, John’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) has an instant allergic
reaction to her new daughter-in-law. Sparks fly, and a battle of wits
ensues, with the approval of John’s sisters (Katherine Parkinson and Kimberley Nixon) serving as the swing-vote opinions on the nuptials, and the couple’s future.

Cast somewhat intriguingly against type as a bit of a cad, and
layabout, Colin Firth brings pleasantly shaded and subtle tones of
swallowed sadness to his role as John’s stubbled, war veteran father,
even as he bickers and banters with relish. As the film unfolds we learn more about his outcast status, and the
disdain with which John’s mother holds him. Biel, sort of playing with fire in respect to bombshell expectations, goes platinum blonde for the role, and does a solid job. There’s something inescapably modern about Biel — and I’m not talking just her body — but in both The Illusionist and now here, she does the necessary work to make you believe her character fits within the times. More demure wallflowers I think she would have trouble with, but slipping into corsets or flapper outfits and playing women a bit ahead of their respective times is well within her grasp, and something that no doubt helps her keep some of the dreck genre screenplays she must be continuously peddled at bay.

At its core, Easy Virtue is both a light comedy of manners and an attack on both the practice and practitioners of outmoded Victorian control, and trying to live out one’s life (either vicariously or for material gain) through the lives of their children. That it’s a period piece is almost incidental, given the towel-snapping pleasure of much of the dialogue. (Where else does one get to hear one character slag another as “swinging your wherewithal like a cat in heat”?) Composer Marius de Vries provides a peppy score that serves the material quite well, but the grander portion of the film’s vibrancy must be credited to Australian director Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), who stages scenes with a brisk, flirty touch while letting the dramatic stakes rise naturally to a slow boil, courtesy of the script, co-written by Sheridan Jobbins.

The only story strand that feels a bit off, or leaves one really wanting for some further connective tissue, concerns siblings Philip and Sarah (Christian Brassington and Charlotte Riley), longtime family friends of the Whittaker clan. John’s casual shelving of Sarah as a potential mate — and her rather blithe acceptance of it — gets its own scene of explanation, but feels like it could’ve been milked for more, either dramatically or comedically. Similarly, the ending may strike some as a bit pat; it’s best if it’s taken as a sort of tonal snapshot of the characters’ minds at that particular point rather than a fixed, end-point conclusion.

Oh, and finally, of course, there’s that scene where Biel’s Larita, quite accidentally, sits on the Whittaker’s prized tiny pooch. In one sense, it feels like a put-on from a Farrelly brothers flick. But Elliott and his cast cleverly spin it forward, and let it be both silly and panicked, having actual consequences. A lot of comedies in general could learn something from that, regardless of the time period in which they’re set. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 93 minutes)

Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard re-team for the religious-lit thriller and hit-in-waiting Angels & Demons, the conspiratorially tinged follow-up to the smash hit The Da Vinci Code, and if there’s really nothing about the movie that screams out for the necessity of its existence, neither will audiences already predisposed toward inking this in their plans over the next couple weeks feel cheated by anything that unfolds onscreen. To the degree that it works, it’s as a lesson in the gravitational pull
of a movie star’s accrued goodwill. Ditching the derided hairstyle of
his first run-through as Harvard professor and religious
symbology expert Robert Langdon, Hanks is the well-oiled pace car that keeps this entire thing moving at a sustained, reasonable clip.

Pulled away from an early morning swim by a representative of the Catholic Church, Langdon is whisked away to Vatican City. There, in the wake of the natural death of a progressive and beloved pope, Langdon is shown evidence of the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati. A powerful scientific-intellectual brotherhood driven underground centuries ago by the persecution of the church, the Illuminati seem behind a dastardly plot — the kidnapping and announced execution of four favored cardinals, and a hidden bomb made of anti-matter — that leaves less than five hours until a bloodbath that will consume much of Vatican City.

Langdon joins forces with Inspector Olivetti (Pierfrancesco Favino, above right) and Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an enigmatic Italian scientist; together, they embark on a frantic dash through the Vatican’s secretive vault, old cathedrals, sealed crypts and dangerous catacombs, facing snide and stone-faced pushback from Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard, looking gassy), the head of the Swiss Guard, the pope’s personal security detail. While Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl) insists on proceeding with the conclave that will choose the next pope, Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) pushes for extra time and evacuation measures, all while hoping that Langdon and Vetra can untangle a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that serve as the Vatican’s best hope for survival.

Regardless of what one typically thinks of his choice in material — and the revisionist haters seem most likely to clamorously cite A Beautiful Mind in their bashings — Howard is surely a highly functional director, and he inflicts no great harm upon the material here. In fact, I’d say he gives it as solid a polish as could be expected while still retaining a reasonable degree of austerity and solemnity. The screenplay, by David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, doesn’t achieve transcendent moments of cleverness, but it does manage to avoid most of the sludgy pitfalls that plagued The Da Vinci Code, if also coming across as unintentionally silly in the cable news coverage of the Catholic conclave. Its chief problem, though, is that the literary-historical elements of the story that so root it in detail are the same things that work against the film’s time-crunch structure, which doesn’t really play convincingly. Vatican City isn’t the size of Texas, but neither is it a mere four or five city blocks, so the announced public execution/body dumpings of the cardinals (one per hour, starting at 8 o’clock) place imposing demands on the narrative that Koepp and Goldsman never fully solve. Instead, when in a pinch, Langdon scours a map and just blurts out something like, “Angels are pointing the way!” and the audience, unreasonably, is meant to say, “Oh, well, sure, that makes sense.”

The movie is facile, though, and again, that’s a credit to Hanks, who is a smart and intuitive actor, quite apart from being just a likeable one. In addition to just having the authority to convey historical detail and theory in such a compressed fashion, Hanks also has a keen feeling for how much exasperation, assertiveness or swallowed panic to inject into a given moment; when he meets Commander Richter’s snootiness with a wry, “Hey, fellas, you called me,” or argues an important point of timeliness with a pair of Italian cops, it has the ability to blind less critically-leaning minds — temporarily, perhaps, but effectively — to the narrative’s implausabilities. And that, my friends, is the definition of star power — the superhuman ability to effect suspension of disbelief.

Apart from Langdon, though, most of the characters in Angels & Demons don’t tightly hold on to one’s attention. McGregor’s is the flashiest, most substantive supporting role, and he does a fine enough job. But what does it say about me that the character with whom I most identify is an assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kass) who says, “When they call me, it’s so important to them for me to know that they’re doing God’s will, or Allah’s, or Yahweh’s, and I suppose they’re right, because without them I wouldn’t exist”? I’m not sure. But with that line, I found myself pondering a much more interesting filmic spin-off… (Sony, PG-13, 138 minutes)

The emotional template of Midnight Cowboy provides the unlikely inspiration for the slightly smarter-than-average knuckle-duster Fighting, in which two different-minded New York City outcasts team up in mutual-use fashion to pull themselves up and out of their marginal existences. Committed performances and smart, unobtrusive direction help mitigate a story with some notable lapses in logic, and elevate it in relation to like-minded fare.



