As both a writer and performer, Larry David has long mined anxiety, irritation, social faux pas and self-flagellating neuroses for all sorts of uncomfortable laughs. It seems no empty pose, though, this persona; it feels hard-wired to his soul. Without the angst, and its slip-sleeve of puffed-up, mock-selfishness he got to slip on for HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Curb Your Enthusiasm, would there actually be a Larry David?

Well, Clear History provides no answer to that question, for those wondering. Debuting this week on HBO, the movie finds David re-teaming, in multi-hyphenate fashion, with three of his Seinfeld and Curb collaborators (writers Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer), for another comic tale of put-upon exasperation. The result starts strong but fades in the end, like a sprinter out of the blocks in a mid-distance race with which he or she is unaccustomed. Gags and joke writing are given favor over deeper characterizations, a tack which works for a while but eventually undercuts what is a quite promising set-up.

Clear History opens in 2003, with a nearly unrecognizable David starring as Nathan Flomm, the marketing expert at an upstart California electric car company headed up by Will Haney (Jon Hamm). When Nathan balks at Haney naming the set-to-debut vehicle after his son Howard (who is in turn named after Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead), he impulsively gives up his 10 percent stake in the company and resigns. Naturally, this movie existing in David’s world, the car becomes a $10-billion, zeitgeist-defining hit.

Needing to pretty much drop off the face of the Earth, Nathan assumes the name of Rolly DaVore and moves to Martha’s Vineyard. Nobody there knows his secret, not even best friend Frank (Danny McBride). Ten years later, though, Nathan-as-Rolly is happy and an integrated part of this community, even if his preoccupations — like his concern over the fact that his ex-girlfriend Wendy (Amy Ryan), may have performed oral sex on (multiple?) members of the band Chicago when last they toured in the area — are stuck in arrested development.

When a retiring Haney and his new wife Rhonda (Kate Hudson) move into the neighborhood, however, Nathan sees his well-ordered world crumbling down around him. He considers fleeing, but then has a better idea: he’ll blow up Haney’s mansion, which construction crews are in the process of putting the finishing touches on. Through Frank, Nathan connects with a couple of idiot quarry workers, Joe and Rags (Micheal Keaton and Bill Hader, respectively), and even a shady Chechnyan black market dealer named Tibor (Liev Schreiber). Antics ensue.

The rhythms of much of the movie’s patter are familiar, and as funneled through David’s angsty kvetching a lot of this material connects with no small amusement. Rants about the placement of electrical outlets, placing silverware on napkins instead of directly on a table, the sincerity of apologies and why Nathan doesn’t reply to birthday emails (“There are so many it turns into a job, which kind of defeats the purpose”) are funny, and definitely bring a smile to the face. Director Greg Mottola (Superbad, Adventureland), too, keeps things moving at a generally good clip.

But if Clear History has energy to spare, for sure, it also lacks the verve and intellectually compacted punch of the best of Curb Your Enthusiasm. At several points, the script plots a seemingly wild change of course only to abandon its outrageousness in midstream. As its story winds its way into the second and third acts, ideas are engaged in the most fitful fashion, while certain potentially rich details (Haney’s seemingly incongruous predilection for Ayn Rand, for instance) are abandoned completely. Characters become servants to the writers’ joke-writing instincts, rather than the other way around. There’s enough here to still merit a curious click. But Clear History may not be what hardcore David acolytes most crave. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Clear History plays throughout the month of August on HBO and its affiliated channels; check local listings for showtimes. (HBO Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

A grand-scale survey of Jewish humor from the middle portion of the 20th century, shambling documentary When Comedy Went to School represents an amiable, openhearted attempt to shine a spotlight on the ethnic lineage of observational stand-up, and its roots in the vaudevillian era. Ostensibly a look at the so-called greatest generation of comedians — a generation that includes the likes of Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Jerry Stiller, Jackie Mason and Mort Sahl, all interviewed here — and the manner in which they got their pre-television training in the resorts of the Catskill Mountains, the film is unfortunately too scattered and bereft of focus to connect with viewers outside of the most sympathetic and devoted habitués of old-school comedy.

Lacking any clean or clear throughlines, co-directors Ron Frank and Mevlut Akkaya’s film unfurls as a jumbled mass of half-baked historical footnotes, recollections, asides and unconnected details. Good intentions abound, but this Comedy is almost all cluttered, talky set-up, in other words. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. In addition to its other theatrical engagements, the movie opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall and Town Center 5, with additional weekends shows in Pasadena and Claremont. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 76 minutes)

A buzzy American premiere at this summer’s Los Angeles Film Festival, director Sebastian Cordero’s low-boil, sci-fi thriller Europa Report has racked up rapturous reviews in large part because of the stark contrast in which it stands to most like-minded genre efforts. Undeniably, it is elegant, understated and wonderfully designed. Unfortunately, it’s also frustratingly hackneyed — a solidly cast, interesting budget concept absolutely wrecked by cross-cutting and needless voiceover.

Penned by Philip Gelatt, the film centers on a mission to Jupiter’s titular icy moon, to investigate the possibility of alien life within our solar system. Six astronauts from all over the globe (Sharlto Copley, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Christian Camargo, Karolina Wydra and Anamaria Marinca) are selected for the mission, and after a forced correction on their landing leaves them 100-plus yards from their designed spot for settling, they soon experience a loss of communication with their Earth-bound handler (Embeth Davidtz), plus a shocking discovery more profound than they could have imagined.

