Its title conjures visions of mythological battle or perhaps a questing journey, but the story at the core of the animated family film Epic is actually a much more familiar, environmentally-friendly tale. Centering on a teenage girl who gets shrunken down to a couple inches and must then band together with a whimsical set of characters in order to protect a surrounding forest, Epic takes aim mostly at the lowest-hanging fruit of entertainment, and achieves serviceable delight around the edges. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 102 minutes)

For a work that sold fairly poorly upon its 1925 publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — perhaps the original American #RichPeopleProblems novel, about misplaced male ambition and romantic longing, and the perils of female drivers — has enjoyed a remarkable afterlife. It remains, of course, a staple text of high school reading lists, spawning along the way a Broadway play, no fewer than four television iterations, film adaptations in 1926, 1949, 1974 and, now, director Baz Luhrmann‘s own interpretation, a glitzy Jazz Age cocktail starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The tale unfolds in flashback through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a would-be writer who in 1922 arrives in New York City, lands a job on Wall Street, and takes a rental cabin across the bay from his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering, blue-blooded husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and next door to the mansion of a self-fashioned and enigmatic young millionaire, Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio). Daisy and Tom live in “old-money” East Egg; Gatsby is nouveau-riche, and throws all sorts of lavish parties in West Egg. What is initially unknown to Nick, but becomes quickly apparent, is that Gatsby and Daisy used to have a fling, prior to his going off to war, and he’s taken up residence at precisely that location so that he might gaze longingly at the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s pier. When Gatsby uses his burgeoning friendship with Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy, infidelity, heartache and tragedy ensue.

Working in a mashed-up, 3-D Art Deco fantasy world, Luhrmann (working with his longtime production/costume designer and offscreen partner Catherine Martin) brings a pinch of the same “jukebox musical” sensibility he impressed upon films like Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. Ergo, Gatsby‘s assault-on-the-senses opening party scene may cause no small amount of bewilderment, with its Jay Z-assisted soundtrack that ranges from tweaked hip-hop and organ-inflected original compositions to a pumped-up version of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Given the reverence accorded most period pieces, The Great Gatsby takes a while to get into. Once one does, there’s a pleasant groove that lasts for a nice spell, but the movie never catches fire as something special.

It imparts the fizzy decadence and all that, and sounds the cautionary notes of achieving the material American dream. In many respects, though, Luhrmann’s re-imagination doesn’t go far enough — it’s a colorful mile long, but about an inch-and-a-half deep. For all the artifice and stylistic overload, certain sequences seem slavishly close in their design and staging to previous big-screen adaptations. Others, crucially, fail to crack the nut of the most difficult hurdle of the novel’s adaptation — its deeply interior qualities.

Purely in terms of its scope, The Great Gatsby offers up enough eye-candy to keep from getting boring. But while there are lots of jaunty uses of “old sport” (Gatsby’s exclamation of choice) and arguably a thin, shimmering ribbon of homoerotic fascination, the film doesn’t dig into the core of what it is that attracts and binds Nick and Gatsby to one another, and their relationships with idealism. There’s the nagging problem, too, of the fact that Daisy is such a spineless cipher and a fairly terrible person — an unworthy object of held obsession for our protagonist. (There’s only one mention of the daughter she shares with Tom, too, and a single brief sighting of the young girl at the film’s end, which is another issue.)

The performances range in quality. Carraway is ostensibly the audience’s guide — both within and without of the world he inhabits, but Maguire, with a perpetual expression of wood-carved wonderment, conveys nothing so much as himbo, go-with-the-flow presence. There’s not enough substance to carve out a contrasting commentary on self-reliance. DiCaprio fares better, by degrees. He’s played a number of wing-ding assholes (Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can comes to mind), and is fast cornering the market on rich, insecure and intensely private men of power (J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes). So he has the affected mannerisms and clenched cheeks (both sets) of besieged and at times nervous entitlement. The problem is that some of his choices lean toward the obvious. A perfect illustration of this is the scene in which Gatsby goads Daisy into telling Tom she never loved him (it’s not enough to have re-won her heart), only to be undone by a blow-up. DiCaprio’s seething anger and resentment is all surface emotion, which, when contrasted with Robert Redford’s icy demeanor in Jack Clayton’s 1974 film version, only highlights its failure to tap into Gatsby’s deep well of neediness. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 143 minutes)

A companion piece to fine art photographer and director Deborah Anderson’s book project of the same name, Aroused is an uncommonly intelligent nonfiction exploration of the inner lives of 16 women in the adult film industry. This type of hybrid endeavor is hardly a novel concept — see also Michael Grecco’s scatterbrained Naked Ambition and David Palmer’s slightly more successful America Stripped: Naked Las Vegas, which cast a wider net by looking at “regular” (i.e., mostly non-adult industry) folks posing for a nude coffee table book — but Anderson’s effort has an easy, unforced quality to go along with its acuity, keeping prurience at arms’ length and allowing the humanity and vulnerability of its subjects to come through.



