The third and biggest-budgeted sword-and-sandal action movie to arrive this year, 300: Rise of an Empire unfolds in 480 B.C., but it might as well be “K.C.,” or Known Commodity. Such is the laid track that this punishingly brutal follow-up to Zack Snyder’s influential 300, which told the story of the battle of Thermopylae and a group of Spartan soldiers’ valiant but ultimately futile defense against a marauding army of Persian invaders, unfolds upon. With its low-angle shots, ominous thunderclaps, glistening pecs and bellowed celebrations of freedom, Rise of an Empire peddles a very particular, fetishized form of masculine hero worship in telling the story of a concurrent naval campaign, but all in service of little more than a state-of-the-art showcase for unremitting violence.

Snyder and Kurt Johnstad’s script, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller after the first film’s success, is a mélange of familiar bits and half-cooked motivations ladled over graphic bloodletting. There is absolutely a place for this sort of faux-historical entertainment — for bombastic films of representational value — but Rise of an Empire lacks the characterizations and intrigue to make it work. This film could be fun, or it could be grisly and of more consequence. Instead, it’s like watching someone else play a videogame. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 103 minutes)

Describing it as a cross between Misery, What Lies Beneath and Eve’s Bayou has the unfortunate side effect of making director Philippe Caland’s Repentance sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. A yawning, mopey thriller that unsuccessfully tries to blend psychological portraiture with pointless tension derived from torture, Caland’s film wastes a couple of invested performances that outstrip the material’s intelligence deficit.

Repentance unfolds in New Orleans, where author and life coach Tommy Carter (Anthony Mackie) lives with his yoga instructor wife Maggie (Sanaa Lathan), peddling positivity and a vague sort of synthesized religiosity. Dormant familial tensions get front-burnered when Tommy’s screw-up older brother Ben (Mike Epps) turns up out of the blue, needing money and a place to crash.

Trying to help out Ben, Tommy decides to take on an individual client who approached him at a book signing — Angel Sanchez (Forest Whitaker), a troubled handyman whose daughter Francesca (Ariana Neal) is also a student in one of Maggie’s children’s classes. Angel is fixated on the untimely death of his mother, and while Tommy’s work with him initially seems to have some benefit, he reacts violently when Tommy attempts to bring their professional relationship to an end. A confused Angel holds Tommy against his will, and begins to inflict his own brand of twisted therapy.

Caland, a French-Lebanese immigrant, has led one of those fantastically weird and charmed lives touching upon all sorts of entrepreneurial endeavors. He was a producer on Boxing Helena and the founder of JuntoBox Films, which provides a crowd-sourcing vehicle for independent filmmakers. A number of his previous directorial efforts have been of the “inside Hollywood” variety, about a filmmaker nobly struggling to make their movie, and Repentance itself is apparently a remake of a film with the same narrative, in which Caland directed himself in the role Whitaker plays here. The basic takeaway of all this is the polite suggestion that perhaps moviemaking is not the occupation for which Caland is best suited — at least on a creative level. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 95 minutes)

Non-Stop, starring Liam Neeson as an air marshal who during a trans-Atlantic flight has a Very Bad Day of the decidedly action movie variety, starts off fairly intriguingly. Its protagonist is brusque and distracted; before boarding his flight he takes a swig of booze to let us know he’s an alcoholic and help signify his tragic past, true, but then he smokes a cigarette after a few spritzes of breath spray, indicating a different pathology. Eventually, though, Non-Stop runs out of interesting little character quirks and recognizable names and faces stuffed into supporting roles to pump up the guessing-game as to its guilty party/parties, succumbing to less interesting, jerry-rigged thrills and payoffs that will play fine with a popcorn and soda but immediately dissipate upon exiting a theater, and leave one feeling a bit empty.

It’s easy, on a theoretical level, to imagine 59-year-old Kevin Costner looking at the post-Taken action flick paydays of Liam Neeson, two years his elder, and saying, “Hey, why not me?” It’s less easy to understand anything else about the mishmash that is 3 Days To Kill, an incredibly inane shoot-’em-up from director McG that mistakes self-satisfaction for vicarious entertainment. Co-written by Luc Besson, 3 Days To Kill is much more of an action-comedy than its advertising lets on — though that may be a smart bait-and-switch given that tonal clumsiness and a stunning lack of attention to detail are the film’s two most consistent traits. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Relativity Media, PG-13, 117 minutes)

The best thing one can realistically say about Pompeii, the new and utterly ridiculous, CGI-addled love-story-cum-disaster-porn offering from Resident Evil filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson, is that it elicits a genuine curiosity to learn more about the first-century Roman city felled by volcanic eruption, since one has so much free time to ponder the narrative’s legitimate historical underpinnings whilst letting waves of inanity wash over them. Borrowing liberally (and not that imaginatively) from Gladiator, Titanic and Volcano, this empty, air-quote epic embodies the worst instincts of disposable Hollywood storytelling, reducing mass-scale tragedy to nothing more than a backdrop for cheap, boilerplate villainy and romance.