Alabama native Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum, above) has come to New York City with nothing. Selling phony Harry Potter books and other counterfeit goods on the street, he’s barely earning a living. Shawn’s luck changes when, in a scrum protecting his merchandise, scam artist and smooth-talking hustler Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) sees he has a natural talent for fighting. Harvey offers Shawn a chance at making bigger money in back-room, bare-knuckle brawls where the rich and curious gather to watch and bet on brawny strangers. The duo form an unfussy partnership, with Shawn crashing on Harvey’s couch. As Shawn experiences some success, he finds himself drawn to single mother Zulay Velez (Zulay Henao). He also crosses paths with an old college nemesis turned professional mixed martial arts fighter, Evan Haley (Brian White), setting the scene for a climactic rooftop clash with a $100,000 payday.

Fighting‘s third act unravels a bit; the reasons provided for the animosity between Shawn and Evan aren’t particularly plausible, or compelling. Still, director Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) works in a fairly restrained fashion outside of the cramped fight sequences, and the film’s dialogue is alternately good-naturedly carping and a bit roughhewn, with overlapping or halting exchanges nicely shading characters’ personalities. In all, there’s a lot of honest effort and investment here in character and emotion, which at least feels refreshing.

Interesting musical selections also help give the film purpose, and punch. In addition to very effective use of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man,” horn-inflected original compositions give Fighting an early sense of uplift. Various ethnically flavored fight sequences, meanwhile, incorporate bits of traditional instrumentation accordant with their respective settings or antagonists. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Rogue, PG-13, 105 minutes)

In 2005, Luc Besson penned Unleashed, which starred Bob Hoskins as a particularly nasty gangster and Jet Li, who he’s literally raised as a dog, as his feral, martial arts-gifted enforcer. It seemed a silly conceit for an action film, something just outrageous enough to serve as a juicy hook while also providing a modicum of emotional mooring so Li could crack skulls in sympathetic fashion as he moved toward becoming a self-actualized adult.



Strangely, it was Unleashed that first came to mind while watching James Toback’s Tyson, a gripping documentary about the former undisputed heavyweight champion who flamed out in a haze of drugs, car crashes and outside-the-ring violence and criminal behavior. After all, despite standing under six feet and never topping 219 pounds during his professional career, Mike Tyson comes across here as the original “manimal,” a fierce, brutal and unrelentingly single-minded boxing machine who took no mercy on opponents in part because none was ever taken on him in adolescence.

Tyson grabs viewers from the first frame. An exercise in subjectivity (Tyson is the only present-day interviewee, though others are glimpsed in archival footage), the film cuts a cursory swath through his heartbreaking childhood in poverty-stricken Brooklyn, and quickly hones in on Tyson’s relationship with Cus D’Amato. A trainer who helped rescue Tyson from juvenile detention, D’Amato became his legal guardian in 1984, taking the teenager into his own home and giving focus to his rage before dying of pneumonia at 77 years of age. With the same management team put in place by D’Amato overseeing his life, both personally and professionally, Tyson would be able to stay focused for four or five more years before spiraling wildly out of control. A turbulent one-year marriage to actress Robin Givens — which spawned headlines about car crashes, money squabbles, drunken screaming matches and worse — yielded a divorce, followed by depression, drug abuse, professional humiliation and all manner of wildly antisocial behavior.

It would be easy to open the movie with footage of Tyson’s stunning loss to Buster Douglas — perhaps the biggest upset ever in an individual sport — but Toback instead showcases the 20-year-old Tyson’s first title fight, a destruction of Trevor Berbick. This savvy reset is a smart approach, as it whets one’s appetite, no matter how much they may or may not know about Tyson or his fight career, for an exploration of exactly how the failure of this unstoppable athletic specimen came to unfold.

Using a slightly overlapping dialogue technique, as well as occasionally shifting split screens, Toback infuses the movie with a sense of restlessness and kinetic energy, which is certainly in keeping with its subject’s digressive mindset. The portrait that slowly emerges, in Polaroid-esque fashion, is a heartbreakingly conflicting one, of both wounded child and raging beast. Tyson is like the tangled mess of cords behind your television entertainment center; all raw nerve endings and intense surface feelings, he’s an emotional, unchecked id without any of the adult tools — in terms of either formal education or mooring life experiences — to substantively cope with his problems.

As a film, Tyson‘s only uncomfortable failing, really, has to do with the lens of subjectivity — otherwise a strong point — that it refuses to modify when it comes to the boxer’s rape conviction and other charges of domestic abuse. While Tyson does address each of these incidents, he has previously proven himself to be an unreliable or vague narrator (sometimes charmingly so), and the short shrift  given these serious incidents feels a bit unseemly. The omission of certain biographical facts (Tyson’s father, whom he never knew, is said to have fathered 16 kids), or a bit more about the therapy, if any, that has calmed Tyson would have also helped round and deeper shade the movie, but as is it remains a fascinating portrait of an unlikely but oddly compelling modern-day Shakespearean figure. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 90 minutes)

A simple, straightforward and sweetly dispositioned multi-generational dramedy without much thunderclap revelation, Michael Caine‘s Is Anybody There? marks the sort of solid, unfussy, character-rooted filmmaking that Hollywood studios have mostly abandoned in their pursuit of the latest hot-shit comic book or videogame property.

Set in 1980s seaside England, the movie tells the story of gangly 10-year-old Edward (Son of Rambow‘s wide-eyed, skinny-armed Bill Milner), whose parents have turned their small house into a retirement home. While his mother (Anne-Marie Duff) struggles to keep the family business afloat and his father (David Morrissey) copes with the onset of a mid-life crisis exacerbated by the proximity of a young assistant, Edward becomes increasingly obsessed with the ghosts and potential afterlives of the residents when they die.

Naturally, this hobby doesn’t exactly make him popular with the other kids at school. In fact, Edward’s existence is a relatively lonely one until he meets Clarence (Caine), the latest arrival at his parents’ home. A cranky, retired magician and bitterly grieving widower who refuses to give in gracefully to old age, Clarence butts heads with Edward, but soon notices that the boy is growing up even more fitfully than he’s growing old. As they begin to face life together, Clarence takes steps toward coming to terms with his past, while Edward curbs his obsession with the unknown. Along the way, both are reminded of what magic is possible when life is lived to its fullest.

Written by Peter Harness and directed by John Crowley (Boy A), Is Anybody There? seems made for a comfortable, rainy day double feature with 2003’s Secondhand Lions, another film in which Caine plays a somewhat irascible mentor to a precocious youngster. His performance isn’t ferocious or wildly theatrical, but instead just rather perfectly modulated. Unselfconsciously naturalistic, Milner exhibited a tremendous sympathy in Son of Rambow, and he doesn’t disappoint here, either. He serves as a believable foil to Caine, and the two have a pleasant chemistry, whether sparring or circling one another in quietly appreciative fashion.

As the movie advances, its one story-related reveal — the card up its sleeve, as it were — might become readily evident to those searching for a narrative pivot. In the end, that doesn’t matter, because of the smart way the film is put together, the full-bodied emotions granted each character, and a wild, bloody, darkly humorous magic trick gone wrong that wouldn’t have ever made the cut in a conventional Hollywood dramedy. Maybe it’s best to leave these sorts of micro-targeted tales to the indie peddlers, after all. (Big Beach, PG-13, 94 minutes)

“Culkins are kind of like Bebe’s Kids… they don’t die, they multiply.” Sorry… but this was the thought that surged through my mind as I settled into Lymelife, another self-satisfied, allegorical tale of the gritty dark side of Northeastern suburban paradise and its attendant loss of innocence, all as peddled by Derick Martini, making his directorial debut. A sort of facile, surface-polished lesser entry in the canon of movies like The Ice Storm, The Chumscrubber and American Beauty, in which sensible and in some regards overly mature kids grapple with philandering and emotionally stunted adults, Lymelife is a bunch of discrete, thematically similar scenes in search of a cogent narrative punch.