Europa Report is anchored by its visuals; cinematographer Enrique Chediak helped design an innovative eight-camera system, wherein lenses are given fixed positions throughout the spaceship, which was created in concert with Oscar-winning production designer Eugenio Caballero. This makes for a unique low-budget experience — one that conveys both the wonderment and claustrophobia of outer space travel.

Director Cordero’s framing and editing choices are terrible, however — full of woeful miscalculations from almost the outset, where mixed direct-address monologues create more of a sense of confusion than audience identification. The story, a bit of speculative/alternative history a la Apollo 18 or Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is in and of itself fine, but the manner in which Europa Report ping-pongs back and forth between different time periods, settings and modes — pre-launch interviews from Earth, omniscient camera footage from the craft, Real World-style confessionals from the craft, press conferences from Earth, etcetera — becomes at first wearying and then just ire-provoking.

There are moments of wonder here — Bear McCreary’s pulsing music, and the austere artfulness of a character drifting off to death in the void of outer space — but Europa Report is a movie that is less than the sum of its parts. For low-fidelity science-fiction, try Moon instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Deeper meaning rises sneakily to the surface in the offbeat, austere Prince Avalanche, writer-director David Gordon Green’s re-imagined, loose adaptation of a 2011 Icelandic film, Either Way. A posed man-child statement of surprisingly substantive feeling, the film connects easily and most readily as a quaint little comic bauble — an odd-couple tale with slow-peddled seriocomic detail — largely because of its two affable stars, Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, and the uniqueness of its desolate setting. In savvy fashion, though, this meditative film makes an unexpected statement.



The movie unfolds in rural Texas in 1988, in the aftermath of what a simple insert card tells viewers was a devastating wildfire that destroyed more than 1,600 homes. Alvin (Rudd) and Lance (Hirsch) work by themselves as road-stripers, painting traffic lines on lonely stretches of highway that run through this burnt-out wasteland. Apart from occasional interactions with a gruff trucker (Lance LeGault) who passes through the area, they are virtually alone. Alvin is the foreman, a head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of guy (“I have a lot of prescription medications… but I try not to use them”) and the younger Lance, the brother of his girlfriend, is a characteristically shortsighted loafer who just lives for the weekend, when he heads to the city and tries to get laid.

Beautifully shot by frequent Green collaborator Tim Orr, Prince Avalanche doesn’t do much more than chart this duo’s bickering and uneasy détente, and yet it achieves a sort of mesmerizing hold, for the manner in which it assays notions of place versus home, and loneliness versus being alone. There’s an abstruse yet meaningful and even semi-poetic quality to the dialogue in many of Green’s indie efforts, like All the Real Girls, Undertow and especially his debut, George Washington. That quality is again quite on display in Prince Avalanche, married to evocative music by Explosions in the Sky and David Wingo.

Rudd and especially Hirsch are great. Their characters (especially Lance) are air-quote dumb or foolish as a kind of distillation of the essence of oft-unarticulated male feeling and neediness, and the actors capture this with a piercing grace and honesty. Nowhere is this more evident than in an extended monologue of sexual frustration Lance delivers late in the film, relating his weekend to Alvin. It’s quietly hilarious in both its detail and pure haplessness, but it’s when the story is later revealed to have been at least partially misplaced in its emotion that Prince Avalanche really blooms. Everybody hurts — even men who may not yet be in the position or emotive state to fully realize it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 94 minutes)

Breaking Bad fans, foreign film cineastes and gangster flick aficionados should all find something worthwhile in Johnnie To’s taut, impeccably staged Drug War, an involving, atmospheric cops-and-criminals import. For years, To’s films struggled to find Stateside distribution, while lesser action filmmakers burnished their reputations ripping off his style. That changed by degrees with a stretch of films from 2005 to 2007, including Triad Election, Exiled and Triangle, which did mostly boutique box office in the United States but solid home video business for distributor Tartan.

The 58-year-old, Hong Kong-born To (whose name rhymes with “row”) often delivers films that touch upon themes of fate, exploiting his knack for keen, offhand social observation while never sacrificing a highly stylized visual aesthetic. His first mainland production leans more toward an exercise in style than some of his previous fare, but Drug War still serves up a gripping if familiar police-sting narrative along with the filmmaker’s characteristically brawny, well-edited action theatrics. Doom hangs over the movie like a low-lying cloud, and there is certainly metaphor in the air if one looks for it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 105 minutes)

A huge portion of the buzz surrounding 2006’s The Break-Up had to do with costars Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston taking their offscreen relationship public, and the chattering class dissecting how sincere that was or was not. It became its own little tabloid thing — a more demure, B-story callback to the alleged production hook-up of Angelina Jolie with Aniston’s ex, Brad Pitt, on Mr. & Mrs. Smith — and subsequently drowned out what should have been the more interesting story: namely, of Vaughn’s debut as a writer-producer, developing the idea of a comedy rooted in the dissolution of a relationship that was never meant to last forever.



I Give It a Year takes the kernel of that same premise and, with a bit less bite, spins it off into a fun, amusing, will-they-or-won’t-they confection — a love rhombus wherein a hastily married couple grapples with mutually wandering eyes. Written and directed by Dan Mazer (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan), and superbly cast, the London-set movie sells an utter fantasy, sure (romantic fissure absent any real churned-up emotional turmoil), but it does so in so good and entertaining a manner — in compact, funny strokes and a breezy, winning tone — as to sidestep all but the most piddling of complaints.