Pompeii unfolds in 79 AD, where Celtic Briton Milo (Kit Harington) is a slave, and has been since he was orphaned as a child. His horse-whispering ways catch the attention of Cassia (Emily Browning), the well-off daughter of an upper-crust merchant couple, Severus and Aurelia (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss). Cassia has recently returned to her coastal hometown, disenchanted, from a trip to Rome, where she inadvertently picked up an unwanted suitor in the form of Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), a sleazy and corrupt senator who, wouldn’t you know it, murdered Milo’s family in front of him so many years ago.

Milo and Cassia making eyes at one another does not at all please Corvus, who seems really focused on putting a ring on it (it being Cassia). Placed on the gladiator track, Milo is slated for a lethal showdown with Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the reigning champion of local deathsport-entertainment. Before they can have a go at the whole mortal-stabby thing, though, they fall under the spell of manly begrudging respect. Oh, and then the gurgling volcano overlooking Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius, erupts, meaning Milo has to fight his way out of the public arena and through a city raining down hellfire, in order to save Cassia and settle his emotional tab with Corvus.

Taken of a piece and by itself, a sequence like the one in which Milo and Atticus band together with other slave-fighters to fend off an ordained gladiatorial execution has a certain cathartic charge. And advances in technology allow for an engaging and detailed aerial portrait of Pompeii, which Anderson further indulges with some high-angle, 3-D representations of city life.

But Pompeii overall exhibits such a staggering misappropriation of time and focus as to almost defy belief. The characters here are all tissue-paper-thin, and the dialogue hammy and tone-deaf; screenwriters Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler and Michael Robert Johnson seem hell-bent on concentrating solely on the least interesting and most ridiculous aspects of their hodgepodge. (Watching Pompeii, one would think that Milo and Atticus’ uneasy friendship spelled the end of any and all racial tensions for all of humankind.) The wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story? A snooze. Generic political intrigue? Boring. The sociopathic need on the part of Corvus to get very specifically up in the garments of a young woman not interested in him? Even more yawn-inducing.

And yet that, along with the overly familiar sword-and-sandal slave stuff, accounts for around 70 minutes of Pompeii. In history books there’s a volcano that unleashed rivers of lava and destroyed an entire vibrant city of around 20,000, but here it’s reduced to just one big concluding set piece to underscore Corvus’ assholishness, and rendered to boot in overly slick tones that neuters any sense of gobsmacked doom. There’s a posed quality to almost of its scenes, so that even the nightmares that plague Milo don’t cling or leave a mark.

It’s arguable as to whether this story would have by default been better served with a R rating, but one thing is absolutely certain — Pompeii is a preposterous movie whose self-seriousness and time spent dawdling on irrelevant diversions makes it a dreary, wearying experience. Viewers know the ending already (or should, at least), and the way that Anderson orchestrates things, it can’t come soon enough in this misbegotten mishmash. For the movie’s trailer, click here. (TriStar/FilmDistrict, PG-13, 98 minutes)

A movie about a nobly principled con artist and courier of contraband invites skepticism if not outright ridicule, but that’s just what writer-director Zak Forsman’s Down and Dangerous is — an indie genre production, poised somewhere between self-seriousness and loose-limbed character study, that gets its ya-yas out and wins over viewers by virtue of its continued ability to surprise.

Los Angeleno Paul Boxer (John T. Woods) is said honorable smuggler, and he’s so good at his scams that he doesn’t need to carry a gun. When he loses leverage in a situation, however, Paul is forced by more violent, less genteel traffickers into concocting a scheme to bring a couple kilos of blow across the Mexican border. Naturally, there’s also a gal (Paulie Rojas) with whom Paul has a complicated past.

