If filmmaker Kevin Smith lived in olden times, and had a family coat of
arms, it would probably have a phallus and giant lit doobie on it, and
maybe some sort of animalistic violation. Smith, of course, burst onto
the scene in 1994 with the ultra-low-budget, delightfully lewd Clerks,
and has since then, while various indie film trends have waxed and
waned, by and large hewed to the same sort of hyper-literate puerile
humor that defined his debut. Injections of more overt sentimentality
(as in Jersey Girl, for instance) have proved Smith a sometimes ham-fisted peddler of sincerity, so it’s a good thing that his new film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, counterbalances a third-act romantic awakening with such a heaping helping of filthy fun.

Things look grim for lifelong friends and roommates Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) when an escalating mountain of debt results in their electricity and water being cut off, just in time for winter. A chance encounter at their high school reunion with the gay porn star boyfriend of a former classmate, though, sparks an idea in Zack: they can get out of debt by making their own homemade skin flick.

Recruiting a motley crew of off-screen assistance (Craig Robinson, Jeff Anderson) and on-screen “talent” (Jason Mewes, Ricky Mabe and adult film stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan), Zack and Miri set out to shoot an adult Star Wars spoof, only to find their budgeted plans ruined at the last moment. Re-jiggering ideas on the fly, they end up shooting after-hours at the coffee shop where Zack works. The two vow that having sex won’t ruin their friendship, but when filming begins what started out as a business proposition turns into something much more.

Rogen might be somewhat overexposed, it’s true, but he’s a natural fit for schlubby misfits like this, and he and the superlative Banks — who can do both sunny and salty, with equal skill — have a nice chemistry together. Smith’s touch with hilariously raunchy dialogue, meanwhile, is still virtually unparalleled. (“Gimme two popsicle sticks and a rubberband and I’ll find a way to fuck it, like a filthy MacGyver,” rants Zack at one point, illuminating the differences between men and women’s masturbatory aides.) That’s certainly what powers the movie, and gives it its kick. In terms of structure, though, Smith also smartly dispenses with any potentially distracting sideplots by having Zack and Miri’s families already out of the picture.

At its core, Zack and Miri is about the transformative power of sex, and how special that bond can be. If Smith hasn’t quite found a way to convincingly seal the deal, narratively speaking (the jump forward in time that precedes the closing 20 minutes comes off somewhat contrived), the candor and bluntness with which Zack and Miri deal with one another — devoid of any of the typical polite gender-identified boundaries — at least mark it as a realistically blue 21st century love story. (The Weinstein Company, R, 101 minutes)

A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled Passengers, in which Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying to tick a wide variety of genre boxes, the movie ends up servicing none that credibly.

Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and
charged by a newfound energy. He flirts with Claire, and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.

Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative.

Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/TriStar, PG-13, 93 minutes)

Film, it’s been both said and proven, time and again, is chiefly a director’s medium. Television is the area in which writers can most clearly and lastingly establish a distinct voice for themselves. Just like most of the movies he’s penned, however, Charlie Kaufman defies the restrictions of that categorization.

In fact, his filmography reads like a list of some of the most subversive, idiosyncratically trippy and dazzlingly audacious movies of the past decade (regardless of whether one thought they succeeded or not): Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Thus, somewhat unusually, there’s already a distinguishable persona attached to Kaufman’s directorial debut — Synecdoche, New York, a sprawling, contemplative and imaginative work in which the literal and metaphorical collide in sardonic and sometimes surprisingly affecting fashion.

Attempting to condense the plot of Synecdoche, New York in a way that’s meaningfully representative of the whole is perhaps an exercise in folly, but here goes, broadly. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a New York theater director whose life starts to contract on him. His marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of miniatures and celebrated artist in her own right, is fraying, and a mysterious physical (psychosomatic?) malady is shutting down his autonomic functions one by one. Things get worse when a flirtatious, would-be affair with box office ticket girl Hazel (Samantha Morton) runs aground before it even really catches fire, and Adele runs off to Europe with Caden’s daugther.

Honored with a MacArthur grant that gives him hope of creating a work of brutal honesty, Caden launches himself into a massive, Mike Leigh-esque undertaking, hiring hundreds of actors to craft an improvised, much-workshopped “living play” in a giant warehouse that contains an ever-growing mock-up of the city outside. He even hires actors, Sammy (Tom Noonan) and Tammy (Emily Watson), to play himself and Hazel, which helps contribute to the mental deterioration of new wife Clare (Michelle Williams), his former leading lady.

Synecdoche, New York (the title is pronounced “sih-neck-doh-kee”) is a movie that has the capacity to enthrall and frustrate in perhaps equal measure, depending on one’s capacity to accept elliptical plotting and abstract flavoring. For a while it unfolds as a more or less straightforward drama about a man caught up in his own head, albeit with a few heightened touches of absurdism. (Hazel lives in a house that is literally on fire, and for years Caden peruses his daughter’s forward-reading diary, long after she’s left.) Later, the movie becomes a series of slipstream moments, scattered marbles of life that serve as emotive triggers and placeholders as much if not more than conventional dramatic fodder.

What I can most easily and honestly say about Kaufman’s id-tickling, decades-spanning picture is that it has both enormous, insistent ambition and a soul, which are so frequently mutually exclusive in modern American movies. “Like” is a hard word to attach to it, not because it’s punishing or depressing, but just because it doesn’t coddle an audience, or pander. It’s largely about death and creative struggle, but it’s also whimsical and hopeful. There are a few bits with which to quibble, but it’s mostly an engrossing experience — funny, mildly unnerving (there’s a pinch of domestic creepiness that would make David Lynch proud) and affecting in unexpected, tangential ways… much like life itself, actually. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 124 minutes)

Recent parolee Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) has been estranged from
what remains of her family for 15 years, and has a drab wardrobe of
browns and greys to match her battered psyche. Lea (Elsa Zylberstein, below left),
her younger sister, picks up Juliette at the airport and subsequently
takes her into her Parisian home, which she shares with her husband
Luc, his mute father, and their two adopted little Vietnamese girls. As
Juliette is slowly reintegrated into society both at large and in
small, a slow thaw occurs, with unanticipated consequences for all
involved.