Centering on two deeply troubled, dysfunctional families during the dog days of the 1970s, the film revolves around an awkward, sensitive 15-year-old boy, Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), whose family life is ostensibly turned upside down after an outbreak of Lyme disease hits his community, spreading illness and paranoia. Scott’s parents — workaholic father Mickey (Alec Baldwin) and overprotective mother Brenda (Jill Hennessy) — are unhappy in swallowed ways bubbling just underneath the surface, and his older brother Jim (Kieran Culkin) is back on brief loan from the Army, and about to ship off for war. Complicating matters, Scott has fallen in love with his neighbor and longtime friend, Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts). Troubled in different ways, Adrianna’s less affluent family consists of her uptight mother, Melissa (Cynthia Nixon), who’s carrying on a not-so-clandestine love affair, and her father, Charlie (Timothy Hutton), who’s slowly slipping away from the effects of Lyme disease.

Derick Martini and his brother Steven, the writer-actors behind the winning, low-budget 1999 indie Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire, collaborated on Lymelife‘s script based on their own experiences growing up on suburban Long Island, but the movie feels too cute by about half, groomed for indie flick preciousness in certain scenes. Lymelife premiered, I gather, at the Toronto Film Festival, and truth be told it’s the warm bosom of a welcoming throng of international filmgoers that’s the best home for this decently acted but otherwise marginally disappointing domestic ensemble.

There’s something of a charismatic star spark from the young Roberts, particularly in the manner in which she captures how teenage females drive the bus of sexual experience, and set the tone for the vast majority of adolescent amorous encounters. But overall her performance is a hot-and-cold thing, a lot of which is admittedly dictated from a scattershot characterization that finds Adrianna admonishing and/or patronizing Scott one moment (“I can call your mom, she can bring you an icepack or a Yoo Hoo or something,” she says in an awkward, meant-to-be-serious moment, after a bully thumps Scott), and then flashing him her red bra in confessional booth the next.

The Martinis have a nice touch with some end-around, unexpected moments of interpersonal friction or personal introspection — there’s a great bar scene between Mickey and Charlie that ranks among the best scenes of passive-aggressiveness I can recall — but the Lyme disease-as-metaphor stuff doesn’t play, and they absolutely overreach when they aim for more overt emotional manipulation. These hamfisted instincts most reveal themselves in thunderously stupid and unrealistic behavior by cheating adults — bits crammed in to advance scenes, and feed revelation amongst minors — and reach their apex in a woefully misguided finale that feels like a straight-up gangsta rip-off of American Beauty, only without the balls of actual catharsis through bloodletting. (Screen Media, R, 95 minutes)

It’s the summer of 1987, and James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, below left), an uptight comparative literature grad from Oberlin, can’t wait to embark on his dream tour of Europe with his best friend. But when his parents renege on the trip’s subsidization, James has little choice but to get a job, and spend his last summer before grad school at a seasonal amusement park operated by a loopy young married couple (Saturday Night Live‘s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig).

Forget about German beer and reefer-infused philosophical discussions, museums and pliable French girls — James’ summer will now be defined by screaming kids high on cotton candy, soused patrons scheming to score giant stuffed pandas and an old elementary school acquaintance always trying to punch him in the balls. Lucky for James, he makes a quick friend in Joel Schiffman (Martin Starr), a droll, pipe-smoking game booth worker who helps initiate James into the absurd conventions and rituals of theme park life. He finds an older mentor in the park’s maintenance guy, Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a local heartthrob due to the rumor that he once jammed with Lou Reed. And yes, James even inches closer to losing his virginity, discovering love — or at least concentrated lust — in the form of two co-workers, the captivating if slightly withdrawn Em Lewin (Kristen Stewart, below right) and dance-happy, carefree Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva).

Fresh off helping deliver a hit with Superbad, writer-director Greg Mottola returns to the big screen with his first original script since his 1997 debut, The Daytrippers. Adventureland is rooted in biographical torture (Mottola worked at a Long Island amusement park while attending Columbia University), a fact that comes through in the winning construction of the movie’s slightly off-kilter tone. Even if he’s unable to wrangle the otherwise lovely and charming Stewart’s eyes-askance lip-nibbling, or bring Eisenberg’s mannered tics fully under control, Mottola has a keen sense of detail, a deft touch with dialogue and smart taste in the casting of myriad supporting players.

One of the more intriguing elements of the film — something hinted at and flirted with in the script, but never fully and explicitly embraced, especially by the actors — is the sense that it’s an exploration of Ms. Right Now vs. Ms. Right Right Now, if that makes sense. As appealing and largely engaging as it is on the surface, Adventureland could have struck an even deeper and more thrillingly subversive chord by tapping into the idea of one (smart) kid’s randy summer in heat — the notion of a young, sensitive guy’s quest to unburden himself of his virginity while still sealing the deal with someone who he can hold a conversation with.

The product of a warped home life with a recently deceased mother and an even more recently remarried dad, Em is a hot, vulnerable mess, which comes through in her serial acting out with Connell. Other than the fact that they both seem to be generally restless, pointed toward New York City and of above-average intelligence, though, there’s little that realistically binds James and Em. Even Mottola seems bored with their interactions, sticking them together and pulling them apart in a somewhat arbitrary fashion that gives the movie a fitful rhythm. These two don’t seem like a match made forever, basically. Unfortunately, Adventureland never wholly digs into that potentially provocative mutual-use premise, and Eisenberg’s Woody Allen-lite shtick isn’t hormonally charged enough to match James’ predicament.

In the end, though, this is all criticism relative to what Adventureland gets right. With its easygoing, lived-in charms and nice supporting performances, certainly there’s a lot more good than not in the movie. It’d be an entirely suitable flick to lose your teen/twentysomething coming-of-age cherry to, in other words. (Miramax, R, 107 minutes)

The feature film directorial debut of R.W. Goodwin, who cut his teeth on The X-Files, Alien Trespass fancies itself a Matinee-style spoof of the old sci-fi films that featured rubber alien suits and other cheesy special effects. Stripped free of any subtextual significance, however, and lacking the breezy wit or clever execution that might otherwise provide a firm reason for its own standalone existence, the film, rather than coming off as fun and lighthearted, instead just feels sludgy, pointless and wearying.

Set in 1957, Alien Trespass opens with a bizarre framing device that provides an additional, needless scrim of separation from the material. The rest of the movie chronicles a fiery object from space that crashes into a mountaintop on the outskirts of the dusty California desert town of Mojave, bringing the threat of disaster to Earth. Out of this flying saucer escapes a murderous if humorously rendered creature — the Ghota, a tentacled blob bent on destroying all life forms on the planet. Seeking to track down this creature, a benevolent alien marshal from the same spaceship, Urp, possesses the body of local astronomer Ted Lewis (Eric McCormack), which leads to several confused encounters with Ted’s wife Lana (va-voomish, period perfect Jody Thompson).