Down and Dangerous gets your attention early on, when Paul runs an end-around on a cruise giveaway on a tampon box contest in order to lure a woman into unwittingly serving as his mule. It tests that interest at times, but never lets it go. It may sound weird, but there are echoes of Michael Mann’s Thief here; Forsman’s tale apparently takes its inspiration from his father’s career in the independent cocaine-smuggling trade, but he’s interested in honor and uprightness in an interesting guise. When we meet him, Paul isn’t atoning for past sins or looking for “one big last score,” he’s happily working outside the law but with his own moral compass.

If the talk of integrity is at times a bit marble-mouthed or awkward, it’s certainly not notional — it’s interwoven throughout. This may make Down and Dangerous seem and feel a bit ridiculous at times, but it definitely also livens things up, and makes it different from so many like-minded movies. The film is also abetted by a polished technical package that belies its Kickstarter-assisted low-budget funding.

As for the performances, Woods has a withholding demeanor that doesn’t tip or bleed over into too-cool-for-school affectedness; he charms enough to get by, and likewise intimidates, but also operates with the knowledge that sometimes less is more. The attractive Rojas, meanwhile, has a chirpy cadence that summons aural memories of Penelope Cruz.

Forsman’s movie has a pinch of batshit-craziness (the idea of a freelance smuggling mentor, played by Judd Nelson, is risible) and I’m still not entirely convinced that its narrative unfolds in a way that makes complete sense, regardless of the material’s nonfiction roots. (There’s truth and “based on true events,” after all, and sometimes movies lean too heavily on the former, in efforts to bolster credibility that actually end up undermining dramatic engagement.) Still, there’s a weirdly dirty charm to this curio, which has more going for it than not. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Down and Dangerous is also available across VOD and digital platforms. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Artis Entertainment/The Sabi Company, unrated, 95 minutes)

Filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been accused of plenty of crimes against cinema in their careers, so one might not think that their latest effort, Best Night Ever, would necessarily hold much surprise. As the writer-directors behind slapdash spoofs like Date Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans and others — overwhelmingly critically panned, all — they’ve traded in creatively bankrupt, stick-poke, air-quote satire for more than a half-dozen years.



And yet Best Night Ever is notable, in that it’s essentially the duo’s first nominally original, non-directly-referential screenplay. So does the film, a wisp-thin, gender-inverted rip-off of The Hangover and Project X, open in forced-outrageous fashion, with auto-tuned synth music and the black-barred member of a male stripper flopping about in circles? Yes, yes it does. And it’s almost entirely downhill from there.

What’s right about Best Night Ever pretty much begins and ends with the cast. The four lead actresses here have an across-the-board likeability and genuine rapport; each inhabit the broad constructs of their disparate, clashing personalities with aplomb, and bring a lot of energy to the proceedings. Unfortunately, after just a bit of early promise, Friedberg and Seltzer’s film quickly settles into a groove that is manic, nonsensical and yet also familiar. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Best Night Ever is also available on iTunes and across VOD platforms. (Magnet Releasing, R, 82 minutes)

From the opening jazzy riffs of musical accompaniment to Love Is In the Air, about bluebirds and the spring, it’s clear that director Alexandre Castagnetti’s French import, starring Ludivine Sagnier and Nicolas Bedos, is going to be a cinematic approximation of lives less ordinary. And so it is. Its story treads well-worn ground, certainly, but this robust exercise in romantic comedy formula has such pleasing, engaging performances and such a breezy, deft touch with push-and-pull gender dynamics that it escapes the over-determined nature of its final reel and by and large trumps most like-minded American product. Lovers of buoyant, improbable love stories will love Love Is In the Air. It has vivacity and enough authenticity to make us believe its sweet fabrications. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films/Focus World, R, 96 minutes)

Lest one think that all the playboy comedies tangentially inspired by 1996’s Swingers, about entertainment industry aspirants and the “beautiful babies” of which they’re in hot pursuit, had finally dried up, witness writer-director Herschel Faber’s Cavemen, a blockheaded, sigh-inducing retread, starring Skylar Astin and Camilla Belle, that evinces neither any particular originality nor freshness of telling. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Well Go USA, R, 86 minutes)

Discerning moviegoers certainly have many reasons to be wary of cinematic adaptations of toy brands. And given their enormous name recognition with the elementary school set, it would be easy to assume that The Lego Movie, based on the popular tiny interlocking plastic bricks, is little more than another slick cash grab with a boilerplate narrative and anything-goes sensibility. But the film, a smoothly blended concoction of spry sensory pleasures and considerable heart, is a terrific family-friendly adventure with sincere verve and pop. Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street) mine a deep reservoir of genuine pan-generation feeling absent in most adolescent-targeted entertainment, while also working in sly digs at consumer culture, and paying homage to Legos’ enduring appeal to retro collectors. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., PG, 100 minutes)