There’s a pinch of self-conscious Franco-genuflection to the directorial debut of novelist and literature professor Philippe Claudel, most particularly in the form of a dinner scene praising Eric Rohmer. For those who’ve sampled even a bit of French cinema, the emotional contours of this film are familiar, and in that regard the movie feels a bit like a stacked deck, daring one to rebel against its slow-developing appraisal of confinement and regret. The studied warmth and unfussy sincerity of its telling, though, wins out; I’ve Loved You So Long is a movie about familial silences and the great, tilled-earth spaces in between, both in relationships and in one’s head. The slow reveal of the full reason behind Juliette’s incarceration gives the film some extra emotional heft, but this is first and foremost an Oscar-level showcase for Thomas, as a woman who learns to purge herself of the swallowed self-loathing that has soured her soul. Think of it as a French secular rebirth drama, about self-forgiveness and learning to walk looking at least partially forward, and not always backwards. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 117 minutes)

In New York City, four cops are dead, killed in an ambush that has
the entire police department on edge. With a cop killer on the loose
and so much riding on the case, Chief of Manhattan Detectives Francis
Tierney (Jon Voight) asks his reticent son, Detective Ray Tierney (Ed
Norton), to lead the investigation. Ray takes over the case knowing the
cops who were lost had served under his brother, Francis Jr. (Noah
Emmerich), and alongside his hotheaded brother-in-law, Jimmy Egan
(Colin Farrell). On the surface, it looks like a routine drug bust gone
tragically wrong. But as Ray delves deeper into the case, he realizes
someone on the inside had to have tipped off the drug dealers that the
cops were coming. When the evidence starts to point in an unthinkable
direction, the case forces the family to choose between their loyalties
to one another and their loyalties to the department.

Directed by Gavin O’Connor (Tumbleweeds) from a script co-written with Joe Carnahan, Pride and Glory fairly capably does what it does, and to that end will be embraced by those who are predisposed to love similarly minded good cop-bad family tales like We Own the Night, no matter the muggy, musty odor of familiarity that hangs over these proceedings. Others will, to degrees, yawn. Tightly shot in heated, hand-held close-up, the movie plays as an accented slow shuffle toward inevitability, with an ending of comeuppance that would work a lot better without the bifurcated, correlative strand aimed to neatly wrap up all loose ends. Invested as always, Norton and Farrell mine a few nuggets from the material, which includes the end-credit crawl tag that “any real people or events are included solely for realism.” Well, OK then. I hadn’t necessarily noticed. But thanks for the heads up. Streets! (Warner Bros., R, 125 minutes)

Testing the maxim that happiness can’t be contrived, High School Musical 3: Senior Year sets off a joy bomb, and attempts to charm tween-leaning audiences through an explosion of primary colors, bright production design and sheer, indefatigable force of will. The first film in the Disney Channel’s huge hit TV movie series to receive a theatrical release is a relentlessly chipper toe-tapper, bluntly effective in its staged cathartic moments but powered by a puttering dramatic engine.

Against the spring backdrop of their senior year, a half dozen students at New Mexico’s Eastern High try to juggle competing interests for their time and attention, and figure out the paths for their respective futures. Fresh off winning their second state basketball championship, school hunk and big-man-on-campus Troy (Zac Efron) seems destined to follow in his father’s footsteps to the local university, by accepting a basketball scholarship alongside his best friend Chad (Corbin Bleu). Giving Troy pause, though, is the fact that his girlfriend Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is headed out-of-state to Stanford.

As they prepare for one last school musical, eagerly anticipated by the self-involved Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and her more open-hearted twin brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel), the group’s drama teacher adds a wrinkle to events by announcing that recruiters from Juilliard, the prestigious performing arts academy, will be on hand to observe the award one scholarship to a student at yet to be determined.

Returning series director Kenny Ortega creates an immaculately presented fashion showcase, and places a heavy emphasis on theatrical gesticulation that makes High School Musical 3 seem ever solicitous of its audience’s feelings, in ways perhaps contrived but no less forceful and effective. A couple musical numbers are shot in seemingly hurried fashion, with tight alternating close-ups, but for the most part there’s a nice fleshing-out consistent with the bump in production value from the previous made-for-television movies.

Somewhat unfortunately, the conflict here is of the paint-by-numbers variety, even for teen dramas. Sharpay’s conniving and antagonism is rather blithely dismissed, never carrying over to later scenes. Similarly, because it’s not evidenced by actual friction in their relationship, the emotional drift between Gabriella and Troy as they prepare for different post-high school paths never seems like more than a set-up for song. Troy, too, often seems an incidental bystander in his own unfolding future, the one exception to this being “My Own Dream,” which is the movie’s requisite Footloose-style, solo freak-out number, complete with shifting floor and ceiling dance bits to simulate angsty teen disorientation and confusion.

That said, there’s not much in the film’s look or execution to dissuade embrace by its core audience. Production design and overall packaging are slick, and the performances are sunny and engaging. (Walt Disney, G, 109 minutes)

The combination of a declared open-ended war on terrorism abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home sets the stage for some important questions about the necessity and scale of governmental secrecy in a world without the comfortable parameters of the Cold War. A 2008 Sundance alumnus, new documentary Secrecy delves into the hidden world of national security policy and the “classification universe.” It’s big business, both in content (in a single recent year, the United States government classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress) and cost, but when does security erode, rather than enhance, democracy?