When novelist Josh Moss (Rafe Spall) and ambitious advertising executive Nat Redfern (Rose Byrne) cap their whirlwind seven-month courtship by getting married, none of their friends — a group that includes Dan (Stephen Merchant) and the married, bickering Naomi (Minnie Driver) and Hugh (Jason Flemyng) — much expect it to last. Nine months later, Josh and Nat are stuck feeling the same thing. With the bloom of romance having worn off, their incompatibilities are cast in a starker light. Joint romantic temptation, then, arrives in the form of Chloe (Anna Faris), Josh’s ex-girlfriend, and Guy (Simon Baker), a smooth new American client of Nat’s. As they attend counseling, things at first don’t seem to be getting much better, but they decide to stick with it and push onward, toward their one-year anniversary.

It’s true that Mazer sketches the strife of Josh and Nat in the broadest strokes possible, and doesn’t much root down into hot-flash acrimony in the way that The Break-Up rather admirably did. But if one excepts and accepts that element of I Give It a Year as a sort of general placeholder for the initial flush of a romantic relationship, when every action of the other party (like misunderstood song lyrics, for instance) takes on an enchanted quality that will eventually not only lose its luster but become downright annoying, then the movie works fine.

This mostly owes to some funny yet unforced set pieces and Mazer’s deft touch with quips, which run the gamut from pointed observational humor to more barbed putdowns (“Oh, look at you — somebody swallowed a copy of Eat Pray Love!”). I Give It a Year is a film that very much connects on the strength of its joke-writing and delivery.

Mazer has a great cast, too, but this isn’t merely some slice of wind-up cinema, with actors set loose and left to their own devices. He directs them quite well, giving the film’s ensemble scenes real liveliness and pop. Driver and Flemyng give delightful supporting performances, and Olivia Colman is equally enjoyable as Nat and Josh’s snappish therapist. Other players are cast in a bit of a new light. Byrne, so good on Damages, has almost always given off something of a cool vibe, but here she’s relaxed and loose — completely at home and in touch with the material. Faris, meanwhile, has always rather specialized in characters that exist in their own special mental orbit, but Mazer elicits one of the most subdued, focused and performances of her career. She plays Chloe mostly “normal” and straight — flustered and confused by her ever-present connection to Josh despite his marriage — and is no less engaging for the choice. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, I Give It a Year is also presently available across various VOD platforms. (Magnolia, R, 97 minutes)

Mid-level animation meets a slapdash, achingly familiar story in the lackluster animated adventure tale Planes, billed as a spinoff to Disney’s successful Cars franchise. Absent much in the way of any special Pixar pixie dust, however, Planes shifts into autopilot early on, and rushes through a checklist of underdog self-actualization in a manner more dutiful than inspired. All but the youngest viewers may leave feeling they’ve overpaid for this flight. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Disney, PG, 92 minutes)

Acute moments of heartbreak punctuate the new documentary Off Label, a collage-type snapshot of runaway pharma-culture which otherwise struggles to find a topic sentence or cultivate a cogent point-of-view. A nonfiction competition title at the Tribeca Film Festival, directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s movie is an example of well-intentioned cinematic social advocacy undone by haphazard, point-and-shoot construction.

Off Label ostensibly centers around seven subjects (or family members of same) who have served, either wittingly or unwittingly, as test subjects for drug manufacturers or doctors nominally in their employ. And certain of its narrative strands are undeniably hugely compelling. Iraq War veteran Andrew Duffy, a one-time medic stricken with post-traumatic stress disorder, talks about being directed to use 14-gauge needles on Abu Ghraib prisoners for their IVs, as part of effort to psychologically break them. A montage of gruesome photographs, meanwhile, shows some of the other horrors of war to which he was subjected.

Equally affecting are the reminiscences of Mary Weiss, the mother of a mentally ill young man who committed suicide during a 2004 University of Minnesota clinical trial of the drug Seroquel. There’s an eerie tranquility to many of her musings, but the chilling, graphic recounting of the specifics of her son’s death (“This is what the drugs do — if Dan simply wanted to kill himself, he wouldn’t have done that”) provides Off Label with an unnerving moment of piercing, wretched sadness destined to be rarely surpassed on the screen this year.

The problem is that directors Palmieri and Mosher evidence little instinct for corralling their story into something manageable and salient. Their efforts to select a broad cross-section of people whose lives are impacted by Big Pharma is commendable, but they get caught up in secondary details or character traits (the marriage of a bohemian couple who have lived largely off of income as compensated test subjects; the gambling habits of another such young man) without first establishing many of the specifics of their respective stories.

Off Label can’t see the forest through the trees; its makers get lost as to exactly what sort of story they’re telling. Is it about the immorality of forced drug trials from the 1960s on prison inmates whose consent was at best coerced? Is it about psychiatrists dealing with poly-pharmacy generated by primary care physicians prescribing medications about which they have little expertise? Is it about the continued lack of substantive national dialogue on mental illness as it relates to health care? Passionate and jumbled, Off Label is a conversation-starter, but as much for its shortcomings as for what it says about the state of drugs in America. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; to visit the movie’s website, click here. Off Label opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal; it expands in weeks following to a limited national release. In addition to its theatrical engagements, though, the movie is also presently available across VOD platforms. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 80 minutes)

A rising tide of dread and desperation marks Jug Face, a low-budget, independent slice of Southern Gothic characterized by a solid technical package. The freshman feature effort of writer-director Chad Crawford Kinkle, this psychologically rooted horror film recalls the movies of Lucky McKee — and with good reason, since the May and Sick Girl director serves as an executive producer here.