A predetermined audience demographic shouldn’t be the guiding principle behind creative decision-making, but it’s so hard to get a clear read on the target viewer for At Middleton, a bittersweet adult romance starring Andy Garcia and Vera Farmiga, that that thought is the one which keeps returning to one’s mind for the duration of its running time. A bewildering dramedy in which two temperamentally contradictory parents meet while accompanying their teenage children on a college visit, this unusual film alternately charms and frustrates, in nearly equal measure.

At Middleton has a workable, if fanciful conceit, but co-writer-director Adam Rodgers and his writing partner Glenn German deliver a screenplay with a lot of exposed seams. And yet when Garcia and Farmiga rip into one of the five or six scenes in the film that really work and connect, none of that matters. This is most roundly evidenced in a sequence in which their characters, after getting busted eavesdropping on an acting class, are given an improvisational exercise by the instructor, and then proceed to lay their souls bare. It’s a master acting class in miniature, and it makes everything else almost worth one’s time. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 100 minutes)

The clarion call of a grander moral calling anchors the documentary We Are the Giant, and in large part saves it from its own overstuffed passion. Profiling a handful of activists involved in Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, Syria and Bahrain, the film mixes unsettling firsthand protest footage with involving stories of self-sacrifice. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here. (Passion Pictures/Motto Pictures, unrated, 90 minutes)

“This is what the ghetto produces,” says one of the satellite bit-players of the arresting, compact new documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, director Lotfy Nathan’s look at a Baltimore subculture of young African-American dirt-bike enthusiasts who view their hobby as a ride-or-die proposition — a dangerous way to act out proxy battles with authority. He’s speaking of the film’s pugnacious adolescent protagonist, Pug, but also all the churning despair, angst and pessimism wrapped up inside him. Youthful anguish and risky acting out are relative constants across geography and time, of course, but this film, which skirts the line between urban dirge and socio-cultural curiosity, paints a compelling portrait of a kid slipping through the cracks.



The film takes its name from the eponymous band of mostly teens and twentysomethings who rowdily parade through Baltimore’s city streets each Sunday, on four-wheel ATVs and tricked-out mopeds. They, in turn, are named for the daring wheelies their riders pop, in which they rear back and stretch their bikes’ front wheels toward the sky. 12 O’Clock Boys unfolds over the course of more than three years, from 2010 to 2013, chronicling the charismatic Pug as he transitions into teenagedom, fools around with his bike and endeavors to gain acceptance into the group.

Pug’s home life is tumultuous; his single mother, Coco, is a former exotic dancer with four children. Pug loves animals, and has dreams of being a veterinarian. His main obsession, however, is dirt bikes. Like many his age, he’s captivated by the carousing misadventures of the 12 O’Clock Boys, who rack up thousands of YouTube views from all over the globe and taunt police — who have a no-chase policy, in order to preserve pedestrian safety in the wake of a series of accidents — with their antics.

In a city with many worse temptations and vices, 12 O’Clock Boys gives voice to those who argue that this outlaw brand of weekend and summer “release” is a way to remain neutral in gang-controlled areas, while also not shying away from the fact that a big part of the dirt-bike culture seems like an only slightly less dangerous pressure release valve for perpetual tension with law enforcement. With the serial antagonization of police officers, things are not going to end well.

Some of Nathan’s slow-motion footage lionizes the 12 O’Clock Boys, playing out like a music video. But he also makes some extraordinarily interesting and seemingly counterintuitive editing choices that pay off in big ways. When Pug’s older brother Tibba dies from an asthma attack, one would expect the movie to grind to a halt as the family copes with the grief. Young and unexpected death, though, is a frequent visitor in poorer areas of Baltimore, and so the movie quickly pushes past this, adhering to its main focus (Pug’s obsession with dirt bikes) and equally apportioned chronological tack.

Years later, then, when Pug is stopped by cops who ask him about his older brother, he points to the back of his airbrushed T-shirt honoring Tibba, and presses one of the officers as to how he knows Tibba. It’s a heartbreaking moment that wouldn’t have the same impact had Nathan delved further into Tibba’s story; in painting this death as an adjunct to all the other drama surrounding Pug, his film speaks quiet volumes about the manner in which what are in retrospect even causal tragedies are often white noise in our more of-the-moment pursuits.