To their credit, co-directors Robb Moss and Peter Galison don’t merely indulge in easy government-bashing; they give open forum to a variety of opinions, underscoring how secrecy can neutralize as well as foster certain threats. But the messily structured Secrecy comes off as not much more than an aperitif. The three main threads here are the situation of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen detained, beaten and held for months by the CIA; the recent Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case; and 1952’s United States v. Reynolds, in which the government appealed a circuit court victory by wartime widows to learn more about the Air Force crash that killed their husbands and fathers. The latter established the legal precedent of a state secrets privilege, and is the poisonous tree from which the fruit of all modern legal stonewalling falls. Secrecy, though, interweaves these strands rather poorly. Artistically inflected animation segments, meanwhile, seem mainly designed to pad the running time, and forestall a more rigorous examination of the very real ethical friction under the microscope. In the end, Secrecy never moves beyond the realm of the theoretical; it only scratches the surface of its area of inquiry, both in content and intellectual forcefulness. For local playdates and more information, click here. (Argot Pictures, unrated, 80 minutes)

A passably engaging claustrophobic horror thriller that a little more
than halfway through reveals the limitations of its mode of
storytelling and visual scheme, Quarantine is told entirely via
hand-held footage shot by one of its characters. The story — about a
television reporter who accompanies a group of firefighters into a Los
Angeles tenement building, only to get sealed in after encountering a
virulent, mutant strain of rabies — works for a while as a goosing
stylistic exercise before descending into nonsensical confusion,
hamstrung by aggressively panicked camerawork, a lack of spatial
clarity and a clumsy attempt at backstory explanation.

A remake of Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza’s 2007 Spanish movie [Rec], Quarantine skips any introductory credits, opening with human interest reporter Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter, above) and her cameraman, Scott Percival (Steve Harris), on a shadow assignment and on site with a Los Angeles fire department crew. Two firemen (Jay Hernandez and Johnathon Schaech) are assigned as their guides for the evening, and some flirting and good-natured chiding ensues between Angela and the guys.

Eventually responding to a late-night call with Angela and Scott in tow, the firefighters, as well as some policemen, come upon an elderly woman who bites one of the officers. When they attempt to get medical help, Angela and the first responders find that they have been sealed in the building. With no power, cell phone reception or immediate answers about their predicament, panic mounts. Soon some of the rest of the residents — including a veterinarian, an accountant and an immigrant couple — succumb to bites from both infected animals and humans, setting off a mad dash by survivors to try to barricade themselves away from the frenzied, foaming-mouthed diseased.

In similar fashion to The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, Quarantine posits itself as an exercise in found footage. Director John Eric Dowdle (The Poughkeepsie Tapes) does a good job blending lurking, corner-of-one’s-eye mayhem with some in-camera effects (one memorable sequence finds Scott using the camera as a blunt-force weapon), but the script has trouble establishing a clear timeline as it relates to the infected, so many times its switch-overs come across as cheaply dramatically convenient.

Also, somewhat fatally, there’s never a keen sense of space established within the building. This renders much of Quarantine‘s shaky-cam action especially unclear and unsatisfying. Finally, a finale which attempts to further clarify the origin of the strain of rabies comes across as very puzzlingly conceived, and entirely at cross purposes with the adrenalized nature of the entire rest of the story. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 89 minutes)

The runaway commercial success of 1998’s There’s Something About Mary and, the following year, American Pie, gave filmmakers and studio executives the creative license to shoehorn into R-rated comedies every gross-out gag involving saggy appendages and bodily fluids that could be conceived, no matter how convoluted the set-up. Misapplying the lessons of the aforementioned films — their tonal balance of, ahem, salty and sweet — teen movies for several years afterward became mostly just slapdash races toward forced outrageousness. Not so with Sex Drive, which may be the most reliably funny teen sex comedy since the original American Pie, and is certainly the most amiable, lived-in and casually self-assured film of its type in that time.



Lanky high school senior Ian Lafferty (Josh Zuckerman, above center) can’t seem to catch a break. Regularly humiliated by his job at a mall donut shop, he’s habitually shown up in the romance department by his younger brother and mercilessly taunted by his older brother Rex (James Marsden), who warns that his lack of a girlfriend may be a sign that he’s “getting gay.”

Actually, Ian has a crush: his longtime best friend Felicia (Amanda Crew, above left). Unable to make her see him as more than a friend, though, Ian engages in some heavy cyber-flirting, and hooks up with an out-of-town babe who seemingly can’t wait to get busy. Egged on by his wry, devil-may-care pal Lance (Clark Duke, above right), Ian “borrows” his brother’s prized vintage Pontiac GTO and, with Lance and an unwitting Felicia in tow, hits the road on a mission to lose his virginity. Car problems, a roadside carnival, trouble with the law, and encounters with both an Amish farmer (Seth Green) and some Amish youth-gone-wild all complicate the group’s journey.

Casting can totally make or break a free-spirited romp like this, and in Zuckerman, Crew and Duke, Sex Drive has a winning hat trick of fresh young faces. Marsden, meanwhile, continues his unlikely reinvention as a comedic player of consequence. Fresh off funny, engaging turns of different sorts in Hairspray, Enchanted and 27 Dresses, he plays frost-tipped Rex with a manic, swallowed rage that plenty of terrorized younger siblings will wincingly recognize.

Co-written by John Morris and director Sean Anders, the movie has an unusual source material pedigree (Andy Behrens’ book All the Way) for a teen flick, and it’s perhaps this fact that helps give it both a solid foundation and a forward-leaning energy all its own. There are broad moments, yes, but they’re both funny and well-integrated with the sort of muttered asides and comedy of self-negation that give one a deeper sense of identification with the characters.

A few of the characterizations seem to borrow a bit from other movies (Duke spins a variation on the zen sex master that Eddie Kaye Thomas did in American Pie), but Sex Drive also nails (no pun intended) the jumbled, hormonal fog of adolescence, when it was possible to pine, both strongly and blindly, for multiple people right in front of your eyes. And it does so by being gross only occasionally, when it actually fits the story. (Summit Entertainment, R, 105 minutes)

The title summons forth all sorts of jokey impulses, not to mention visions of dumb Hollywood studio comedies or aching indie projects a lot more pat and self-satisfied, but the spare, intimate Good Dick proves that, well, size doesn’t matter. The story centers around a sullen, emotionally deadened, pathologically introverted young woman (multi-hyphenate Marianna Palka) and an equally adrift Los Angeles video clerk (Jason Ritter, below) who slowly draws her out of her claustrophobic world. At first he merely recommends more artistically satisfying pornography, but soon he’s camping outside her apartment and pursuing a relationship with her. After chipping away at her sexual antipathy and deflecting her prodigious flashes of anger with Job-like patience, the two reach an impasse. The question for both: is it permanent, or just a final hurdle en route to more firmly rooted happiness?