Teenage sweethearts Dick (Andrew Dunbar) and Penny (Sarah Smyth) glimpse the Ghota and, along with their friend Cody (Aaron Brooks), try to warn the authorities. However, the local police, in the form of Officer Vernon (Robert Patrick) and
Chief Dawson (Dan Lauria), are by varying degrees disinterested skeptics and
mocking hornballs; nothing good can come from their involvement in the situation. With the help, then, of Tammy (Jenni Baird, above center), a waitress from the local diner, Urp/Ted sets out to save mankind, all while dealing with the curious low-grade electrical hum of sexual attraction that the erection in his pants keeps intermittently producing.

Working from a script by Steven Fisher, and a story by Fisher and James Swift, Goodwin trades in many of the production tricks of the era (rear projection, off-screen vaporizations and other action), and also uses a spectral-synth score to nice effect. But there’s no firm point of reference for the material — it’s not played straight enough to be purely a slice of nostalgic homage, nor is it arch enough to be a rib-nudging, good-natured spoof. The film is designed and shot in relatively realistic, if spare, fashion, but the Ghota, for instance, looks entirely silly — kind of like the mouth-foaming alien creatures from The Simpsons. This gap in tonal presentation would work if Alien Trespass were more loose-limbed, or ironic. But it’s not.

Furthermore, there’s nothing driving the movie palpably forward; Chief Dawson very much doesn’t want to investigate any of this alien nonsense (to the point that you keep half-expecting some sort of twist pay-off as to why, which never arrives), and the Ted/Urp character is abandoned for entirely too long during crucial stretches of the film. Myriad small details are off, too. At one point, after barking that, “This is official police business!,” Chief Dawson lets Lana jump in the front of his police cruiser as they peel off in final pursuit of Ted; also, Penny, who’s been reticent the entire movie, suddenly gets the urge to vocalize the idea of trailing folks, and ostensibly jumping right in harm’s way. It’s OK, I suppose, to just shrug and admire the slicked-back hair and creased khakis of the period, but nothing about this putative genre send-up is smart, starched or interesting. Like its stupid Ghota, it just sits there, like a blob. (Roadside Attractions, PG, 88 minutes)

A small army of foley artists, sound mixers and editors, and digital effects compositors try their best to inject some life into Fast & Furious, the latest entry in the auto-minded urban action franchise, but they
only succeed in upping the decibel level of this grating, clamorous
mess. Any thrill of even just ample, colorful entertainment of the
entirely expected variety is blunted by a wildly inane script, which
makes the comparative functionality of previous entry Tokyo Drift look
like high art.

Taking place between the events of 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift, the movie opens with its one undeniably thrilling sequence, in which entrepreneurial automotive freelancer Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and girlfriend Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) lead the hijacking of a gasoline tanker in the Dominican Republic. After this, the pair split, with Dominic not wanting the heat he’s feeling from the police to bring down those around him. Meanwhile, former undercover cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) now works directly for the FBI, in Los Angeles. When personal tragedy befalls Dominic, both he and Brian have a reason to take down Arturo Braga (John Ortiz), a Mexican drug kingpin ferrying shipments across the border via an underground tunnel. Naturally, this involves lots of turbo-charged racing and other dangerous activities, which in turn worries Dominic’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), whom Brian used to date.

Director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, Annapolis) returns for his second series stint behind the camera, and uses an aggressive sound mix to sell the action scenes. But as with Tokyo Drift, has some trouble delineating the spatial relationships so crucial to any understanding and emotional investment in the racing sequences. Of course, the parameters of Chris Morgan’s screenplay afford him no favors, setting two hugely important races underground, in cramped and dimly lit fashion. Lin saddles another race, an outdoor affair, with gaudy, incongruous overlays of a navigational map — a gambit that comes across as ripped off from a videogame. The major failing is the film’s poor plotting and ridiculous dialogue, however. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 107 minutes)

Sex sells, of course, now and forevermore. That much is a mortal lock. But if prurience intrigues us, we also have a very complicated history and relationship with what stokes the fires down below — one inextricably intertwined with the times in which we live, no matter the individual moral shading of our sexual compass. With this in mind, there’s plenty to titillate the top brain while watching the new documentary American Swing, a go-go snapshot of partner-swapping and anonymous group sex in New York City felled by, among other things, the burgeoning AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

The year was 1977, and even as New York hurtled into bankruptcy, the city’s nightlife hit unprecedented heights. In midtown, the ultra-exclusive Studio 54 was a cocaine-fueled celebrity playhouse. Downtown, at the spartan CBGB’s, punk rockers set out to thrash and destroy pop music’s status quo. Meanwhile, in the basement of the prestigious Ansonia building on the conservative Upper West Side, Plato’s Retreat opened its doors to ordinary couples who came to dance, swim, enjoy a terrible buffet and, oh yeah, swap sexual partners.

The brainchild of former wholesale meat purveyor Larry Levenson, Plato’s Retreat quickly emerged as the epicenter of public sex for the “me” generation, coming several years on the heels of the breakthrough mainstream success — fueled in large part by long runs in Times Square — of porn flick Deep Throat. Previously, swinging was mostly an underground activity, engaged in primarily by the attractive and well-to-do. But Plato’s welcomed anyone and everyone; it was a “poor man’s Playboy Mansion,” as one interviewee recalls, where it didn’t so much matter the size or shape of your body. For a mere $25 to $35, couples checked their pedigrees and judgments at the door. At this clothing-optional Disneyland, debutantes got it on next to bus drivers, and Wall Street movers and shakers gave secretaries the “starlet treatment.” For Levenson and others, Plato’s was utopia; for some, it’s a time capsule they’re eager to forget. Utilizing exclusive interviews with former patrons, employees and family members, and intercut with never-before-seen archival materials, American Swing brings this epicenter of sex and excess to the big screen.

If only it did it better. Co-directed by Matthew Kaufman and Jon Hart, and based on an article by veteran journalist Hart, American Swing is undeniably engrossing, insofar as sex is inherently interesting, and the notion of serial, strings-free couplings even more so. Unfortunately, despite the exhaustiveness of their efforts in tracking down some of the key players in the story of the club, the filmmakers have less success in constructing a cogent, contextualized narrative about the rise and fall in popularity of Plato’s Retreat, let alone an insightful examination of its founder. Certain subjects are identified only by their first names, and at times it’s not immediately clear, with the editorial cross-cutting, if they’re talking about one another or their experiences in general. The film isn’t helped by the fact that Levenson’s voice is silenced (he passed away of heart illness in 1999, though appears liberally in clips from Donahue and other talk shows), but it further does itself no favors in its handling of interviews with surviving family members, like his first wife, and sons. The movie’s press notes make mention of hundreds of hours of interviews between Hart and Levenson, spanning years, up until his death, and it also references Levenson’s estrangement from his sons. But, astonishingly, the film doesn’t include this material, or even Hart’s refracted thoughts on the curious fall of this brash character. Everything about American Swing is only thumbnail-deep, from its intimations of Mafia investment to the true nature of Levenson’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend and Plato’s Retreat co-owner.

Thankfully, there are more than a few moments of piercing, smirky humor, as when writer Buck Henry speculates on the value of post-coital dialogue between people who’ve just met, and another former patron remembers “women talking and trying to figure out about carpooling to Hebrew school in the morning.” (Robin Leach just came “to look,” one former worker notes, while Abbie Hoffman failed to get laid.) Most of the more lurid, vivid descriptions of reminiscence pertain to the “mattress room” (above), a sexual-free-for-all zone which one interviewee likens to a writhing bucket full of worms.