Anderson’s interviewees span different levels of professional experience, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s — including Alexis Texas, Allie Haze (above), Katsuni, Lexi Belle, April O’Neil, Ash Hollywood, Belladonna, Brooklyn Lee, Misty Stone, Francesca Le and more. Almost all have something to contribute as they discuss how and why they got into pornography to begin with, but perhaps most interesting is Kayden Kross, who intriguingly posits that a lot of girls find their way into the adult industry not because they’re damaged per se, but owing to “not having a father or others around to disappoint” in their lives — and that a lack of those front-line barriers helps make the seemingly tough or daunting decision much easier.

Anderson sprinkles her film with the sort of requisite interstitial title cards of attributed quotations one might expect from a self-consciously serious work (“In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it’s a fact” – Marlene Dietrich, and “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting” – Gloria Leonard), but, crucially, Aroused has the brains to back up any puffed-up sense of importance that might seep through its seams. Anderson is obviously a sympathetic and solid interviewer, but equally important and insightful to her chats with the assembled porn stars is her well-integrated conversation with Fran Amidor, an industry talent agent who offers up smart observations unencumbered by judgment.

Aroused digs into the psychology of its subjects, but, rather curiously, apart from a standalone anecdote from Teagan Presley, doesn’t really address the body modification (be it breast augmentation, other plastic surgery and collagen injections, or something as simple as tattoos) rampant among women in the adult industry. “Would-have-been” weather girl Jesse Jane talks about not getting into the sex trade until she was 22, and even waiting to lose her virginity until she was married (of course, that was at age 17…), while other interviewees speak candidly about assuming a different persona on camera, life on set in general, the difficulties of making relationships work with significant others (or “civilians,” as Stone dubs them), and more.

The film has great production value, too. Anderson has an active camera — the latter half of the movie unfolds in a series of extreme close-ups and suggestive tracking shots — but also has clearly thought through a visual framework that abets a certain emotional narrative arc. Early on, as the women get ready for their photo shoots in make-up chairs, Aroused is lensed in black-and-white, and tracks more or less along the lines of biographical or general interest questions. At the mid-way point, as the movie shifts to its boudoir setting where she coaches them through her photo shoot, Anderson makes a switch mostly to color — embracing a style that reflects some of the more intensely personal musings. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Aroused is also available on iTunes and across several VOD platforms. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Ketchup Entertainment, unrated, 69 minutes)

Crackerjack popcorn entertainment done overwhelmingly right, Iron Man 3 is a robust example of what Hollywood can do right when it puts its mind to it — bringing tremendous resources to bear upon a larger-than-life story, entrusting it to smart, capable people, and turning them loose with fully invested confidence. A fun ride brimming with nice character details that fit together in comfortable and occasionally savvy ways, writer-director Shane Black takes over the franchise reins with a breezy aplomb, delivering a movie packed with both thrills and amusement.

But the performances here are highly enjoyable (in addition to the regulars, young Ty Simpkins scores highly as Harley, a kid whom Stark befriends), and the rakish Iron Man 3 accomplishes the rare three-quel feat of actually leaving you wanting even more from a franchise. (Disney, PG-13, 129 minutes)

The story at the core of this curiously directed and somewhat misleadingly titled documentary — an adaptation of Peter Bergen’s excellent, bestselling book — is an innately fascinating one. Unfortunately, as either a primer on America’s terrorist takedown infrastructure or a megaphone for the insights of the (many female) analysts who helped untangle the ambiguity of information in aid of that cause, director Greg Barker’s messy Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden, premiering May 1 on HBO, doesn’t forcefully connect, and as such remains a frustrating viewing experience.



The story of the ALEC Station group — the first CIA team tasked with finding bin Laden, formed in 1995 — is an engrossing one, and the putative leaping-off point for this nonfiction inquiry, whose strongest selling point may be the array of direct interviews with these former intelligence analysts. The regret and guilt is evident on the officers’ faces as they recall the weeks following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, for which they were suddenly “responsible” in the words of many pundits outside of government and several voices within it — even though their clear warnings about bin Laden had either gone largely unheeded and/or lacked operational intel. There was a “foundational change in organization” post-September 11, of course, and sharing information rather than compartmentalizing it became the de facto governmental position.