If Tidal-era Fiona Apple were able to spawn a movie, Good Dick would be it; it’s essentially a threadbare character drama of swallowed anger and despair, but studded with moments of dark humor and a few nice supporting turns that make it seem fleshed-out and real. Writer-director Palka also doesn’t use a limited budget as an excuse to punt on production value; the movie is gorgeously, smartly shot by Andre Lascaris, in a manner that feeds the shuttered worldview of its wounded protagonists, who are a couple in real life. Unconcerned with and unburdened by traditional notions of both feminine centeredness and masculine chivalry, Good Dick is about awakening to the notion of a life lived looking forward, and how one good, hard… friendship (what did you think I was going to say?) can serve as a tethering lifeline in a sea of intra-personal turmoil. The other stuff? Benefits, don’tcha know… (Morning Knight/Present Pictures, unrated, 86 minutes)

Feature film debuts are so often about flash and pizazz — a young director wanting to make their mark by piling on as many visual flourishes or gimmicks as possible. So it’s bracing to come across something like writer-director Lance Hammer’s exactingly constructed, strikingly photographed, deliberately paced Ballast, which feels like a shiny Sacagawea dollar stumbled across in the dusty parking lot of a remote rural diner. A deserving winner of multiple festival awards, including Best Director and Cinematography prizes at Sundance earlier this year, Ballast is a lyrically told, moving story of underclass struggle, a film of a certain piece with David Gordon Green’s George Washington, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Enid Zentelis’ Evergreen.

A tale of loss, resilience and rapprochement, Ballast unfolds in the crisp winter light of a small Mississippi Delta township. There, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), a single mother, struggles to scratch out a living for herself and her 12-year-old son, James (JimMyron Ross, above left), who’s begun to succumb to influences of drugs and violence. When the opportunity to seek safe harbor at a new home arises, Marlee grabs it, even though the property is shared by Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, above right), her former brother-in-law. With circumstances thrusting them into proximity, a subtle interdependence and common purpose emerge for Marlee and Lawrence, as they tend to old wounds, test new waters and tentatively move forward.

Told in beautifully observed minimalist strokes, Ballast is all about fumbling toward forgiveness. Its performers are almost exclusively non-professionals, yet there’s a quiet confidence and uniformity of purpose that informs the movie and holds it together during the tenuous, delicate first half-hour, which otherwise feels very much like discrete, stolen moments from some rural domestic surveillance footage. Slowly, though, a bigger picture develops. Lawrence is a twin, and so devastated by his brother’s suicide that he tries to shoot himself during the film’s opening minutes. In his nephew James, though, Lawrence sees the chance for a purpose and project greater than himself, or his workaday life at a convenience store.

What’s perhaps most interesting is the level of non-showy authenticity that Ballast achieves, despite the fact that Hammer is a 40-something-year-old, Caucasian former architect and part-time art director from Southern California, while his subjects are African-American, and the Mississippi Delta a place that he’s visited frequently but isn’t from. Arthouse fans will be suitably impressed. And who knows — in a decade maybe Hammer, like Green, will be helming a Judd Apatow-produced comedy. One shouldn’t count on it, though. For more information on the film, click here. (Alluvial Film Company, unrated, 96 minutes)

A slickly packaged yet ultimately unpersuasive political action thriller, Eagle Eye collapses under the weight of various story incongruities, in large part because its sprawling, conspiratorial plot and mode of storytelling don’t ever quite fully align.

A re-teaming of Disturbia director D.J. Caruso and star Shia LaBeouf, the movie represents a crucial test of commercial leading man viability for the young actor. Set in and around Washington D.C., the story centers on a piecemeal terrorist plot, with different “cells” being activated against their will. Disaffected copy shop employee Jerry Shaw (LaBeouf) finds his life turned upside down when his twin brother mysteriously dies. Returning from the funeral, he discovers his apartment crammed with bomb-making supplies. A strange woman calls his cell phone and orders him to flee, but Jerry is captured, and questioned by FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton).

Simultaneously, single mother Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) sends her 8-year-old son off on a school field trip, only to get a call from the same woman threatening to derail his train if Rachel doesn’t obey her orders. The voice on the phone is soon revealed to be a rogue, omnipotent government defense computer system, who brings together strangers Jerry and Rachel and parcels out instructions that unwittingly lead the pair into complicity in a scheme to eliminate most of the United States’ elected government. In pursuit of the on-the-lam duo, along with Morgan, is Air Force investigator Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson).

Hatched several years ago by executive producer Steven Spielberg as a techno-phobic thriller, Eagle Eye shows the wear of much tinkering by many writers. The wildly preposterous plot hinges on governmental hyper-competence at a time when all evidence in the real world points to the contrary, and isn’t aided by brawny sequences that paint a colorful picture of the super-computer’s god-like abilities, which stand in stark contrast to the third-act messiness it spawns in trying to concoct a ruse that will eventually frame Jerry and Rachel.

Furthermore, there’s a baffling, poorly conceived scene mid-film — nakedly designed to pull the audience along, and distract from narrative potholes — in which the computer summons Jerry and Rachel to a consumer electronics store and reveals a portion of their mission. This would be akin to the Man Behind the Curtain outing himself halfway through The Wizard of Oz, just because.