The ending of 12 O’Clock Boys, which blurs the lines between fantasy recreation and indulgence, is thought-provoking, but also feels a bit like a ripcord pulled too soon. Still, Nathan’s film is a gripping portrait of youthful passion as well as opportunity’s doors slowly closing. One hopes Pug can slip through before some of the better options swing shut. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. 12 O’Clock Boys opens this week in Los Angeles at the Crest Theater and Laemmle Playhouse. (Oscilloscope Laboratories, unrated, 75 minutes)

Metaphor and opacity get a workout in The Wait, an inscrutable drama of commingled supernatural and psychological elements, starring Chloë Sevigny and Jena Malone as at-odds sisters coping with the death of their mother. Writer-director M. Blash marshals considerable atmospheric forces, but his film collapses under the weight of oblique logic and plotting, lacking in either effective emotional payoff or the more skilled observational touch of a rumination on loss. The Wait leaves viewers poised on a precipice, waiting for a revelation or catharsis that never comes. For the full, original review from Screen Daily, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 97 minutes)

That Awkward Moment, the latest bro-tastic laffer which attempts to thread the needle between twentysomething sexual exploration and acting out and relationship comedy (read: accepted “male” and “female” genres) is an awkward mash-up, but in the end will represent nothing more than a momentary, wholly understandable blip on the respective filmographies of its talented young cast. A stab at blended American Pie and Swingers-type antics, writer-director Tom Gormican’s film banks heavily on the ample chemistry of its players, to intermittent but largely unmemorable effect.



The movie unfolds in New York City, and centers around a trio of guys who are best friends. Jason (Zac Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller), who work together at a publishing house designing book covers, are your classic player-types, who enjoy the bar scene and take extraordinary measures to develop a rotation of girls and avoid being pinned down in a relationship. When their doctor pal Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) discovers his wife Vera (Jessica Lucas) has been cheating on him and wants a divorce, Jason and Daniel vow to reintroduce him to single life, and enter into a pact to avoid getting into a relationship with any whiffs of exclusivity.

Things get complicated, however, when Daniel tumbles into the sack with his female wingman Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis), who’s apparently smitten by all his witty talk of receiving blowjobs from other girls. Jason, meanwhile, meets cute with Ellie (Imogen Poots) and, after their first night together ends in sex, transcends the awkwardness of mistakenly thinking she’s a prostitute. The more he gets to know her, the more Jason likes her. But when unexpected tragedy befalls Ellie, Jason blanches at comporting himself in the manner of a boyfriend, and jeopardizes a shot at maintaining a place in Ellie’s life. Can any of these guys grow up and find happiness in a monogamous relationship?

In his feature debut, Gormican basically serves jointly as ringmaster and a turbo-charged pace car, pushing his actors through rat-tat-tat dialogue, and hoping that the movie’s high-volume joke quotient wins over viewers. In a game cast — especially the talented Teller, who wins the day — the director has a lot going for him, but Gormican’s script, which was spotlighted as one of the top unproduced comedy screenplays in the 2010 Hollywood Black List, is a vessel of breezy banter, confidence and energy more than a cogent, well-rooted narrative.

Daniel and Chelsea’s burgeoning relationship doesn’t really pass the smell test, and Mikey seems most defined by shaking his head at Daniel and Jason and telling them that they’re idiots, which he does at least a half dozen times. Overall, the film seems inordinately preoccupied with proving its bawdy bona fides, by way of a good bit of cock-centric humor. Some of this works (Jason showing up at what he thinks is a costume party in a compromising guise, only to discover it’s a tony affair), but many other bits (I’m looking in your direction, confusion of self-tanner with hand lotion) feel like hijackers of tone, robbing the movie of any honest momentum or flow.

Certain sequences work quite nicely, and exhibit a keen observational touch; Jason and Ellie’s first date proper is a scene which nails the pushback and gentle mocking buried in as-yet-consummated flirtation. But Gormican seems afraid or unable to focus on honest emotion for too long, and when he contrives to deposit four of his characters in a bathroom at a Thanksgiving party — the scene most emblematic of That Awkward Moment‘s unfortunate unraveling — it becomes robustly apparent that his film is yet another example of a modestly smart movie felled by adherence to formula and dictums that don’t align with its raison d’être. (Focus, R, 94 minutes)

In sports, relationships and indeed life, sometimes it’s the little things that end up mattering most — the hustle down the first baseline on a routine grounder, the changed windshield wiper blades as an unsolicited favor for a loved one, and the extra-pass proofreading of a job search query letter. Lest we forget, such can be the case with cinema, too. For all the Hollywood obsession with high-concept and special effects, sometimes there’s something enchanting about a simple story simply told, and a movie of small rather than grand gestures.