Photographer Donna Ferrato, meanwhile, recounts an amazing (apocryphal?) anecdote about swimming under arcs of male ejaculate, and notes that the mattress room was “terribly exciting, but also depressing, because it kills any notion or sense of romance you might have.” It’s just that level of substantive emotional analysis that the film is most missing. As a curious artifact of the sexual revolution, Plato’s Retreat has plenty of intrigue, both for older audiences who — wistfully or otherwise — missed out on the experience firsthand, and younger audiences now grappling with the sensibility and repercussions of ever texting naughty photos of themselves. American Swing captures a bit of that glossy surface engagement, but it doesn’t have, ahem, the rigorous thrust necessary to leave a lasting impression. (Magnolia, 81 minutes, unrated)

The second film behind the camera from Michael Clayton writer-director Tony Gilroy, Duplicity, would have you believe it’s a spry little battle-of-the-sexes con movie — a two-handed theatrical holdover for the same audiences that have flocked to Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, until the schedules of its Hollywood heavyweights can be coordinated to crank out another installment. It is not. Not really, not first and foremost. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Quite the opposite, really.

No, instead Duplicity is a subversive high-wire romance, with the MacGuffin, or unknown plot element, serving as a metaphorical placeholder for the surging hormonal attraction, trepidation and uncertainty of love’s bloom. It’s true that Duplicity recalls other con/heist flicks, from obvious benchmarks like Out of Sight and the chatty, erudite Heist to more stylized or colorfully drawn character fare like Lucky Number Slevin and James Foley’s Confidence. But Duplicity is incidentally a con movie. It’s also fun, engaging and pleasurable as all get-out.

The story centers on Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) and Ray Koval (Clive Owen), two spies turned corporate security operatives who work hard and flirt harder. An abbreviated romantic encounter many years ago gives the duo plenty of backstory. That shared history comes bubbling to the surface when they meet again and find themselves on opposite sides of a brewing corporate war between two captains of industry (Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti), bitter enemies who are each out to secure a product that promises a fortune to the company that patents it first.

The major-chord plot is crisply drawn and smartly studded with little mysteries. Mainly, though, the film is about deceit and honesty — the boundaries and limits of the latter, and the freedom it ultimately affords. And it’s here that Roberts and Owen (a man born to wear linen suits) excel, capturing the inner head-games of two smooth, natural-born deceivers who are trying to reconcile their basic mutual attraction and problematic personal lives with the very impulses, namely distrust and doubt, that make them such valuable professional assets. In this regard, Duplicity might be called a romantic procedural, because in the end it’s less about the sizzle-chemistry of its stars than the moods and tones of first falling under love’s sway. All that money? Big stakes, for sure. What the heart wants? Even bigger stakes. For the full review, from H Magazine, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 118 minutes)

He wrote and directed 1998’s Safe Men, which played at the Sundance Film Festival, but it was filmmaker John Hamburg’s rewrite of the 2000 mega-hit Meet the Parents, and subsequent work with Ben Stiller, which brought him fame and industry clout, and his since formed the thematic spine of his work. That same heavy, mostly unleavened affinity for serial masculine debasement has charted the course of Hamburg’s career, and, for better and worse, it’s all over I Love You, Man, his first feature-length film behind the camera since 2004’s Along Came Polly.

I Love You, Man, an unhinged “bromance” about a betrothed young professional who embarks on a wild quest to find a best man for his upcoming nuptials, has the sun-ripened benefit of excellent casting, and the good sense to let its charming players carp and needle one another in loose, lived-in ways. It also feels willfully crude, though, with its relationships defined as broadly as possible, and in ways that don’t allow for a full-bodied exploration of the film’s rich conceit.

After Los Angeles real estate agent Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) proposes to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones, above right) he’s stung and slightly unnerved to realize that his family’s teasing about him never really having a male best friend is at its core true. Not wanting to come across as overly clingy to Zooey or her friends, Peter tries to extend his social network by going on some “man dates,” several of which are arranged by his gay younger brother Robbie (Andy Samberg). He eventually meets Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), an oafish Venice Beach day-trader who expands Peter’s calendar of activities and allows him to reconnect to an avocational passion for music, even as his coarse manner helps create new problems between Peter and Zooey.

I Love You, Man‘s premise is modern, and brilliant; it could easily be used to delve substantively into the new, post-feminist (evolving? constricting? wounded?) male psyche. But the film eschews anything too complicated or dark, like either Peter not succeeding in his friendship quest, or Sydney turning out to have clingy, Cable Man-esque sociopathic tendencies of his own. The resulting laughs are the difference between pleasant surface engagement and a gratification to which you can return, something that feels built for the long haul, and rooted in reality. The cameo inclusion of Lou Ferrigno — who more or less acquits himself, as a home-selling client of Peter’s — feels forced, and as the movie wears on there’s massive drag in the second and third acts. With its watered-down, Fire in the Belly-type lessons, I Love You, Man is on some level the thirtysomething white dude equivalent of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, expect with a pinch more sex talk.

What most connects in I Love You, Man are the bits that aren’t afraid to not be funny to certain groups of people. Just as The 40-Year-Old Virgin wasn’t afraid to dis Coldplay or bizarrely name-check Kelly Clarkson, Hamburg’s movie summons up Dana Carvey’s decades-old “Church Lady” sketch, has some fun at the expense of The Princess Bride, and features a dog named Anwar Sadat. Of course, it also features a sequence with the projectile vomiting of chili. That’s the sort of lowest-common-denominator Hollywood concession that pays for the conceptual noodling, I guess, but it also makes I Love You, Man at least a bit less easy to love. (DreamWorks, R, 105 minutes)

The presence of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas as a carousing lead character gives The Edge of Love some edge and verve to which it otherwise wouldn’t and couldn’t rightly lay claim, but the film overall still never truly sets sail. It’s a gorgeously shot, grand romantic misfire.

Written by Sharman Macdonald and directed by John Maybury, the movie is, at its core, a World War II-set love quadrangle melodrama centering around Thomas (Matthew Rhys), his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), Thomas’ childhood pal Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley)
and a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who slowly insinuates his way
into Vera’s heart. It opens in the London underground during the air blitz of 1940, where Vera croons torch songs to help steel the resolve of passersby. She and Thomas reconnect, and some hyper-literate flirting over cigarettes ensues; naturally, because he’s a roguish cad, Thomas fails to mention the fact that he’s married, and even has a kid.

Not that it matters, really. Though domesticity and the decisions that it foists upon folks are in theory thematically in play here, since The Edge of Love spans several years, the laxness and intellectual dishonesty with which they’re handled makes for plenty of eye-rolling and awkwardness. When Vera eventually yields to William’s amorous advances — just before he goes off to war — she gets pregnant, which leads to she, Caitlin and Dylan eventually moving back to Wales, where grey-skies moping and infidelity ever-so-predictably follows.

There are bits and pieces of intrigue here, chiefly in what Maybury puts under the
microscope, and most particularly the parallel notion of homefront (i.e., “non-heroic”) men
grappling with returning veterans, who themselves are
grappling with re-entry into society at large. The love stories and all
the romantic friction, though — the vast majority of the movie, both in substance and in terms of what drives the movie’s tone — feels poorly sketched, melodramatic and leaden. I also couldn’t wrap my head around a character
like Caitlin, and why she would permit (and even encourage) an
emotional infidelity between her husband and putative best friend, and then retain any legitimate sense of
shock/betrayal when things got physical. That is one of a couple key incongruities in Macdonald’s screenplay.