Former television director Caruso has proven himself a stylish shooter of genre fare, and Eagle Eye is his biggest outing to date. From a technical point-of-view, the film is fairly well put together, though a first act car chase sequence is choppily edited, and lacks spatial clarity. Unfortunately, the method of conveyance doesn’t match the degree to which the story is steeped in paranoia and invasion of privacy. A grittier treatment or more futuristic setting would have been more in keeping with the story’s themes. Or a compelling case could be made for a tone of polished, heightened absurdity similar to this summer’s international hit Wanted. By spurning either of these more stylized visual approaches, Eagle Eye feels trapped between two worlds. (Paramount, PG-13, 117 minutes)

It was about 70 minutes into The Lucky Ones that I finally wrestled to the ground, in my mind, where the movie was going and what is was trying to say or accomplish. “In its own weird way, this wants to be the Sideways of Iraq coming-home tales,” I thought. There’s some of the same bittersweet clash of tonalities, and each movie, in large part, is about trading in self-defeatism and rueful doting for que sera deliverance, about locating the virtue of small victories and finding release in the fact that life is a journey and not a destination. (Heck, composer Rolfe Kent even provides the score for both films.)



All of this makes The Lucky Ones — mostly a humanistic dramedy, with a few pointed moments of flare-up — explosive for some very strange reasons. It’s a fascinating and in some ways slightly unnerving realization that we’ve seemingly reached a point in our collective national pop-cultural coping that allows for a movie like this, after having (broadly speaking) turned a blind eye on so many Iraq War dramas and documentaries, a handful quite superb.

Directed by Neil Burger, who made the interesting 2002 mockumentary Interview With the Assassin before transitioning into more streamlined narrative filmmaking with The Illusionist, the movie centers around three very different Iraq war veterans returning home from Landstuhl Air Force base in Germany, and the cracked road trip they share across the United States when their connecting flights out of New York City are canceled.

Fred Cheever (Tim Robbins), a married reservist with a teenage son almost ready for college, returns home to a wife who’s bluntly, emotionally moved on. This extends Cheever’s road trip with the cocky TK (Michael Peňa) and young, naïve Colee (Rachel McAdams). The latter is headed to Las Vegas, to deliver a guitar to the family of a slain pal. TK, meanwhile, is planning on a brief, headlong plunge into hedonism to make sure his sexual running gear, wounded by shrapnel, is in working order for his fiancée.

There’s a warm, easy rapport between the three actors, and while there are moments of flinty anger and edginess — Colee’s reaction to a put-down of her friend, plus a pointed political discussion at a house party in Kansas — these are momentary encroachments in an otherwise fairly lightweight, lighthearted film… maybe too lighthearted, actually. The movie is co-written by Burger and Dirk Wittenborn, who previously adapted his own novel Fierce People for the screen, and The Lucky Ones shares the aforementioned work’s sense of glancingly lacerating sociological observation, as when a Hummer salesman, after a mishap with the group’s first rental car, remarks that the Army vehicles they’re used to driving probably don’t have built-in cameras in the headrests like their commercial counterparts.

That keen sense of detail helps mitigate the lingering sense that this is all a bit too pat of a set-up, as do the movie’s fairly strong performances, particularly from McAdams. There’s certainly no disrespect intended by the filmmakers, but the tonal shifts here give off the sound and feel of a grinding gearshift; California wine country helps such bittersweet grappling go down much smoother than do battle-scarred veterans, it turns out. (Lionsgate/QED, R, 108 minutes)

In 2006, Inside Man, and its $185 million worldwide gross, seemed to augur an occupational shift for director Spike Lee. Working within the loose confines of a tony yet straightforward genre piece seemed to suit him. Being freed from the shackles of more overt social commentary allowed Lee to craft his most cogent, confident narrative feature in years.

Lee’s new film puts the brakes on that career makeover. A clunky, overlong and all-around bizarrely plotted World War II melodrama, Miracle at St. Anna feels, above all things, like a fantastically unlikely yet still true memoir hewing too closely to its source material, out of some sense of solemn over-regard. Learning that author James McBride’s book, which he adapted for the screen himself, is in fact a work of historical fiction makes the film’s choices all the more perplexing.

The movie opens in 1983, with what seems like the murder of an innocent man at a Harlem post office. After an artifact from the oldest elliptical arch bridge in the world is discovered in the apartment of the arrested killer, the rest of the story winds back in time, detailing the travails of a small group of soldiers from the all-African-American 92nd division who get stuck behind enemy lines crossing a river in Tuscany, Italy in September, 1944.

Led by Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), the group stumbles across a wounded young Italian boy (Matteo Sciabordi), who latches onto Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a lumbering simpleton who carries with him a statue head that he believes renders him invisible. As the unit holes up and awaits word from their commanders, they also come across a variety of townspeople and Italian resistance fighters, some helpful and some clearly concealing secrets.

With both the awkward present day framing device and the back story of the little boy, Lee and McBride obviously want to evoke parallel mysteries, yet there’s no there’s involving hold to these yarns, mystical or otherwise. Lee’s penchant for never letting a point lay softly is also on ripe display in a few speechifying flashbacks-within-flashbacks, during which the movie completely grinds to a halt.

Miracle at St. Anna aims to be at once a mystery, a lyrical war drama, and a mystical, Cinema Paradiso-style tale of cross-cultural connection. Despite a few effective passages, it succeeds in sum at none of these endeavors, and is instead stuck in this weird state of limbo — not pulling off the magical realism that a director like Guillermo del Toro might have more success in conveying, and not really connecting as a war drama either. Miracle at St. Anna possesses many of the component parts of an idiosyncratic, air-quote important work, but it never gels into anything other than a casserole of jarring, jangly, disparate tones. Strangely, and perhaps a bit sadly, the film makes one yearn for the return of Spike Lee, hired commercial hand. (Touchstone, R, 147 minutes)

Having already nuked the fridge earlier this summer with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, high-profile screenwriter David Koepp jumps behind the camera for his fourth feature film, a comedically-inflected misfire about a socially maladjusted dentist, Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais), who briefly dies, comes back to life, and finds himself able to see and talk to dead people. Soon Bertram, much to his annoyance, is being pestered for favors by all sorts of Earthbound ghosts, including a philandering husband, Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear), looking to break up the impending marriage of his wife, Gwen (Téa Leoni).