The story unfolds in a rural, backwoods community, where moonshine seems to be the only connection to the outside world. Teenager Ada (Lauren Ashley Carter) is set to be married off to Bodey (Mathieu Whitman) by her father Sustin (Larry Fessenden) and mother Loriss (Sean Young). What they don’t know, however, is that Ada’s walks in the woods with her brother Jessaby (Daniel Manche) are more than innocent strolls — and that she’s pregnant.

All this would be a simpler tragedy if not for the fact that the community indulges in occasional human sacrifice to a mysterious pit. The pit supposedly heals wounds and sickness, but also requires fealty in the form of a corporal offering when potter Dawai (Sean Bridgers) goes into a trance and carves the visage of someone onto a ceremonial jug. When Ada discovers she’s been tabbed as the next sacrifice, it sets off a scramble for survival — with far-reaching consequences for her entire burgh.

There’s a simple, streamlined narrative quality, and corresponding restraint, to Jug Face. It feels properly scaled. Though it does get bloody, the film eschews much in the way of gore in favor of steeped atmosphere and tension. It mostly works, even if Ava and Jessaby’s sibling bond could use a deeper and more sincere exploration, and Kinkle doesn’t quite figure out the most compelling bridge between the movie’s second act and its ending.

What gives Jug Face its punch is Kinkle’s instincts for construction; they’re superb, and extend to composer Sean Spillane, who offers up a great, memorable and evocative leitmotif as part of his score. Chris Heinrich’s cinematography is also quite nice, fitting the naturalistic aesthetic of the movie. For genre fans there’s more of moody interest than not here in Jug Face — a film of modest intentions, but solid execution. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Jug Face opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, and in addition to its theatrical engagements it’s also available across VOD platforms. (Modern Distributors/Modernciné, unrated, 81 minutes)

A mythologically-infused adventure quest with a reluctant hero archetype straight from the notes of Joseph Campbell, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters works as a delivery vehicle for unabashed B-movie pleasures aimed squarely at the preteen set. A solid sequel to 2010’s Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, this predictably plotted but nonetheless fun and engaging offering harks back to matinee serials of yore, where moderated, all-ages peril and derring-do were the name of the game. Several of the youthful performances favor a certain demonstrativeness that doesn’t linger much on the brain. Lorgan Lerman (above left), though, ably embodies Percy’s can-do spirit and awakening, while Nathan Fillion in particular serves up a wry, winning supporting turn. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 106 minutes)

A satisfying, enormously likable genre cocktail, Cockneys vs. Zombies not only delivers upon its title promise, but does so with wit and fleet-of-foot aplomb. Director Matthias Hoene, working from a screenplay by James Moran and Lucas Roche, delivers an entertaining romp that successfully purées its many disparate antecedents, imparting flecks of cheeky homage while also standing steady, firm and fine on its own two feet. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Cockneys vs. Zombies is also available across VOD platforms. (Shout Factory/Dada Films/Film Collective, unrated, 88 minutes)

 

A willfully muted chamber piece, The Time Being is a curious thing. Centering mostly around a struggling artist (Wes Bentley) and his mysterious new benefactor (Frank Langella), the film touches on themes of loneliness, family and social need, but doesn’t sketch out its characters in interesting or dynamic enough fashion to ever blossom into anything more than a meditative curio.

If it resolutely lacks any sort of cathartic roundhouse kick, The Time Being is never really outright boring mainly because co-writer Nenad Cican-Sain is also a disciplined director, and also oversees a beguiling if austere technical package that hints at roiled inner landscapes the screenplay proper doesn’t much address. What The Time Being lacks is something to stand in starker contrast to its spartan aesthetic. As written, Bentley’s character isn’t the most proactive, but the actor also plays him in a blank-faced manner that makes him seem divorced from any rooting interest in his own life, almost as if he’s trying to out-sublimate Langella. This is, needless to say, not a winning strategy. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical dates, The Time Being is also currently available across VOD platforms. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 88 minutes)

Bruce Springsteen has sold 120 million albums worldwide, and racked up 20 Grammys, but it’s his reputation as a consummate live showman that perhaps shines most brightly, and still has the ability to bring even sitting governors to tears. Taking inspiration from the Ridley Scott-produced Life in a Day (Scott also nabs a producing credit here), the crowd-sourced concert-and-reminiscence documentary Springsteen & I highlights with an unadorned effectiveness the deeply personal connection so many fans have with the man they call “The Boss.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NCM Fathom Events/Arts Alliance Media, unrated, 78 minutes)

With scene-stealing turns in movies like Funny People and a solid role in the small screen ensemble Parks and Recreation, Aubrey Plaza has exhibited no short supply of crack comedic timing. The looming question, then, was whether she could translate that gift into the lead role in a film. The answer, in the form of last summer’s quirky, winning Safety Not Guaranteed, was a resounding yes. And that’s part of the reason the lackluster The To Do List, her second foray into leading lady-hood, lands with such a disappointing thud.



Written and directed by Maggie Carey (the real-life wife of co-star Bill Hader), this 1990s-set tale means to put a gender spin on the sex comedy formula, telling the coming-of-age (nudge, nudge) story of a brainiac virginal girl who gets it in her mind to make some mad, make-up progress on her sexual bucket list during the summer between her high school graduation and college matriculation. The problem is, nothing about this potentially rich conceit is handled in an emotionally honest or resonant manner, and the yawning, indifferently paced result has none of the sharp wit of something like the similarly themed For a Good Time, Call…, making for an at times painfully interminable viewing experience that variously wastes and works at cross purposes with the charms of its lead actress.