I previously branded the film as seemingly spliced together from outtakes of The End of the Affair and Atonement, which actually gives it nominal credit for a scope and grandeur that it doesn’t really achieve. Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti provides another characteristically lush and beckoning score, but this isn’t even really a movie for the Danielle Steele set. The Edge of Love is a bit too arty and concerned with quasi-historical detail to catch fire as a romance (doomed or otherwise), and it’s too yawningly familiar in its major chord plotting to set sail as a honest character ensemble. (Capitol Films/BBC, R, 111 minutes)

Those figuring that they’d seen every possible screen-featured mangled male genital sight-gag receive quite the surprise in Miss March, the co-directorial debut of multi-hyphenates Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, co-founders of the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know, and its same-named IFC television show.

Basically a teen sex road comedy recasting of Dumb & Dumber, the film centers around two high school friends — sensible, sensitive good guy Eugene Bell (Cregger) and his crass, wild-eyed pal Tucker Cleigh (Moore, above left). His older brother’s life having been ruined in exaggerated fashion by premarital sex, Eugene has taken a pledge of abstinence until marriage. His girlfriend Cindi (Raquel Alessi, above center), however, is getting a bit antsy, so Eugene promises that on prom night they’ll do the deed. Before he can seal the deal, however, Eugene takes a tumble down a staircase and ends up in a coma.

Cut to four years later. Tucker, who has since hooked up with Candace (Molly Stanton), an epileptic high school classmate who previously wouldn’t give him the time of day, wakes up Eugene with a baseball bat to the head, and shortly thereafter discovers that the previously virginal Cindi is a Playmate. Seeking “closure” and/or sex for his pal, Tucker convinces Eugene that a drive across the country to the Playboy Mansion is a good idea, so off they go. For help in gaining access to Hugh Hefner’s pad, Tucker turns to a former high school classmate turned superstar rapper (Craig Robinson, above right) who insistently goes by the moniker Horsedick.MPEG, a phrase I’m more than a bit leery of Googling. After all sorts of zany misadventures, and being chased by Candace’s murderously vengeful fireman brother (don’t ask), the fellas end up in Beverly Hills, reconnecting with Cindi and discovering a bit about themselves in the process.

Following on the heels of The House Bunny, Miss March is the second movie in the past year to which Playboy magnate Hefner has lent his image and branded lifestyle, and it’s easily the lesser of the two projects, I’m afraid — and not only because of the fact that you can clearly see him reading cue cards during a long monologue in his cameo as a mentor to Tucker. The comedy here is overwhelmingly of the willfully crude male-fantasy variety, with Horsedick.MPEG’s party bus shenanigans and misogynistic rap anthems, and super-horny lesbians picking up the hitchhiking guys, explaining that they need someone to drive their car so that they can suck and fuck each other in the back seat without losing any travel time. This would work a bit better if it were more smoothly integrated as ironic counterpoint, but the movie’s female characters are all so wholly underdeveloped that it brings a few scenes to a screeching halt.

Miss March‘s anarchic tone and wholehearted embrace of straight-faced obliviousness — especially by Moore, who employs a hairstyle that looks like it belongs at a medieval-themed restaurant, and righteously channels early-era Jim Carrey — recalls Dumb & Dumber, as mentioned. In this sense, the movie works as a fairly harmless, double-f rental laffer for its wheelhouse demographic. But, having refashioned the script from a story idea credited to Dennis Haggerty, Ryan Homchick and Thomas Mimms, Cregger and Moore’s directorial chops aren’t slick enough to mask either limited production means and/or scenes that are open-ended, and not self-contained. Additionally, there isn’t a rigorous enough application of the movie’s own interior logic: At first Eugene, his muscles atrophied, can’t walk or even control his bowels (yes, explosive defecation gets the comedic-rule-of-three treatment), but later he’s more or less fine. Playing this stumble-bum physical malady for laughs is perfectly legitimate within the context of the outrageous premise, but doing so only partially, until it’s convenient to discard, undercuts the rest of the wild tone of heightened absurdity.

Oh, and the genital joke? Well, far be it from me to ruin things, but, in the tradition of There’s Something About Mary and the recent Step Brothers, it involves a prosthetic. And a straw. If your curiosity is irreversibly piqued, then Miss March might indeed be for you. (Fox Searchlight, R, 89 minutes)

A commercially streamlined remake of horror magnate Wes Craven’s nasty,
low-budget 1972 original, The Last House on the Left can’t decide
whether it wants to play it straight and grim, or dash headlong into
over-the-top cathartic vigilantism. The moderately executed result
holds sway for half its running time before plot potholes and clashing
tonalities cause the movie to come grinding to a halt.

Buoyed by a stronger pedigree and easily graspable vengeful hook, The Last House on the Left has more ably defined marketing muscle than a similarly brutish box office misfire like Captivity. Almost three years ago to the day, another remake of a Craven property, The Hills Have Eyes, opened to $15.7 million en route to a $69 million worldwide gross. Last year The Strangers, another horror film of rural besiegement, rung up over $81 million worldwide, including a robust $52.6 million Stateside. The Last House on the Left should track somewhere in between, translating smoothly to international genre audiences and also yielding significant pay-cable and DVD earnings.

The story finds 17-year-old Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her friend Paige (Martha MacIsaac) joining shaggy-haired stranger and fellow teen Justin (Spencer Treat Clark) back at his hotel room for some premium-grade pot. Innocent fun quickly turns dark and terrifying when Justin’s father Krug (Garret Dillahunt), sprung from police custody by his girlfriend Sadie (Riki Lindhome) and brother Francis (Aaron Paul), returns unexpectedly, and decides that Mari and Paige can’t be counted on for silence. A trek through the woods and an abortive escape attempt follow; Mari is eventually raped, shot and left to drown, but not before extracting a physical toll. As a howling storm approaches, Krug and his crew unwittingly seek refuge with the Collingwoods. When Mari finally crawls back home, her parents, John and Emma (Tony Goldwyn and Monica Potter), piece together the truth and take retribution.

Horror films of this sort — rooted in deplorable but recognizably human characters, not bionic killing machines — must locate and trade in polarities, and Greek director Dennis Iliadas (Hardcore), in his English-language debut, has no trouble capturing depravity. In fact, the movie’s opening showcases a desperate hurriedness to prove its degenerate bona fides — not content to merely kill him, Krug taunts a dying cop by showing the man a picture of his family as he strangles him.

But it’s not enough to simply contrast the outwardly idyllic and the nasty. There has to be a collision of latent yet deep-seated moralities, and as the film wears on the script lets Iliadas down. The bad characters all seem sketched by type — the quietly menacing ringleader, the psychopathic henchman, the reluctant innocent and a woman, the latter grouping much more intriguingly handled in The Strangers — and an unlikely brood outside of this monstrous set-up. The lack of care and depth granted the characters means the plot exists only to get us to the set-up for domestic blood-letting. Accordingly, The Last House on the Left feels caught between grim reality — as captured in its unflinching rape sequence — and the gory celebration of exaggerated vengeance, especially since the film extends the parameters of parental retribution present in Craven’s original. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 110 minutes)

Rife with its own rich backstory, including a complicated development history and copyright infringement lawsuit involving several Hollywood heavy hitters, Zack Snyder’s sprawling adaptation of the ground-breaking 1986 graphic novel Watchmen arrives in theaters with perhaps the loudest buzz of any spring release. A vividly re-imagined Cold War-era drama about a group of former masked crimefighters grappling with intrigue against a backdrop of the soured American dream, the film is an instructive lesson on the perils of overstuffed big screen translation. A thematic Whitman’s sampler that fitfully touches on a variety of complex issues, but never entirely satisfyingly so, Watchmen is shockingly devoid of natural narrative pull — a beautifully constructed rocket that never gets off the ground.

