Once again proving that being original isn’t necessarily synonymous with being good, Cassadaga flirts with conventions of both paranormal horror films and more traditional serial killer thrillers. The independent production, a debut at Screamfest two years ago, aims to be a more character-rooted chiller, but it mainly ends up just being a boring slog.

Ostensibly named for a real-life small Florida community of mediums and spiritualists, Cassadaga centers around Lily Morel (Kelen Coleman), a post-lingually deaf artist and teacher who, following the untimely death of her beloved younger sister, is trying to pick up the pieces of her life and move on. When she meets Mike (Kevin Alejandro) the handsome father of one of her students, Haley (Rachel DuRose), things seem to be looking up. After Lily participates in a séance and ends up making contact with the vengeful ghost of a woman murdered long ago, however, things take a turn for the worse, leading to a killer who likes to turn his victims into human marionette dolls.

Writer-producers Bruce Wood and Scott Poiley succeed in keeping some of the more tawdry, base-level instincts of genre filmmaking at bay, and for a while that makes Cassadaga seem classy and intriguing. But despite its potentially intriguing backdrop, their script also seems desultory, marked by listless characters and indistinct dialogue. From the moment welcoming landlady Claire (Louise Fletcher) says to Lily, “That’s my grandson Thomas — he keeps to himself on the first floor…”, Cassadaga springs a slow leak. The rest of the movie is one big, long deflating, marked by a few moments of menacing violence.

With his mannered, non-exploitative take on the material, director Anthony DiBlasi succeeds in delivering a film that stands in distinct opposition to the clamorous, boo-scares editing of a lot of horror product. And yet despite this, Cassadaga still somehow manages to build to a scene of Lily running through the woods in a negligee, plus… sigh… a car chase.

Coleman is an attractive and sympathetic enough presence, but can’t hold viewers’ attention through long fallow patches. There’s simply not enough meat on this film’s bones, narratively speaking, to merit broader, general audience interest. Opening this week in top regional markets, including in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, Cassadaga is also available across VOD platforms. (Arch Distribution, R, 111 minutes)

An admirable if wearyingly muddled attempt to throw a spotlight on one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, documentary Men at Lunch loses sight of its lede and fumbles away viewer interest.



“Lunch Atop a Skyscraper” was first published on October 2, 1932, during the throes of the Great Depression. Its photographer was unknown, as were its 11 subjects — anonymous figures against a misty Manhattan skyline, inclusive of Central Park, stretching out behind them. The picture was taken during the construction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 57 stories up in the air.

To this day the photo, which could only have been taken during this era, remains striking for a variety of reasons: the composition itself, the view from 850 feet up in the air, and of course the casual indifference of laborers for whom this habitat, and its inherent dangers, is second nature. The picture seems to capture and deeply embody something unique about the American spirit and work ethic, about steadfast, punch-the-clock commitment and reliability even during times of considerable hardship.

Director Sean O Cualain’s film coughs up a few definitive nuggets of information — debunking rumors of the photo being a fraud, but confirming it was very much a posed shot — and then chronicles in fitful fashion a 2003 New York Post contest and other some subsequent efforts to identify the subjects. Men at Lunch tries to thread a needle in too fine a fashion, being both an investigation and a homage to the ethnic immigrant class who would fundamentally change the face of New York City and the nation over the first three decades of the 20th century.

Some of the information about iron welding and construction at the time (developers would factor in a loss rate of one worker per every 10 floors) is interesting. But it’s not very well developed, and O Cualain and editor Daithi Connaughton have little sense of how to smoothly interweave their parallel narrative tracks, simply tossing out investigatory dead ends as random facts here and there, rather than involving viewers in the process. Men at Lunch would be better served solely pursuing one function, no matter its lack of conclusivity. As is, it feels like a mystery that its makers got halfway into examining, found out some other folks had done work, and ceased or modified their own efforts. It’s not a movie worthy of “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.” The picture itself says more than Men at Lunch. (First Run, unrated, 66 minutes)

Science fiction, as a genre, has for a generation-plus been largely laboring in the long, cold shadows cast by 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Runner. There have of course been other films that swung for the fences, mixing entertainment with grand metaphorical statement, but the most interesting of those efforts were often low-budget gems that seemed to stand in opposition to the narrative preferences and demands of the Hollywood studio system. The default big-budget position has, for many years, been to figure out a way to introduce aliens and/or other mass-scale disaster — to inject enough action mayhem to hedge bets on the science fiction elements.



Filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a game-changer, both for the genre itself and Hollywood filmmaking on the whole. Starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as a pair of astronauts whose mission suffers a catastrophic disaster, the movie is a state-of-the-arts showcase for some amazing special effects work, but first and foremost just a minimalist stunner and a master class in cinematic tension — pulling viewers into the infinite and unforgiving realm of deep space in a manner never before captured on the big screen.

Clooney plays rakish veteran mission commander Matthew Kowalsky, while Bullock is specialist Dr. Ryan Stone, a medical engineer on her first shuttle mission. Their spacewalk, and Stone’s installation of a special software upgrade, are interrupted by a belt of debris from a destroyed Russian spy satellite, which obliterates the shuttle and sends them spiraling out into blackness, tethered to nothing but one another. With no radio contact to Earth, the pair try to come up with a patchwork plan to make their way to a safe harbor.

Co-written by Cuarón (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men) and his son Jonas, Gravity eschews any Earthbound set-up or backstory, throwing its audience directly into the vast expanse of outer space. The resultant story is lean and sinewy, but notable as much for what it’s not as for what it is. While Gravity‘s disaster sequences are as gripping as any you’ll see all year, the film is chiefly gratifying as an exploration of the intense feelings attached to such incidents. As with J.C. Chandor’s forthcoming All Is Lost, Gravity is shot through with concomitant awe and despair over ultimate human insignificance in the face of nature and the universe.

Making deft use of unnerving silences as well as a gripping score by Steven Price, Cuarón and his behind-the-scenes team (including cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, a frequent collaborator) craft the rare Hollywood movie that earns the distinction of its 3-D and IMAX presentations. In most films, there’s the occasional instinct to pull off one’s 3-D glasses, to see how images look around the edges, without augmentation; there’s never a moment that sort of thought passes through one’s mind during Gravity. This is an immersive masterwork. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 90 minutes)

Documentaries rarely spawn sequels. And yet five years after Herb & Dorothy, a fascinating look at an elderly New York couple who over several decades amassed a massive, world-class collection of minimalist and conceptual art despite their modest means, here’s a follow-up to director Megumi Sasaki’s nonfiction film about both the place of art in modern life and its broader relationship to the proletariat. It’s too cruel to call the pleasant, milquetoast Herb & Dorothy 50×50 pointless or boring, but in truth it does feel defined more by its inessential nature than any of the updates it provides.

For years, married Brooklynites Herb and Dorothy Vogel lived in a single-bedroom apartment on the latter’s salary as a librarian, while using the former’s earnings as a postal employee to collect thousands of pieces of art. In 1992, though their collected works were now worth millions of dollars, they donated their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. Sixteen years later, a national gift project called the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States was conceived. The simple idea, since their collection was too large to ever exhibit at one location, was to bequeath works to museums and art galleries across the nation. Having lived as public servants, the Vogels wanted to share their love of art with citizens across the entire country.

Herb & Dorothy had the advantage of surprise, certainly, serving as an introductory snapshot of the Vogels, two characters fascinating in their ordinariness. And yet that movie also had an important hook, forcefully promulgating the theory that art was meant to be lived with, and essential to a meaningful, well-rounded and intellectually stimulating life. Herb & Dorothy 50×50 would seem ready to plumb that same terrain (after all, what is the very idea of “50×50” but an extrapolation of that philosophy), but while the film does feature some interviews with patrons of the museums that receive the Vogels’ art, Sasaki doesn’t pursue that concept aggressively enough.