Exercising his skill with cud-chewing asides, and blissfully playing up his character’s inhospitality and smarmy self-regard, Gervais gives Ghost Town a bit of a kick in the pants. And the movie is, on a certain level, sweet enough, really — it elicits a few smiles and nods of identification here and there. Saturday Night Live‘s Kristen Wiig pops up in a couple amusing scenes, as a doctor. And, yeah, dental practice colleague Aasif Mandvi gets to give Gervais the slow burn, after putting up with his shit for years.

But mostly Ghost Town feels full of safe choices and conventional moves, rendering it a future bundled-DVD companion of fellow apparitional rom-com piffle like 2005’s Just Like Heaven. A potent comedic force in her own right, Leoni is forced to mainly stand around, look beautiful and play variations on sputtering uncertainty, which she capably pulls off, scene to scene. Watching her romantically warm to Gervais and vice versa, however, elicits indifference at best, disbelief at worst. Koepp’s previous directorial efforts have all been small-budgeted dramatic thrillers, with an emphasis on the drama more than the thrills. His first foray into more whimsical comedy, co-written with John Kamps, doesn’t leave one wanting for more in this vein. (Paramount, PG-13, 103 minutes)

Written and directed by Christian Petzold, absorbing German import Yella unfolds against an evocative backdrop of abandoned cityscapes. After escaping her volatile ex-husband Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann, below left), with whom she owned a start-up business, Yella Fichte (Nina Hoss, below) leaves her father and small hometown in former East Germany for a new life in the West as an accountant. One job quickly falls through, but Yella hooks on with Philipp (The Counterfeiters‘ Devid Striesow), a freelance business executive who comes to rely on Yella’s balance sheet expertise. Ben, however, will not leave his ex-wife alone.

Yella is one of those movies that the less one knows about it going in, the more likely they are to fall under its sway. The film’s press notes name-check Herk Harvey’s 1962 cult classic Carnival of Souls as inspiration, which is easy to see. And yet this color-encoded, carefully constructed allegorical tone poem of lonesomeness and strangled aspiration also strongly echoes, on a certain level, David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive. Unlike that film, Yella doesn’t work as an adrenalized cognitive booster shot, heightening one’s awareness of the sinister and absurd; Petzold is interested in telling a much more compact, straightforward story. Spare and streamlined in its production design, and for the most part stripped of any sense of accompanying human warmth, Petzold’s tale hones in on upward mobility, and the lies that we tell and sell ourselves to make just-around-the-bend self-betterment seem plausible. Underscoring that notion, and holding the film together with a wonderful performance, is Hoss, whose placid demeanor serves as a plaintive stand-in for a universal underclass. For more information, click here. (Cinema Guild, unrated, 89 minutes)

Modest in scope and temperament, Chris Smith’s The Pool serves as a pleasing neorealistic dip for foreign film aficionados who may have somehow been suckered into recently seeing Bangkok Dangerous. Set in Goa, India, the story centers around 18-year-old Venkatesh Chavan (below) and his orphaned 11-year-old friend Jhangir Bhadshah, who have survived their traumatic childhoods, and work at a small hotel and restaurant, respectively, sleeping on mats and making extra money by selling plastic bags at a local market. After an upper-class family moves back into their home — which happens to have a shimmering pool that goes unused — Venkatesh befriends the head of the household (Nana Patekar, the film’s only professional actor), strikes up a friendship with his upstart teenage daughter, Ayesha Mohan, and tries in wayward fashion to point his compass toward a more comfortable way of life.

With its few pantomimed or otherwise casually played “reveals,” The Pool‘s proper drama is reduced to a couple minor-chord arguments. Influenced equally by Vittorio de Sica and Satyajit Ray, writer-director Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) was inspired to make The Pool after serving as cinematographer on a friend’s Bollywood remake of Romeo & Juliet, and his film is the rare example of an American production that doesn’t overly fetishize its Eastern setting. Working with non-professional actors (Bollywood superstar Patekar being the exception), Smith’s directorial touch is deceptively simple; eschewing close-ups, he crafts a film about simple acts and everyday friendship. The result is a solid work of fuzzy adolescent yearning — when even good advice had to be derided in front of friends — and quiet uplift, free from mawkishness. For more information, click here. (Vitagraph Films, unrated, 95 minutes)

Arthouse filmmaker Neil LaBute takes his best commercial swing yet with Lakeview Terrace, a solidly constructed drama of suburban friction and unrest that only fully yields to genre convention in its final wild, gunplay-fueled 10 minutes. For the majority of its running time, Lakeview Terrace is more of a character study than somewhat similar neighbors-gone-wild thrillers like Pacific Heights and Unlawful Entry. While not enough of a straight thriller to attract widescale younger audiences, the film is foremost a very effective reservoir for the cool menace that star Samuel L. Jackson can project, and will connect largely on the basis of that strength.

The story revolves around a young couple, Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, respectively), who buy their first home in an upper-middle-class southern California suburb, and immediately clash with their new neighbor Abel Turner (Jackson), a stern single father of two who makes known his disapproval of their interracial relationship. Abel is also a veteran police officer, which complicates matters when passive-aggressive acts of harassment that could be misconstrued (a mock parking ticket on the couple’s first day in town, security lights on Abel’s house shining directly into the Mattson’s bedroom) give way to various acts of vandalization.

For a while Chris and Lisa try to make nice, even offering Abel’s teen daughter the use of their swimming pool — a welcome oasis in the sweltering heat, which is partially responsible for nearby raging wildfires. When Abel’s campaign of harassment persists, however, Chris and Lisa succumb to measures of payback. Things come to a boil just as a fire descends from the hill that abuts their land.