Plaza stars as Brandy Clark, a Boise, Idaho valedictorian and the family “good girl” in comparison to her older sister Amber (Rachel Bilson). After an abortive, mistaken quasi-hook-up with the hunky Rusty (Scott Porter), Brandy submits to the advice of her friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele), and decides to attack her sexual inexperience as if cramming for an exam. Working opposite Rusty, and under the supervision of loafing manager Willie (Hader), as a lifeguard at the local public pool, Brandy spends her summer putting various notches in her proverbial belt, much to the consternation of her long-suffering friend, Cameron (Johnny Simmons, aptly channeling puppy-dog devotion), who initially views Brandy’s libidinal awakening as a chance to finally get out of the friend zone.

Carey scores a few zingers here and there, at the expense of “innovations” like call-waiting and Snack Wells, but there’s truly nothing real here; her movie lurches to and fro, as if written as a collection of loose, thematically grouped sketch comedy scenes. For a Good Time, Call… found and exploited for laughs both the differences and similarities in male-female sexual attraction and gratification, and actually took seriously its female characters’ sexuality. Carey nominally puts Brandy in charge (the movie is her “quest,” certainly), but embraces narrative contrivance and wind-sock characterizations instead of rooting down into substantive feeling. Consistently, characters don’t behave in rational ways, which makes the story feel arbitrary. The closest Carey comes to something interesting and honest is in Brandy and Amber’s sexually enlightened mother (a wonderful Connie Britton), but even here she eventually undercuts herself.

When not indulging in digressive, increasingly uncomfortable and, more important, unfunny humiliations of its lead character that are irrelevant to the movie’s putative core exploration, The To Do List is marked by lazy plotting, and bailed out repeatedly by look-at-me casting, as with Andy Samberg and Jack McBrayer. (The former plays the lead singer of a touring band who comes through town, while the latter pops up in one scene, as the manager of a swanky private pool that Carey randomly introduces as a “rival” late in the movie, after spending no time whatsoever developing it.) And even grading on the curve of a small budget, the film’s production design feels cheap, haphazard and inattentive, propped up by soundtrack choices (hi there, Spin Doctors and Naughty by Nature) meant to evoke a certain breezy nostalgia.

Plaza, meanwhile, pushing 30, exhibits no small difficulty in channeling teenage angst and wound-up hormonal discovery, but not just because of her maturity. Rather, it’s because of Carey’s thinly imagined script, which doesn’t give her a solid enough character. If The To Do List was her chance to show a sunnier, looser side than the deadpan style for which she’s known, she fails, sadly. It’s not just on Plaza, though. This undisciplined affair simply doesn’t deliver on its concept. Cross it off your own late summer to-do list. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (CBS Films, R, 107 minutes)

Rote, declamatory representations of paranoia, fear, delusion and counter-attack get cycled through in Stranded, a low-budget science-fiction actioner that unfolds on a heightened emotional pitch which doesn’t leave much room for intrigue or escalating tension. Starring Christian Slater (inexplicably sporting a leather jacket), this futuristic movie from Battlefield Earth director Roger Christian is set on the lunar surface, but it lacks the overall virtuosity of Moon, the visual elegance of the flawed but interesting Europa Report, or even the outlandish lunacy of Apollo 18.

In short, it’s a paycheck project for all involved, and nothing that those outside of diehard genre completists need waste their time on. Stranded isn’t thrilling, or scary, or remotely scientific. Rather, its title just describes how viewers will feel in its 88-minute grasp. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Stranded is also available across VOD platforms. (RLJ Entertainment/Image Entertainment, R, 88 minutes)

Power seeks to protect its interests, inherently — to validate its judgments and its actions, or even inaction. That’s perhaps the most salient, unnerving lesson of The Cheshire Murders, a confounding documentary that can’t quite figure out what stories it wants to tell. And the fact that said point lurks just outside of frame says everything one ultimately needs to know about this dark true crime offering from directors Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, which drops the ball in illuminating with any discernment the tale of a horrible 2007 triple-homicide in Connecticut.

Is The Cheshire Murders about the failure of a broken mental health system? The dark, warping legacy of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse? The equally distorting, sometimes damaging effects of Christian fundamentalism? The heartbreaking story of police incompetence and after-the-fact cover-up? The death penalty writ large, and/or as it intersects with fiscal responsibility? Or just a family’s grief, and the ripples it sends throughout a close-knit community? There is certainly no shortage of subplots, or post-arrest mini-twists to the case, but The Cheshire Murders is a movie with about a dozen different topic sentences, and messy, unfocused editing undoes any satisfying blending together of these disparate elements. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Cheshire Murders debuts today on HBO, and plays throughout the month on the channel. Check your local listings for showtimes. (HBO Films, unrated, 117 minutes)

After the success of Arrested Development and Superbad, Michael Cera promptly, predictably found himself plugged into a roster of other Hollywood studio comedies with varying levels of successfully integrated quirkiness, while also exhibiting a keen sense of taste relating to indie films (e.g., Juno, Youth in Revolt). This summer, after having already played a coked-up version of himself in the “Apatow All-Stars” project This Is the End, Cera again dives headlong into Indieville with what might very well be his most daring, off-the-beaten-path professional choice yet.