Case in point: the pleasant and enchanting Brightest Star, a narratively slight but well acted and keenly observed romantic dramedy about a twentysomething guy’s amorous fumblings and occupational uncertainty. Starring Chris Lowell, Rose McIver and Jessica Szohr, debut director Maggie Kiley’s Brightest Star isn’t a movie of conventionally structured catharsis. But it does understand, on an intuitive level, the enormous weight of young adult ambivalence, and how that can be a suffocating thing in its own right. And sometimes there’s warmth and value in such reflection. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 80 minutes)

If one needed a reminder that “different” is not synonymous with “good,” an ample reminder arrives in the form of writer-director Jeremy O’Keefe’s Somewhere Slow, a very self-consciously serious independent production about an emotionally fragile thirtysomething woman (Jessalyn Gilsig) acting out a life crisis by opportunistically plunging into a road trip with a dodgy, wayward Mormon teenager (Graham Patrick Martin).

Somewhere Slow actually shares a decent bit in common with another cracked road trip of emotional awakening that centers around an older woman and younger male — Natural Selection, in which Racheal Harris plays a character who discovers her coma-stricken husband long ago fathered a son (Matt O’Leary) she never knew or met. But O’Keefe’s script is a precious bundle of mannered eccentricities, and a frustrating non-starter. Its characters don’t circle one another; they fall into a make-nice rapport too easily. That puts viewers on a slow train to Posed Self-Actualization, with too many stops along the way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media Films/Logolite Entertainment, unrated, 96 minutes)

An unusual and gripping piece of minimalist experimental cinema, Charlie Victor Romeo dramatizes the cockpit voice recordings of a half dozen actual airline emergencies. Directors Robert Berger and Karlyn Michelson — working in concert with actor/producer Patrick Daniels, who helmed the stage version of this New Frontier world premiere from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — craft a psychological thriller that blends low-fi technique with high-tension situations, and wrings a real rooting interest out of viewers.



Filmed in front of live (though never shown) audiences over the course of three days during one of its 2012 stage runs, Charlie Victor Romeo deploys a small repertory company of actors playing the various roles of the pilots, co-pilots and other flight crew members grappling with six discrete disasters. The situations unfold at different lengths, and include incidents with icing, birds, bulkhead rupture, hydraulic system failure and other mechanical malfunctions.

Brief interstitial title cards provide relevant information about the type of aircraft in each scene, and the passengers and crew on board. Otherwise, the black-box staging of the material provides a fixed, straight-on point-of-view of the cockpit, though with a couple camera angles and very occasional, tightly framed cutaways to the profiles of assisting, overheard air traffic controllers. It’s a very spare approach, but the telling suits the material. It forces a subjectivity upon the viewer which compels them to create all the surrounding elements — the passengers and scrambling ground crew — in their mind.

The acting is (appropriately) clipped and professional, though not without small moments of humor and humanity; the movie’s opening sequence includes some flirtation between pilot and stewardess. There’s profanity, too, understandably. The aviation jargon, meanwhile (“over-speed alarm,” “elevator control,” etcetera), summons forth memories of the panicked punch of television hit ER, which gave plenty of viewers their first real glimpse into the crisis reaction of frontline medical professionals. It’s considerable, this terminology, but since the scenarios are authentic it’s not distracting; the gist of all the problems in each event is always readily apparent.

By using actual “black box” voice recording transcripts (only condensing some material for time, not changing any of it) and recreating these scenes of extreme duress, Charlie Victor Romeo doesn’t so much provide a snapshot of heroic professionalism (though there is a good pinch of that) as much as plumb the valley between human frailty and our remarkable capacity for disaster response. The result is a unique and unsettling film. For the full, original review from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its New York City engagements, Charlie Victor Romeo opens in Los Angeles on January 31 at the Downtown Independent. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, visit its eponymous website and/or Facebook page. (Collective: Unconscious/3-Legged Dog, unrated, 81 minutes)

A compassionate drama that wants to sift through and examine notions of expanded family, Run & Jump flirts with being a lot of different things, but succeeds in being none of them. The debut feature film of co-writer and director Steph Green, this Irish import — featuring one of two dramatic turns by ex-Saturday Night Live star Will Forte this season — has a rooted sense of place, but lacks the resolution and fortitude to push past pretty, dressed-up surface conflict and into areas that might leave a lasting mark with viewers.