More or less a critical darling since his incendiary 1997 debut, In the Company of Men, LaBute has never scored with domestic audiences to the tune of more than $25 million. Lakeview Terrace, however, represents the slickest packaging yet of the themes that have most often defined his work — the inherent tension of interpersonal relationships, and how differences (in race, gender and religion) often radically divide us. The screenplay handles the story treatment fairly seriously, taking care to nicely shade and fill in Abel’s back story, but also spotlight his manipulativeness. The first hour of the film is very effective in building tension. Abel speaks in coded vagaries that allow him to maintain plausible deniablity, but flashes of his temper — including an argument over global warming at garden party — reveal a tightly wound man barely in control of his emotions.

Apart from an implausible conversation between Chris and Abel after a stakes-raising incident, the only real narrative stumbles are the aforementioned ending and the inclusion of bickering discord between Chris and Lisa about when to start a family. The latter plot strand slightly factors into proceedings, but comes across chiefly as just a way to stall action with regards to the main story. The film’s aggressive finale, meanwhile, feels like a concession to commercial pressure, and out of step with the nuance and care with which the rest of the story is told. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 110 minutes)

Screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino team up with director Jon
Avnet in Righteous Kill, a thinly sketched, utterly pedestrian cop
thriller that pivots on a very predictable twist ending. An unworthy
vehicle for its stars’ talents, the movie plays like an episodic small
screen crime serial lazily blown up for the big screen.

The film opens with black-and-white footage of a confession to 14 slayings, and then winds its way back an indeterminate amount of time, introducing Turk (De Niro) and Rooster (Pacino), two veteran New York City cops. The long-time partners share some sympathies with a vigilante killer, The Poetry Boy, who’s offing pimps, murderers and other thugs who otherwise beat the legal system, and leaving calling cards of rhymed composition at the crime scenes. Turk and Rooster start investigating drug dealer Marcus “Spider” Smith (rapper 50 Cent, né Curtis Jackson), but get pulled into the serial killer case.

A hard-edged forensic specialist, Karen Corelli (Carla Gugino), helps out with some crime scene analysis; complicating factors is her relationship with Turk. Two junior detectives, Perez and Riley (John Leguizamo and Donnie Wahlberg), are also brought in to work with the wily veterans. They quickly come to suspect that the killer is a cop — maybe even Turk, who seems eager to knock down any theories that the Poetry Boy has a badge.

Watching Righteous Kill, one feels as if they’ve tripped back in time and landed smack dab in the middle of some anonymous, straight-to-video thriller from the 1980s. There’s no pop to the pacing, no intrigue or slickness applied to the homicidal stagings, which are flatly captured in stand-alone form. In short, there’s no excitement here, or legitimate tension. Instead, Avnet and cinematographer Denis Lenoir try to manufacture forward-leaning energy by occasionally deploying a couple different stylistic gimmicks, from split-screen psychiatric interviews and point-of-view hand-held camerawork to flash-forward bits from the aforementioned confession video. This lack of a codifying visual scheme only underscores the narrative’s weakness.

The film’s indistinct screenplay, by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man), offers up righteously thin lead characterizations, which on a certain level makes its eventual reversals play more smoothly, yet without any real consequence. The personal relationship between Turk and Karen, who’s into rough sexual roleplay, is especially baffling in its cursoriness, and the junior detectives — integral to driving the investigatory plot, and thus Turk’s increasing agitation — aren’t given enough front-and-center time.

A few incongruous moments of pop cultural humor pop up (one of the victims’ surnames is Brady, spawning a joke about Brady Bunch), but there’s never a sense that these jokes flow from character, that they’re anything more than a couple tossed-off bits of generic “color.” The script is perhaps best defined as being beset by missed opportunities and unexploited pay-offs; the latter is most egregiously true in a violent sequence that feeds the finale and yet is crucially not referenced by characters, rendering it inconsequential and false.

Older but tanner and slimmer than his counterpart, Pacino plays things more subdued than in many of his recent films. De Niro, meanwhile, trades in moderately restrained variations of moves we’ve seen in some of his previous hothead characters. Even if familiar, there is certainly a residual trace affection from seeing the two exercise their craft in the same frame, but Righteous Kill slowly drains that thrill. For the original review, from Screen International, click here. (Overture, R, 100 minutes)

The weighty mouthful of a title is somewhat ironic counterpoint for
this quiet, mannered tale of how we feel most acutely distance from
those genetically closest to us. Adapted from a novel by Yiyun Li,
Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a slow-played, smartly observed movie about familial reconciliation and rapprochement that only unravels at the very end.

A retired widower from Beijing, Mr. Shi (Henry O, above right) comes to Los Angeles to visit his cool-to-the-touch adult daughter, Yilan (Faye Yu, above left), who’s recently undergone a divorce. Her isolation and estrangement from her father is palpable; Yilan barely conceals her irritation at having to explain things to him, or having him ask the definitions of certain words, and it’s obvious that his gentle chidings (“You subscribe to the newspaper — you should read it”) enormously get under her skin.

With Yilan at work during the day, and concocting excuses to stay out at night, Mr. Shi is a purposefully orphaned house guest, so he wanders down to the local park, where he meets a friendly Iranian woman (Vida Ghahremani). Without a common language, they resort to expressing themselves to one another using a mixture of their respective languages and broken English. Mr. Shi, a former rocket scientist, confesses to her he was frequently absent as a father, and doesn’t understand his daughter. As Yilan drifts further away, though, Mr. Shi endeavors to get to the heart of the mystery surrounding her unhappiness.

Wang (The Joy Luck Club, Smoke) has a nice touch with actors, and his cast here is characteristically wonderful. Elegantly spare in its construction and production design, the film often unfolds in echo-overlap scenes (Yilan and her father at home eating dinner, Mr. Shi in the park with his new friend) that fit together like Russian nesting dolls, with minute differences and coded dialogue exchanges (Mr. Shi musters an apology by way of conversational observance that the world would be a better place if parents were first grandparents) giving us small new insights into the characters.