Nevertheless, the rabid, sizeable fan base for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ respected, award-winning graphic novel, combined with the boutique allure of IMAX presentations should guarantee Watchmen a successful theatrical run, with steady repeat business among its core demographic. Snyder’s ultra-violent, hyper-stylized 300 was a worldwide smash, grossing more than $450 million, and given his nascent cachet and the source material’s pedigree, it’s hard to fathom another R-rated film in 2009 with more of a primed, built-in audience.

A lot of what made Watchmen a landmark achievement in the comic book realm — its imaginative density, philosophical grappling and embrace of different modes of storytelling, including faux primary documents — helps make the film feel bloated and unfocused. David Hayter and Alex Tse’s script seems faithful to a degree that handcuffs any substantive exploration of the chief narrative dilemmas, and the curious result is an exercise in tension-free antics and alt-noir styling. The film’s performances are also uneven. Billy Crudup, working mostly through a flattened voice, wonderfully conveys the melancholic nature of his character, while Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach (above), an unchained id, gives Watchmen a growling, vengeful heart of darkness. Malin Akerman and Patrick Wilson, however, fail to register — problematic since their characters share a love story — while Matthew Goode comes across as too arch. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 162 minutes)

The awkward, morning-after realities of a one-night stand get dragged out into the light of day in writer-director Barry Jenkins’ quiet, festival-circuit tone poem, a shoegazing arthouse romance marked by naturalistic performances and a commitment to the beauty, tenderness and on-tenterhooks hope of everyday reality.

First-time feature director Jenkins’ fresh, breezily compelling reverse-romance — shot in gorgeously muted fashion, with only the faintest, intermittant whiffs of color — follows two San Francisco African-American twentysomethings, Micah (Wyatt Cenac, a fellow correspondent of Aasif Mandvi on The Daily Show) and Jo (Tracey Heggins), who slowly become reacquainted the day after they drunkenly meet at a party and have an uncomfortable one-night stand. As they ride bicycles around “the city by the bay,” flirtingly arguing about whether blacks go to museums, or the term “mixed-race” really can adequately describe an indie rock scene that they remain forever on the fringe of, the young couple waver between friendship and romance — the uncomfortable reality of Jo’s out-of-town boyfriend always lurking in the background.

With the movie, Jenkins has been rightly tapped as a talent to watch, named one of Filmmaker Magazine‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. It’s easy to see why, since his film has a keen sense of place, a naturalistic blend of character and plot and an unhurried pace. In fact, the first three minutes unfold without any dialogue, and the character to break the reverie is never to be seen again, lending credence to the notion that these characters would perhaps prefer to each slink away, or, even later, shift no higher conversationally than third gear.

Although they’re really otherwise very little alike, Medicine for Melancholy shares the same fetishistic celebration of place that also characterized Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. It’s drained of Lee’s film’s verve and willful eagerness to please, however; like David Gordon Green’s hypnotic and affecting debut film, George Washington, Jenkins’ movie is very much at once about both the inner struggles of its characters and the complicated relationship that they have with the city in which they live.

It’d be a bit glib, though not entirely inaccurate, to label the movie Garden State West, powered as it is by emo-style noodling. It’s not “heavy,” really, though discussions of gentrification and racial identity do make their way into the mix. And the movie isn’t funny, per se, either, but it allows for small, telling flashes of personality, as when Micah boasts of winning a “Cosbetition, part chili cook-off, part Bill Cosby impersonation competition.” In short, Medicine for Melancholy is a low-yield, very humanistic film. All told, there could stand to be a bit more meat on the bone here, either in the form of pressing intellectual, give-and-take engagement, or more immediate outside conflict. But Jenkins proves himself a master of middle-ground uncertainty, bringing to mind a lyric from Dashboard Confessional’s “Vindicated” — “Hope dangles on a string/Like slow-spinning redemption/Winding in and winding out/The shine of it has caught my eye.” For the trailer and more information on the film, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 88 minutes)

Fashion magnate Coco Chanel once declared that luxury is the opposite of vulgarity, but in the current Stateside economic climate such conspicuous consumption can seem somewhat tacky, or even a sign of mental psychosis, especially when a character opines, “No man will ever treat you as well as a store.” The film adaptation of Confessions of a Shopaholic, a bright, shiny bauble that serves as the leading lady debut of Isla Fisher, attempts to mitigate that conflict largely through a voluble charm offensive. But the end result is a manic and not entirely convincing romantic comedy in which there is no discernible difference between its characters drunk or sober.

Based on a series of best-selling books by Sophie Kinsella, the film stars Fisher as Rebecca Bloomwood, a spunky New York journalist with an unchecked addiction for expensive brand-name fashions and accoutrements. Drowning in more than $16,000 of credit card debt, Rebecca gets suddenly downsized, but ends up lucking her way into a gig at a financial magazine, where she charms the publication’s earnest British editor, Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy), and becomes an overnight sensation with a common sense money column penned under the anonymous moniker “The Girl in the Green Scarf.” Against the backdrop of an array of recognizable supporting players, Rebecca expends a lot of energy trying to keep secret both her personal debt and general lack of knowledge of the world of finance. Eventually, though, the lies and games catch up with her.

Australian-born director P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding) brings some of his trademark energy to the edges of scenes, most notably in interplay with Rebecca’s proletarian parents (John Goodman and Joan Cusack) and other secondary players. But the overall tone is one of pitched mania; the entire movie feels hopped up on cough syrup. There seem to be no honest consequences to actions. If the well-worn direction of the plot generally fails her, certainly no shadow falls on Fisher. She proved herself a comedic force in Wedding Crashers and Definitely, Maybe, and here gets to showcase screwball line readings, a delightfully sunny persona and a deft touch with some physical slapstick. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Walt Disney, 104 minutes, PG)

The Bourne Identity was released in the summer of 2002, and owing to both the changes in the real world post-September 11 as well as the commercial success of that film and its subsequent sequels, since then every spy thriller worth its salt has had to ground itself in greyer times. Even the James Bond franchise — notoriously stingy about embracing change — brought in Daniel Craig after Die Another Day, and OK’ed a grittier franchise reboot that returned to the secret agent’s roots.

It’s in this murkier, tough reality that The International unfolds, directed by German-born Tom Tykwer, who in 1999 set film school imaginations afire with the adrenalized import Run, Lola, Run. A moderately tough sell because of its ambition, complexity and the fact that almost all of its action is contained in a single mid-film burst, The International is a globe-trotting law-and-action hybrid that melds investigatory procedural maneuvering with some covert head-crowning.

Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is a disgraced Scotland Yard detective turned Interpol agent working from afar with Manhattan district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) on a case involving one of the world’s most powerful banks, and the impending sale of missile guidance system technology. It looks like there’s a compelling claim to be tried in court, until both Louis’ partner and a potential witness separately turn up dead. Louis and Eleanor have their suspicions, but can’t prove anything. Spurned for direct information at their imposing Luxembourg headquarters — a perfect metaphorical stand-in for the evil machinations of this huge corporate machine — Louis starts working a separate evidentiary strand, a mysterious assassin (Brian O’Byrne) believed to be used by the International Bank of Business & Credit, with the hope of eventually using him to bring down the head of the company (Ulrich Thomsen).