Telling the story of emotional issues stirred up when a buttoned-up American doctor (Forte) gets a research grant to stay with an optimistic wife and mother (Maxine Peake) whose husband (Edward MacLiam) is suffering the aftereffects from a personality-altering stroke and coma, Run & Jump unfolds with much warmth and consideration, but seems skittish of pushing its characters into deeper conflict or friction. Content to play around the edges, Green’s film fritters away viewers’ attention. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 101 minutes)

Solid acting and filmmaking technique breathe a good bit of life into triple-hyphenate Blake Robbins’ The Sublime and Beautiful, a Slamdance Film Festival world premiere and narrative feature competition title. But there’s ultimately not enough of distinguished merit to save the movie from a screenplay that trades in rote, plodding dramatic developments and say-nothing symbolism. While not without a couple moments of nicely observed quiet heartache, too much of this impressionistic tale of survivor’s guilt — built around a drunk driving accident that robs a small town couple of their three children — is balanced alongside meandering story beats that resonate as vague, indistinct, phony or some combination thereof. The result — a work of enervated, representational moping — is an enormously frustrating viewing experience. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Vitamin A Films/Through a Glass Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)

An engaging documentary about the transformative power of the sort of teacher who is able to connect with and inspire teenagers, If You Build It illustrates the benefits of the practical application of alternative education, and the ripple effects that it can often create for a community — if and when that community is ready to embrace it. Telling the story of a pair of architectural designer-activists who alight upon a rural burgh with dwindling economic opportunity, the film is a bittersweet exploration of outreach and advocacy.

Directed by Patrick Creadon, If You Build It unfolds in the small town of Windsor, North Carolina. Idealistic partners in both business and life, college-educated architects Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller arrive with a different sort of curriculum. Their two-semester, off-site high school class is called Studio H — so named for “humanity, habitats, happiness and health” — and it involves the creative planning, refinement and construction of a number of projects for a small group of students, about 10 in number. First they’ll make “cornhole” (also known as beanbag toss) boards, then chicken coops. Their third project — with $150,000 in grants covering equipment and supplies — is a yet-to-be-determined structure for the community, which ends up being a farmer’s market pavilion.

In its passionate subjects, If You Build It would have enough to easily appeal to sympathetic viewers who fall hard for inspirational tales, and especially those involving adolescents. But Creadon, the director of Wordplay and I.O.U.S.A., is a gifted filmmaker with an intuitive understanding of how to complement and bolster his main narrative arc with compelling details, as he does here with an interwoven revelation about lessons learned by Miller from his post-graduate thesis work in Detroit.

Perhaps surprisingly, while interviews with the students at various points over the course of more than a year greatly inform the movie, If You Build It doesn’t delve into the home lives of its subjects in the way that recent Medora did, for instance. That film, about a hapless small town Indiana high school basketball team trying to secure their first victory in more than a year, was much more a metaphorical exploration of the wheezing death rattle of trickle-down economics. If You Build It, which could easily chart a similar course, largely eschews this tack. It’s a choice, but for the most part it works fine for this film.

Things break down a bit in the last third, though. The film paints a picture of a school board that is change-resistant or possibly worse. We see an abandoned elementary school, renovated two years prior to being closed down, and when the county superintendent, a supported of Miller and Pilloton, is fired, the intimation is that his prescriptions for change were somehow too radical. (The pair subsequently each forfeit their $40,000 salaries in their entirety, to keep the class afloat). Creadon doesn’t dig down into the politics of the school board, however, and how widely or deeply their efforts might be supported.

Early on, this is perhaps for the best; If You Build It, after all, is more interested in the elemental bond forged between high school kids and the type of instructor who is willing to move beyond the drill sergeant oversight of rote memorization of facts and embrace the role of mentor. Too much time spent in the weeds, as it were, would be time wasted, and take away from that focus. But in the home stretch, as deadlines loom and Pilloton and Miller’s future in the town becomes a topic of debate, these unaddressed subplots and sidebars seem conspicuous in their absence.