Instead, the movie just kind of wanders to and fro, spending time with the Vogels as they travel to various museum installations (Herb, increasingly silent and in poor health, would pass away last summer), querying grateful artists about the Vogels’ status as benefactors, and chatting up equally appreciate museum directors who talk about how they frequently wouldn’t otherwise be able to bring such notable works to their galleries. It lacks a cogent spine, as well as a lot of emotional punch. There are ways a more visually oriented filmmaker could have endeavored to bring the Vogels’ collection to life, but Sasaki eschews the hunt for any inner fire, and the result is a minor chord cinematic riff that lives and dies, moment to moment, by a viewer’s predetermined level of interest in and familiarity with the source material. (Fine Line Media, unrated, 86 minutes)

An indefatigable, forward-leaning concoction, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 breathlessly mimics the adolescent playtime, anything-goes sensibility of its predecessor, but can’t recapture the essential magic of 2009’s inventive children’s book adaptation, one of the more purely enjoyable animated films of the past five years. Directors Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn take over for originating helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who each take executive producer and story credits, and while Cloudy 2 is undeniably the product of massive collaboration (it’s even billed as “another film by a lot of people” in a pre-title card), Lord and Miller’s unifying touch and oversight are sorely missed. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, PG, 95 minutes)

A lot of nonfiction films of the social activist strain peddle scattershot panic or unfocused, call-to-arms rhetoric in lieu of taking the time to properly root down into a particular issue, present compelling characters or craft throughlines of a deeper and more sincere engagement. However well intentioned they might be, they fan the flames of discord, attacking those promulgating different opinions as backwards, uninformed or worse.

GMO OMG, which explores the loss of seed diversity and the rise in the genetic manipulation of food, is thankfully not one of those films. Directed by Jeremy Seifert, this bighearted, family-centric effort has no small amount of skepticism about the dubious efforts of companies like Monsanto and others to patent the building blocks of life (and sue out of existence the farmers that would deign to oppose them) but it’s powered by an honest curiosity rather than a completely predetermined agenda. Recognizing that minds are changed as much through the heart as a litany of facts, GMO OMG manages to provoke important self-reflection in viewers. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. GMO OMG opens in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema before expanding to various Laemmle theaters; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Submarine Deluxe/Natures Path/Compeller Pictures/Heartworn Pictures, unrated, 91 minutes)

Eschewing shaded characterization and often basic sense, and establishing what should be the high-water mark for most crotch-grabbing in a single film in 2013, Battle of the Year drapes a pro forma narrative over lots of acrobatic hip hop dancing. It’s not a good film, necessarily, but director Benson Lee, drawing inspiration from his 2008 documentary Planet B-Boy, at least crafts a vehicle that establishes a certain sub-cultural milieu and delivers what viewers most predisposed to movies like this are most interested in. Unfortunately, the script is utterly lacking in interesting characters, it awkwardly shoehorns in a bunch of product placement, and it then works its way through choices ranging from misguided to risible — like having dancing cure a character’s homophobia. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 109 minutes)

A disappointingly scattershot, sigh-inducing comedy from the creators of Reno 911!, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, Hell Baby represents a slog through improvisation run amok. A horror comedy that doesn’t make hay out of lampooning the genre (which is totally fine), Garant and Lennon’s joint feature directorial debut seems downright allergic toward anything that might be construed as a legitimate throughline, lest that somehow be interpreted as “selling out,” and not subversive enough.



The story centers around Jack and Vanessa (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb), a married couple, expecting their first child, who move into a possibly haunted and certainly rundown house in an unsafe borough in New Orleans. There’s a weird dude, F’resnel (Keegan Michael Key), living in a crawl space in their home who tells them about all the murders committed there; then a grotesque old lady, Mrs. Nussbaum (Alex Berg), appears out of nowhere and sexually assaults a confused Jack, who fights her off, apparently killing her.