With its skittery keyboard score and cabal of moneyed string-pullers, The International is a mega-corporate takedown thriller, a modern-day The Parallax View by way of Syriana and Michael Clayton. It skulks, in other words. Yet if the film, as conceived, is at its core a rendered judgment on the nature of man — with Louis having to grapple with the essential question of whether he should abandon his own ideals, and playing within the system, for the greater good of society — it takes a step back in its finale, afraid to let its protagonist fully, individually come to grips with the weight of his decisions.

In this sense, as penned by debut screenwriter Eric Singer, The International is a perfectly good and engrossing adult-level film that doesn’t really take a full, hearty swing at greatness. It toes the line, but in the end blinks. Overall, the dialogue is fairly unexceptional, but the performances are engaging and Tykwer’s staging is smart and crisp. There’s a fun “New York City moment” that fuels one close escape, when Eleanor and Louis honk their way out of a traffic jam, and Tykwer turns an incidental clandestine meeting into a fantastically over-the-top shootout at the Guggenheim’s main rotunda, amidst a massive video installation. The moment is more than a bit silly; upon reflection, it’s bat-shit crazy, plain and simple. It’s also the brawny set piece that pays for the rest of the chess match. So I didn’t mind. (Sony, R, 117 minutes)

Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski‘s life itself reads like a movie, full of its own dramatically cinematic highs
and lows, which is perhaps why multi-hyphenate Damian Chapa decided to dive headlong into this biopic, being peddled largely on its “unauthorized” pedigree. Other words might better describe the film, however — chief among them the phrase “fantastically terrible.”

Working from a script co-written with Carlton Holder, Chapa fashions a movie that opens like a 100-yard dash, cramming virtually all the big set piece scenes of Polanski’s early life — a childhood in which he survives horrors of the Holocaust survivor, a creative upswing of the late 1960s, the shocking Manson murders that leave him a sudden widower, and the famous 1977 statutory rape case which ends with him becoming a fugitive
felon — into its opening five minutes. The rest of the movie then indiscriminately jumps around. We see Polanski (Chapa) woo Sharon Tate (Brienne DeBeau) prior to production on The Fearless Vampire Killers, and take on a menacing “special consultant” for Rosemary’s Baby. There’s partying, and shop talk with producer pal Gene Gutowski (Paul Sanders). Flashbacks to young Roman (Kevin de Ridder) are rendered in black-and-white.

There are also a couple weird sidebar digressions throughout (a scene with Frank Sinatra telling a minion, “Let’s send her her walking papers,” and Mia Farrow then receiving divorce notification on the set of her cinematic collaboration with Polanski), but Polanski doesn’t fully capture its subject’s Napoleonic arrogance, and it’s additionally far too riddled with jaw-dropping inaccuracies (the specifics of his rape arrest) and wild flights-of-fancy (a Nazi-themed flashback just before Polanski commits his infamous sexual assault) to be taken seriously as having any sort of psychological insightfulness. Most egregious of these spurious, denigrating strands might be a brief, tasteless scene which posits that Polanski was paid by tabloid photographers to pose next to evidence at the scene of the Tate murder — namely, the word “pig” scrawled on the wall in his fiancée’s blood.

Visually, the film is framed in coffin-tight fashion, in an effort to mask its meager production means. This grates, certainly, but its mortal sins are mostly related to story, and acting; almost all the dialogue is wincingly on-the-nose, and while Chapa, who once played Lyle Menendez in a TV movie about the parent-slaying brothers, at least slow-peddles Polanski’s legendary impish charm, he doesn’t have the range to convey the hole-in-his-heart sociopathy that informs the dark lens through which Polanski views the world, and thus operates in manipulative fashion. There are also repeated, confounding lapses in logic based on what we see unfold on screen. Late in the movie, producer Gutowski says that he “waited for the real Roman to surface” all through Polanski’s courtship with Tate — this despite the fact that we’ve seen the two of them have a conversation about Tate… over the naked body of another Polanski conquest!

The one story thread that holds any dark sway involves a Satanic consultant (Thomas Deuilhet) hired for the sake of authenticity on Rosemary’s Baby, but eventually Polanski even fritters away this spooky allegorical menace, positing that the character is quite literally the devil, and sets Manson acolyte Susan Atkins on the path that leads to the murder of Tate after meeting her at a bar. What? Yes, seriously. A jumbled, whorish, opportunistic hot mess, Polanski definitively proves that “bold” and “good” are not always synonymous. For more information on the film, click here. (Amadeus Pictures, R, 89 minutes)

Wall▪E eventually struck out in its bid to match 1991’s Beauty and the Beast as the only animated film to ever score a Best Picture Academy Award nomination, but its widespread critical praise helped underscore the notion — once somewhat radical, now more firmly rooted — that animation is a medium, and not a genre unto itself. More proof comes courtesy of this year’s slate of nominees for Best Animated Short Film.

Running only three minutes, French entry Oktapodi is the shortest nominated film, and it’s also the slightest — a case of colorful but empty style masquerading as entertainment. The story finds two octopi fighting for their lives in an out-of-water, air-quote comical escape/rescue mission through the streets of a small Greek village. Nothing about this short sequence makes much sense, and those inclined to give it a good-natured, shrugging pass need only be reminded of Finding Nemo‘s thrilling, funny aquarium escape scene, which didn’t ignore basic biological facts about its subjects, but instead incorporated them into the story.

House of Small Cubes, Japanese writer-director Kunio Kato’s 12-minute effort, is an elegiac offering
about an old man battling a rising tide to save his house; there’s a
children’s-storybook-come-to-life quality to the animation, and it draws a viewer in slowly. Near wordless nine-minute British entry This Way Up, a slice of funeral slapstick from Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith in which two morgue attendants try to deliver a coffin to rest, is gorgeously sketched, but, like Oktapodi, a bit hollow, narratively.

The theatrical pre-show entertainment to Wall▪E, and part of its DVD celebration as well, Disney/Pixar’s five-minute Presto (above) is about a turn-of-the-century magician who, after failing to feed his rabbit, enters into a wild on-stage game of one-upsmanship with said animal. Writer-director Doug Sweetland’s is the crown jewel of the nominated flicks, a kinetic, funny little farce that also manages to slip in a few touching grace notes about the mutual dependence of its characters. Easily the second-best entry is Lavatory Lovestory, a spare, mostly black-and-white, 10-minute Russian film from writer-director Konstantin Bronzit about a lonely female toilet attendant who attempts to uncover the identity of her secret admirer. Formally, it’s nothing like Peanuts, but its mixture of externalized daydream and (swallowed, in this case) interior monologue recalls Charles Schulz’s skill at mixing the wry and the wistful. A tender score helps matters, too.

Many big cities are hosting theatrical exhibitions of the films, but look for them down the line, collected, on DVD, if they don’t make it to your area in the coming weeks. The animated program includes five more “commended” bonus shorts from Marc Crase, Bill Plympton, Matthew Walker and Jeremy Clapin not screened for review, hence its listed running time below. For a review of the 2008 Oscar live action short film nominees, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 88 minutes)