Overall, though, Creadon’s film touches a viewer’s heart because of the manner in which it so roundly showcases the reality that kids aren’t blind to the social rot around them. They crave answers and self-betterment and the opportunity for stability and upward mobility, just like adults. There’s a forlorn quality to If You Build It, but in its small, to-scale triumph there is also a glimpse — and a hope, really — of seeds planted for even greater future change. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Long Shot Factory, unrated, 86 minutes)

Maybe it’s my fault, really. Perhaps I should have watched The Grounded, Alaskan wildlife filmmaker Steve Kroschel’s documentary about the purported healing powers of simple physical, bare-skin contact with the Earth, on a laptop outdoors, on my back, shirtless, and with my feet dug into the soil. Maybe that would have made it make sense. Unfortunately I did not, and so the aims and claims of this rambling nonfiction effort — the filmic equivalent of the jittery, well-meaning neighbor on whom you can’t quite get a read — remain so hazy as to circumvent embrace from even the most sympathetic and open-minded viewers.

The Grounded is at least nominally a first-person, crusading affair, albeit one with all sorts of blurred lines and focus. Kroschel lives in Haines, a small, snow-swept town of 1,700, and after seeing or hearing some random New Age-y news report, he crawls underneath his house in sub-freezing temperatures, strips naked and lies down in the dirt (a sequence he recreates for the movie). The next morning, he’s free from all joint stiffness and pain. The Earth, a “source of free electrons,” has healed him of pain.

Deeming this “an undeniable phenomenon,” Kroschel then conducts some experiments with plants (“Guess which lily kept its petals the longest?”), and bounds into advocacy like an eager puppy. Why isn’t this natural treatment more widely known, he wonders. The Grounded does include some interview chats with figures of repute (Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Canadian science broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki), but it mostly indulges an array of figures of dubious qualification or achievement, plus unexplained trips to Stonehenge, and a sequence where Kroschel lets his teenage son and his ill-equipped girlfriend interrogate a physicist. When he’s not tossing off important-sounding yet inescapably vague proclamations (“Gothic cathedrals often times were built exactly on energy hot spots”), Kroschel is busy passing out brown paper bags full of mysterious “grounding materials” to the townspeople of Haines, who later sing the praises of this treatment in curing arthritis, chronic back pain, torn rotator cuffs and more.

Ignoring the fairly questionable scientific method on display, Kroschel’s film mainly just has a hard time explaining or focusing on anything for more than two or three minutes. Some time is given to scientific pushback, but there’s just nothing of much intellectual substance on either side of any debate that might be had about homeopathic electron therapy and its effect on human physiology; The Grounded is an emotional work whose passion is outstripped by its incoherence. For more information on the movie, which opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Kroschel Films/One Paw Productions, unrated, 74 minutes)

A Slamdance Film Festival world premiere and documentary competition title that delves into a subset of the disastrous aftereffects of the April, 2010, British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe à la Hache is a devastating piece of community portraiture, and a look at the diminished choices of the working poor. Directed by Nailah Jefferson, this modestly scaled but no less heartrending work is instructive about the different public faces that corporations will try on, depending on how many cameras are on them and what best suits their most pressing purposes. There is no one easy answer or solution that emerges from Vanishing Pearls — no single decision that, if reversed, would bring stability to its subjects. And maybe that’s what’s saddest of all — that the exploitation of the poor takes many shapes, but that they are also among the most economically susceptible to forces of change beyond their control. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Perspective Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

Sometimes a film need not totally work in order to win you over. Case in point: Appropriate Behavior, which heralds the arrival of a fresh talent in the form of multi-hyphenate Desiree Akhavan. Reminiscent of Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein’s Lola Versus, starring Greta Gerwig, Appropriate Behavior will draw some barbs as just another single-girl-in-the-city comedy, but it puts a wry spin on gender politics and Persian-American assimilation. Akhavan stars as Shirin, a closeted bisexual Iranian-American who, fresh off a breakup with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), stumbles through some dubious personal decisions and gets roped into teaching a Park Slope film class for unruly 5-year-olds.

As a cogent whole, Appropriate Behavior can’t quite decide what story it wants to tell; it’s caught between being a story of romantic dissolution, sexual coming out and a more mordant satire. Still, it crackles scene to scene, with warped meet-cutes (“I find your anger incredibly sexy — I hate so many things too”) and other off-kilter delights. Akhavan has an observant sense of humor and a great touch with dialogue. Part Sarah Silverman, part Molly Shannon, she’s equally at home with garrulousness and deadpan awkwardness. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here; to get all up in the film’s website, click here. (Parkville Pictures, unrated, 82 minutes)