Drected by Sebastián Silva — from a story loosely based on an autobiographical experience, and shot in a period of several weeks while he and Cera were waiting to film Magic Magic — the highly improvised, Chilean-set travelogue Crystal Fairy unfolds in long, shaggy, straggling stretches seemingly meant to mimic and induce the frazzled vexation of its protagonist, as he copes with the flighty title character he’s unwittingly invited into the lives of he and his friends. Think an ambling The Sitter by way of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, stripped free of any of the former’s lunacy and replaced instead with passive-aggressive back-biting and obsession over a hallucinogenic cactus. That’s Crystal Fairy, a meandering movie that doesn’t do a lot to reward one’s time but still gives one something to think about once they’ve escaped its clutches. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, R, 100 minutes)

Pimp turned successful urban fiction author Robert Beck gets a loving, burnished treatment in the new documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, a film which awkwardly straddles the line between amiable hagiography and a more discerning sociological study of the constricted economic opportunities for African-Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era. A world premiere at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, director Jose Hinojosa’s colorful movie is consistently engaging, but also consistently marked by pockets of missed opportunity.

An idol to rappers like Ice-T and others, the late Beck would help birth the Blaxploitation film genre with a series of bleak, gritty and at times jarringly poetic novels that captured the brutality and viciousness of the pimp’s lifestyle — works deeply rooted in his own experiences. In older interview clips Beck talks about the (phony, assumed) glamor of the pimp lifestyle, and how the life of a pimp is one of unremitting pressure and tension, playing God to a cabal of broken women living in his refracted glow. With its roster of recognizable talking heads (Ice-T, Chris Rock, Don “Magic” Juan, Henry Rollins, and others), Iceberg Slim (one of Beck’s nicknames) also sketches out the sense of communal respect accorded pimps and lionizes, rather uncomfortably at times, their skills of psychological manipulation (or, as interviewee Snoop Dogg puts it: “You can’t just dog a woman out and gorilla pimp a bitch to death — there’s got to be some compassion and tender loving in there”).

While it doesn’t outright deny it, Iceberg Slim skirts around the chaos of its subject’s family life, and certainly his history of violence perpetrated against women. The question of how deep a scumbag’s amends must run hangs uneasily over the entire movie, because Beck clearly gave voice to an underclass in his writing. Part of the unsettled quality of the film owes to Hinojosa’s unreconciled ambitions for the project, and others to a family unit still semi-estranged, which casts long shadows of doubt over certain recollections. (The movie weirdly, passingly hints at Beck’s return to the pimp lifestyle in the 1970s; there’s vehement disagreement amongst his daughters over this fact, though they all seem to agree he was a serial philanderer.)

Anchored by interviews with Holloway House CEO Bentley Morriss, other writers who labored under the label (an important vessel for marginalized African-American voices), and present-day authors like Ian Whitaker, Richard Milner and others who interviewed and wrote about Beck before his death in 1992, the portion of Iceberg Slim dealing with Beck’s unlikely rise to literary prominence is its strongest, by far. In delving down into the sub-genre of realistic African-American “street” fiction and the hungry need it met (there’s even a clip of Beck’s masked appearance on Joe Pyne’s television show), it makes one wish Hinojosa had opted for deeper waters throughout. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Phase 4 Films, R, 89 minutes)

Drive partners Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling re-team on Only God Forgives, a shadow-drenched, neon-infused, fever-dream rumination on vague notions of loyalty and honor that labors so hard to wrap up its narrative in abstruse metaphor that it ends up saying almost nothing of consequence at all.

The spare, Bangkok-set story — a looping series of violent reprisals and refusals of same — is full of often mesmerizing touchstone signifiers. It’s Shakespearean, it’s a square-jawed Western set in the Orient, it’s an intricate mood piece that ponders the question of what would happen if Michelangelo Antonioni had tackled a film with commingled crime world and martial arts tropes. Only God Forgives is all of these things in theory, and yet none of them in practice. It’s a bravura exercise in style — a fairy tale (or nightmare) that unfolds in the same language as Drive, as Refn has said — but as any sort of drama it is inert.



When his brother Billy (Tom Burke) is murdered after killing an underage prostitute, American ex-pat Julian (Gosling), who works as a trainer at a boxing club that’s actually a front for an illegal drug business, finds himself roiled by a certain amount of inner conflict. Upon finding out some of the darker truths about his brother, he’s seemingly disgusted. But his imperious mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), who flies in to identify and claim her beloved Billy’s body, insists that Julian extract revenge.

Julian demurs, but in a wishy-washy manner that invites more abuse from his mother, who has no qualms about making clear whom her favorite son was. When Julian brings home for dinner a prostitute whom he’s been visiting, Mai (Ratha Phongam), Crystal doesn’t hide her contempt either, labeling Mai a “cum-dumpster,” among a few other choice insults. Still, Julian dutifully lights his mother’s cigarette.

This cracked family dynamic — and Crystal’s ongoing machinations to find and slaughter those responsible for Billy’s death — ignores the film’s true main character, though. That would be Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), an avenging-angel cop who enjoys karaoke when he isn’t meting out his own brand of justice by lopping off people’s hands. Naturally, he eventually crosses paths with both Julian and Crystal.

Only God Forgives is rather exquisitely photographed; cinematographer Larry Smith’s compositions mean something, and the slow tracking shots give ample time to admire the vivid production design, with its deep, symbolic reds. And it’s put together with nerve, definitely. Cliff Martinez, who also contributed music to Drive, offers up a score that’s appropriately ominous at times but also communicates waves of mournful distance between mother and son, even as they remain locked in a weird, sexually charged, symbiotic relationship. The best portions of Refn’s film impart an elemental dread, but these moments are few and far between. His screenplay is too thinly sketched to work as an existential crime thriller. It lacks the purring, streamlined purpose of Drive, and its characters aren’t merely types — they’re complete ciphers.