While this puts two inept detectives (Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer) in Jack and Vanessa’s orbit, the former also begins to wonder if his wife — who’s taken to spiking his drinks with paint thinner — may have forces other than just prenatal stress acting upon her. Garant and Lennon, meanwhile, portray Vatican exorcists dispatched by Rome to, like, solve a mystery of in-utero evil or something.

Hell Baby is “just” a comedy, sure, but there’s simply not a lot of tension, discipline or consequence to the story, really. It’s just a bunch of lowest-common denominator wankery, without any sort of unifying aesthetic. (Even “dumb” generally coalesces around a couple central ideas.) It doesn’t help that it’s 70-plus minutes before Jack learns that Vanessa is possessed, but even when she slashes his stomach (offscreen, weirdly), there’s no immediate escalation of action. Editorially and structurally, the film is a huge mess, which makes its 94-minute running time often feel interminable.

Garant and Lennon‘s movie is also characterized by a screenplay that embraces digression, and scorns backstory. The latter is fine, but the tangential asides and other comedic indulgences herein don’t have the same warped silliness of something like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore or Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, which I underestimated upon its theatrical release. When Hell Baby descends into one of its extended superfluous riffs — Po Boy sandwich eating montages, group puke fests or juggling babies — it feels like a stalling technique as much as anything else. (And speaking of gratuitousness, as Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie, Riki Lindhome pops up to make a run at 2013’s Most Consecutive Seconds of Screen Nudity crown.)

The sad thing is that Hell Baby has some fine, funny folks in it. The array of familiar faces may make one want to take a flyer on this proudly oddball offering, but the curses you’ll be left uttering at the end won’t be of delight. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)

The story of the planet’s most famous cosmologist, told for the first time in his own words and by those closest to him, documentary Hawking is an engaging, inspirational portrait of as unlikely an iconic figure as the last half-century has produced. If modern celebrity culture values glamour, sexiness, vitality and youth — or, failing that, healthy dollops of tawdriness and puffed-up confrontation — British-born scientist Stephen Hawking is the antithesis of those qualities. And yet, beginning in the 1970s, he managed to drag physics and related topics into the popular discourse.

Directed by Stephen Finnigan, Hawking chronicles its subject’s incredible journey from childhood to PhD candidate, scientific genius and bestselling author. Though known worldwide in his wheelchair-bound form, Hawking, now 71, actually enjoyed a full and normal childhood with his siblings, and this film sketches out that adolescence in fanciful, winning fashion. Diagnosed in his 20s with a motor neuron disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS), Hawking was given only two or three years to live; though he’s beaten the odds to live a long and full life, his condition is a degenerative one, and it’s robbed him of speech and almost all movement (apart from a few muscles in his cheek) over time.

Among Hawking’s scientific breakthroughs are the idea that black holes emit particles of radiation, and a cosmological singularity that finds union in the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Hawking, though, scales these monumental breakthroughs in science in a very human way. Part of this has to do with the way that Finnigan cannily interweaves interview segments with a variety of subjects — former students and contemporaries, plus caregivers and Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde — along with tastefully staged re-enactments that capture the feeling of moments.

Hawking’s droll sense of humor pokes through often as well. Recounting the onset of his disease, he says, “I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner.” Later, describing the emotions attached to scientific breakthrough, he says, “There is nothing like the ‘eureka’ moment when you discover something no one has known before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”

The dual spine of the film lies in Hawking’s commitment to crafting a mainstream-accessible tome about physics and the Big Bang Theory — which he did with A Brief History of Time, which would go on to sell over 10 million copies — and his rather easy embrace of celebrity (surprisingly, even Jim Carrey pops up). The latter, for better or worse (it cost Hawking at least one of his two marriages), can be viewed from several perspectives, depending on one’s level of cynicism. But the love that Hawking has outwardly manifested, and indeed radiated, in pursuit of asking the big questions about life and solving the difficulties of the universe’s creation have a broader lesson and application. As Hawking himself says near the film’s end, “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and excel at.” Hawking opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. (Quad Cinema/Vertigo Films/Film 4, unrated, 94 minutes)