While there are a few bits of social misunderstanding (Mr. Shi is baffled by the men-seeking-men personals in the newspaper, and inquires about the etymology of K-U-M, versus the word “come”), they’re not played broadly, or for laughs, but rather quietly, to highlight cultural alienation. There’s a certain beauty in all this restraint — Wang’s film reminds one that many screen storytelling conventions diverge from the clipped manner in which we converse and interact in real life — but the movie, in its final lap, also leaves one a bit wanting.

Wang sets up some fascinating generational and geographical stalemates. When the knives finally do come out, Yilan movingly articulates the discomfort she feels speaking her native language, given the uncommunicativeness she witnessed in her parents; despite feeling like a bit of a stranger in America, she feels at home with English. Yet Mr. Shi’s cathartic revelation takes place in unrealistic overheard fashion, and so A Thousand Years of Good Prayers feels a bit unresolved. Perhaps that’s a minority cultural commentary within a larger cultural commentary, but it also feels like a bit of a cop-out. For the original review, from H Magazine, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 83 minutes)

A warped coming-of-age tale that connects courtesy of the unfussy straightforwardness and charm of its lead performances, British import Mister Foe delivers audiences a much different portrait of star Jamie Bell than American audiences will remember from his feel-good debut film, Billy Elliot.

Hallam Foe (Bell) is a troubled young man whose penchant for voyeurism and regressive dress-up paradoxically reveals his darkest fears and his most peculiar desires. A 17-year-old misfit, Hallam spends lonely days spying on others at the Scottish Highlands estate of his father (Ciarán Hinds), haunted by his mother’s suicide. When his beautiful new stepmother Verity (Claire Forlani) starts asserting herself with respect to his father’s business affairs, Hallam begins to suspect that maybe she even played a hand in his mother’s death.

Confusing matters even more for Hallam, he finds himself attracted and repelled by Verity in equal measure. When the tension brewing between the two erupts, Hallam runs away, fleeing the countryside for the big city. With no money and no friends to speak of, he crashes down into reality in Edinburgh. Adept at fading into the background and peering in on the lives of others to escape his own every day life, Hallam soon becomes obsessed with Kate (Sophia Myles, above), a hotel middle manager who bears an uncanny resemblance to his deceased mother. Landing a job in the hotel’s kitchen, Hallam finds himself drawn to the older Kate but unable to confess his secrets to her. When the reality of life back home finally catches up with him, Hallam is faced with betraying the memory of the mother he longs for or using his one last chance to grow up.

Co-written and directed by David Mackenzie (Young Adam), Mister Foe trades in plenty of the filmmaker’s familiar staples (clutchy, inappropriate sex that’s hardly erotic or titillating; rain and/or water as a motif; hand-held camerawork and a paucity of color). Mackenzie is also keen on peddling half-frames — obscuring our view of Hallam, to parallel the blinkered fashion in which he views the world. This lurking, nonjudgmental camerawork also has the benefit of muddying the narrative waters with regards to Hallam’s feelings about Verity, and some of the more radical assertions about her nature — a facet of the narrative that is otherwise, through no particular fault of Hinds or Forlani, the weakest part of the movie.

Bell has played wounded, emotionally withdrawn figures before, as in The Chumscrubber, but there’s a core warmth and decency to Hallam that here tugs one along, past some of the more outré inclusions of the story proper. A soundtrack powered by Franz Ferdinand, King Creosote, Orange Juice, Hood, Woodbine and other up-and-coming Brit rockers definitely helps lend Mister Foe (or Hallam Foe, as it was released elsewhere, a title deemed too abstruse for American audiences given the exotic nature of its name) a certain young-boy-in-the-big-city gravity and weight. Parts of the movie feel strangely Dickensian, other moments feel like a Smiths song come to life. Regardless, adolescence is a time when feelings often govern decisions more than reason, and Mister Foe is powered by that same sense of forceful capriciousness. Apart from some closure on the familial story strand that feels somewhat forcibly tacked on, that modus operandi serves this little curio quite well. (Magnolia, R, 95 minutes)

Hounddog first attracted acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, as the movie in which a 12-year-old Dakota Fanning is raped. Nearly 20 months later, it’s finally seeing a theatrical release, with plenty of evidence as to the cause of its lengthy delay.

An amorphous blob of clichéd Southern gothic, where thunderstorms rumble portentously and there’s seemingly only one or two pairs of shoes in the entire town, Hounddog is a pretentious, mildly terrible period piece drama of random, falsely weighted dramatic signifiers and vaguely defined personal triumph — the type of movie where air-quote catharsis is achieved by someone screaming, “Leave me alone, I hate you!” several times at another person before finally collapsing into their arms.

Written and directed by Deborah Kampmeier — who previously mined some of the same loosely related thematic territory with Virgin, about a pregnant teenager who has no memory of ever having sex, and is thus convinced she’s carrying the son of God — Hounddog unfolds in rural Alabama in the 1950s. Young Lewellen (Fanning) lives with her stern, religious grandmother, Grammie (Piper Laurie, spinning a warmed-over variation of the same stiflingly overhearing nut-job that she delivered 30 years ago in Carrie), just up the hill from her no-account father (David Morse), a heavy drinker prone to disappearing for stretches of a couple days at a time and bringing home strange women, like one played by Robin Wright Penn.

Lewellen loves Elvis (not Schmelvis), and when she finds out he’s scheduled to make a stop in her small town, she makes plans to try to get a ticket to attend, along with her friend Buddy (Cody Hanford). After the aforementioned rape, by an older boy dangling the promise of an Elvis ticket, nearby neighbor Charles (Afemo Omilami, suffering the screen caricature of the “mystical Negro”) tries to help Lewellen get her spirit back by teaching her to tap into the blues. There are also a few obligatory third act revelations regarding a tangled family lineage, but they hold much more shrug than pop.

Hounddog is rather gorgeously shot (cinematographers Ed Lachman and Jim Denault share credit), but the film’s mossy beauty soon wears thin — done in by characters that are defined broadly, by race, socioeconomic class, terrible wig, or some combination thereof. For the full review, from H Magazine, click here. (Empire Film Group, R, 98 minutes)