Dating back to even some of his earliest work, Gosling has a true gift for nonverbal elucidation, and finding large meaning in the smallest gestures. Here, though, he seems to treading water, delivering a dour performance that verges on parody. Julian doesn’t have a lot of dialogue (maybe two dozen lines, tops), but Gosling plays the character as enigmatic and sullen simply for the sake of showcasing those qualities. Coming on the heels of another whispery, reticent turn, in The Place Beyond the Pines, it mostly makes the case that Gosling is hell-bent on shedding himself of teeny-bopper fans. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Radius/TWC, R, 89 minutes)

The comedown of a haughty socialite provides the basis for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, an examination of existential crisis and self-delusion that is nimble, glancingly funny and yet also marked by sly, unstressed depths. Anchored by a superlative, wound-up turn from Cate Blanchett that will surely generate some awards consideration talk, the film exhibits perceptive dramatic insight with only a leavening pinch of melodramatic inclination, highlighting the gravitational pull of the love one thinks they deserve. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 98 minutes)

An indie horror flick that debuted at the Fantasia Festival last year and made the rounds at a number of genre fests, the suburban-set Under the Bed unfolds with a nuance and relative level of sophistication that belies its generic title, before eventually succumbing to a haphazard, poorly explained explosion of gore at the hands of a nasty creature hell-bent on terrorizing a pair of brothers. Directed by Steven C. Miller, the movie is for much of its running time quite engaging, and plugged into a sense of clammy unease, but unfortunately pays off its story in familiar, uninteresting ways.

Eric Stolze’s script scores early points for the manner in which it nibbles around the edges of something darker, drawing a viewer in by hinting at reasons for this and that. It’s invested in all the human relationships to a heartening degree, and the film’s good performances (particularly Chasing Mavericks‘ Jonny Weston and young Gattlin Griffith, who have a very good rapport) are aided by heightened arguments (“You don’t get chances, you earn them!”) that really feel like honest extensions of legitimate parental frustration rather than telegraphed, plot-point conflict.

But somewhere in its second act the wheels pretty much come off for Under the Bed, and the less-is-more approach eventually yields to a more-is-more tack, wherein characters indiscriminately start getting their necks snapped and heads popped off, seemingly if for no other reason than to showcase the movie’s effects budget. Composer Ryan Dodson’s obliges these yawning instincts, bending from intriguing moodiness to conventionally clamorous aural declaration. And Miller’s direction, heretofore so artfully restrained, sags to indulge in flat, schlocky stagings of typical horror mayhem. In the end, Under the Bed doesn’t pay off its set-up in deeply rewarding fashion. Still, it confirms a certain talent in Miller and his cast, when they’re given shaded, interesting material with which to work. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (XLrator Media, R, 86 minutes)

An unsettling, forthright drama about a man falsely accused of sexual child abuse, Danish import The Hunt is anchored by a painfully haunting turn from Mads Mikkelsen. Drawing from the McMartin Preschool scandal in Southern California, and similar cases of child abuse hysteria across the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, co-writer-director Thomas Vinterberg fashions a darkly gripping tale in which presumed guilt spreads like a virus, engulfing an entire small town.



Having recently lost his job as a secondary school teacher, the divorced Lucas (Mikkelsen, above) is also locked in dispute with his ex-wife (Anne Louise Hassing) over visitation rights with his teenage son, Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm). Still, Lucas has a lot of things going for him, including his best friend and next-door neighbor Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). Working at a kindergarten to make ends meet, he takes up a relationship with Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), and seems a hit with almost all the young kids, including Theo’s daughter Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), who takes a particular liking to him.

One day, however, Klara makes a disturbing accusation, saying that Lucas showed his genitals to her. The school’s principal (Susse Wold) oversees an interrogation with a litany of leading questions, and quickly determines not only the veracity of Klara’s statements, but that there were other victims as well. Lucas is drummed out of school and ostracized by almost all those around him. Attempting to “prove” his innocence, however, is a difficult task. Later, physical violence is visited upon both Lucas and also his son.

Rather than mightily juice things up in the name of drama, though, Vinterberg, working from a script co-written with Tobias Lindholm, mostly aims for a maddening mundanity — maddening, that is, in the sense that Lucas suffers this plight more with sadness and confusion instead of howling his innocence from rooftops. This tack works because The Hunt is so carefully modulated — and because of Mikkelsen’s superbly put-upon performance, which throws a light on Lucas’ inner anguish in a way that a dozen declamatory monologues cannot.

At times there’s a certain tension that creeps to the surface — viewers will want Lucas to lash out, to be more proactive or throw around righteous indignation. And while it’s true that there are moments marked by curiously little pushback, a more assertive stance is at odds with the story that Vinterberg wishes to tell. His 1998 film The Celebration dealt with a family’s secrets and lies, but The Hunt is more explicitly about the latter — and the daisy chain of consequence that can spread from the unverified embrace of vague accusations.

Vinterberg’s film forces an (at times uncomfortable) identification with Lucas upon its audience because he wants to make a statement about not only human fallibility, but also a greater social responsibility. The Hunt‘s eerie, ambiguous ending, which embraces our core decency and highlights the power of forgiveness while also showing the lasting stains of abusive mistrust, marks the movie as an uncommonly thoughtful, and thought-provoking, entry in the social-issue drama subgenre. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 111 minutes)

A deeply affecting indictment of the aquatic theme parks that build tricks-and-splashes family shows around captured and bred orcas, Blackfish introduces viewers to a parade of rueful SeaWorld trainers who share stories that are decidedly at odds with the misinformation and scrubbed-clean tales peddled by park owners. In charting the existence of one popular but troubled killer whale, Tilikum, it also makes a clear and easy case for the unique intelligence and majesty of these behemoth creatures — and the moral dubiousness of their current treatment in captivity.



Blackfish, which enjoyed its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is in some ways a whistleblowers’ tale, and in other ways a murder mystery — albeit a “whydunit,” or the unraveling of the aftermath of a corporate cover-up, rather than a conventional whodunit. First and foremost, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film is well-researched; a series of comprehensive articles by Tim Zimmermann from Outside Magazine were her launching point, and Zimmermann even came on board as an associate producer. So there’s a factual, chronological backbone here that makes it easy and compelling to track and follow, no matter its considerable emotional punching power.

But Cowperthwaite is also incredibly savvy about the manner in which she structures her movie. It opens with warm recollections from a litany of trainers, who detail how they landed their jobs (there’s far less marine science experience or background required than one might expect) and began work with dolphins, sea lions and killer whales. From there, Blackfish gets more specific in telling the story of Tilikum (above), who was captured in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1983 at around two years of age. It tracks his (sadly, deadly) stay at Sealand of the Pacific, where in 1991 he was responsible for killing trainer Keltie Byrne, on through to his sale to SeaWorld Orlando, where — with trainers there kept in the dark as to the whale’s involvement in Byrne’s death — he would eventually fell veteran trainer Dawn Brancheau.

Given this loss of life, the story is obviously tragic from a human perspective, but the manner in which Blackfish interweaves these disasters with the parallel troubling story of Tilikum’s care (there are zero recorded incidents of killer whales ever attacking a human in the wild) is what makes it such a heartrending affair. Without getting bogged down in endless minutiae, Cowperthwaite deftly drops in damning details from a legal case against SeaWorld brought by OSHA, intercutting all of that with a variety of vintage SeaWorld television commercials that, in their juxtaposition, put a creepy and slightly unnerving spin on the company’s family-friendly image.

Given its watery setting, the most obvious antecedent to Cowperthwaite’s movie is the Academy Award-winning The Cove, which called attention to the mass killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, as well as, more broadly, cruel and otherwise suspect measures in that country’s fishing practices. But Blackfish also underscores one of the more lasting and salient points of fellow documentaries like Project Nim and One Lucky Elephant, which is that not all animals have it in them to be domesticated as pets. Certainly humans have the capacity to keep them as such, and dependent animals, needing food and water, will bend their behaviors to accommodate. But for a variety of reasons, including social strata we don’t understand and other needs we can neither measure nor fully grasp, there are higher-functioning creatures for whom captivity creates a profound emotional turbulence and depression.

Undeniably, the film has an agenda, and to the extent that its effective punches land on a hardened chest, one may wish for greater push-back or clarification from SeaWorld as to certain matters. (Voices of dissent are included, though their arguments seem to be around the edges, and in the end not much in the way of substance.) If it’s a hit piece, though, as detractors would argue, it’s of a broken-down system that doesn’t have an adequate defense for itself in the modern world. The incredible inner turmoil and conflict that these trainers possess — the people who worked with the orcas most closely, and to the extent that they can be “known,” knew them most intimately — speaks to this.

A heartbreaking, gut-punch work that doesn’t come by its feeling through cheap manipulation, Blackfish is designed to open eyes and change minds, and it does just that. For anyone who cares about animals, or ever has been on or is considering a vacation to SeaWorld or a similar aquarium, this film is a true must-see. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Blackfish opens this week in New York City and Los Angeles — the latter exclusively at the Landmark Theatre — before expanding nationally in the following weeks. For more information on the film, and to view its trailer, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia, 83 minutes, PG-13)

Filmic evidence of both mankind’s folly and its boundless capacity for thrill-seeking still connected to the natural world, Storm Surfers, presented in 3-D in select theaters but also available in regular 2-D, offers up a look at surfing legends and best friends Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones. Narrated by Toni Collette, somewhat ironically for such a Fire in the Belly-type work, this gorgeously lensed affair is one part “Redbull cinema” (okay, maybe one-and-a-half) but also one part fraternal rumination, buoyed by the maturity and rootedness of its subjects.

Storm Surfers unfolds in and around Australia, homeland to the aforementioned pair. With the assistance of surf forecaster Ben Matson, Carroll and Clarke-Jones track and chase giant storms in their effort to ride some of the biggest and most dangerous swells in the Pacific Ocean, dropping in via jet skis. Co-directors Justin McMillan and Chris Nelius do a good job of blending their film’s action footage with interview segments talking about inner motivations and the like, although from a certain perspective Storm Surfers could use a bit more familial mooring. When Carroll talks about he and Clarke-Jones, both well into their 40s, passing through the stages of life together, with “wives and kids and all that,” it begs the question: wait a second, where are they again, and what exactly do they think of what you do?

The film’s visual bona fides, however, are never in question; its cinematography is exquisite, providing you-are-there thrills by putting viewers right inside the barrels of waves along with its subjects. Cameras are mounted actually on the surfboards and jet skis, and the directors make use of helicopters (already part of the safety and oversight crew) to provide aerial perspective. At the third annual International 3-D Awards, Storm Surfers picked up the Outstanding Achievement in Documentary prize, besting Katy Perry: Part of Me and the James Cameron-produced Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, among other movies.

Its specificity may preclude certain general audiences from seeking it out, but Storm Surfers does devote time to cultivating a message that resonates beyond the X-Games subset. Find your bliss, it tells viewers. Such pursuits fill up the soul. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Storm Surfers opens in Los Angeles at the Chinese 6 Theatres, but also enjoys an exclusive two-night run at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, July 20 and 21. To view the movie’s trailer, click here. (XLrator Media, unrated, 95 minutes)