Bergen’s book, while comprehensive, is far from unwieldy, even as it chronicles bin Laden’s rise from his tangles with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan up through bombings on the USS Cole and American embassies. The movie version of Manhunt, on the other hand, is a thicket of distracted impulses, themes and half-litigated theses. While analyst interviewees like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, as well as Marty Martin, the former senior CIA case officer in the Middle East who became the day-to-day manager of the organization’s worldwide operations against al Qaeda, give Manhunt an undeniable insider authenticity, the movie ping-pongs from an early, 1990s study of Al Qaeda (quite interesting) to the terror attacks and the CIA’s embrace of black site foreign prisons (“Let’s just say boutique locations,” says one subject), before alighting back on Bergen and Peter Arnett’s March 1997 CNN interview with bin Laden, in which he first formalized his declaration of war on the United States.

Other parts of the film cover CIA analysts moving on to work as “targeting officers” in various war theaters (Nada Bakos, for instance, heads to Iraq, where she spends so much time hunting brutal Al Qaeda in Iraq emissary Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that soldiers jokingly start referring to him as her boyfriend). There’s trenchant analysis buried amidst these competing threads, as when retired Army General Stanley McChrystal says of the United States in general, “We haven’t taken the time to not be blind, deaf and dumb in areas of the world that matter to us.”

But Manhunt can’t decide if it wants to tell a history of Al Qaeda, the story of the overhaul of the American security and spying apparatuses post-September 11, the story of the enhanced interrogation/torture debate and American foreign policy adventurism more broadly, or just the Abbottabad OBL raid. The success of the book — distilling the essence of each of these strands, and connecting them — proves too difficult a lift for Barker, who employs a couple empty directorial tricks to try to enliven a graphic depiction of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, but doesn’t winnow his sources effectively. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against anyone watching Manhunt. But there are also better resources — starting with Bergen’s tome, and inclusive of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty — that chronicle the search for bin Laden from 2001 until his death. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 102 minutes)

Unfolding in the urban slums of India, documentary The Revolutionary Optimists attacks the notion that where one is born should alone determine their prospects for health and happiness. If Whitney Houston’s soaring voice once awakened a populace to the notion that children are our future, The Revolutionary Optimists again highlights the fact that the best chances for change lie not in the simple rescue of adolescents, but in empowering them to become agents of change.

The movie centers on Amlan Ganguly, an ex-lawyer and the charismatic founder of Prayasam, a Kolkata-based NGO. Known as “Dada” to all the kids of the neighborhood, Ganguly pushes and cajoles them, demanding that they help work for better futures. He’s up against some difficult and troubling statistics; 12 percent of children ages five to 14 in India work, and 47 percent of girls are married by their 18th birthdays. These and other factors contribute to a deficit of hope, a tamping down of aspiration levels, Ganguly admits.

Co-directed by Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen, The Revolutionary Optimists doesn’t quite wrestle to the ground a more focused dramatic through line; in focusing on the lives of several kids, it’s sometimes rather unclear in marking time or elucidating consequences, which impacts its connection a bit. But neither does the film ever lose its capacity to casually shock or move a viewer, as when Ganguly shares with the children that he was raped by a family caretaker when he was six years old. It’s a stunning moment, rendered more amazing by Ganguly’s explanation of how he used that terrible moment to focus his life. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie itself, click here to visit its website. (Shadow Distribution, unrated, 85 minutes)

Rocker-turned-writer-director Rob Zombie has, in a fairly interesting and definitely surprising manner, carved out a certain multi-media genre niche for himself, spinning off horrific visions both original (The Devil’s Rejects) and adapted (his Halloween remakes). His latest film in some ways seems like a no-brainer, the type of easy-fit movie Zombie could churn out every 18 months or so if he desired. In it, a Salem, Massachusetts radio deejay starts having strange flashbacks of her town’s violent, witchy past after receiving a mysterious record addressed to her at work. Could it be… Satan?! Or maybe just some of his minions?

Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, again serves as his leading lady, playing Heidi, the obligatory shot of estrogen alongside morning zoo radio show partners Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman (Ken Foree). After a guest, author Francis Mathias (Bruce Davison), appears to discuss his latest work, said package arrives. On its heels follow entrancing visions, as well as a couple increasingly awkward interactions between Heidi, her landlady Lacey (Judy Geeson), and her landlady’s friends, Megan (Patricia Quinn) and Sonny (Dee Wallace). After that, more ominous stuff happens, and the bodies start accumulating.

Zombie, as one might expect, has a nice sense of aural construction. The metronomic bass thump of the tune which puts Heidi in a trance is mesmerizing in its own way; Zombie also sneaks in some classical music as well. The Lords of Salem, too, is definitely a movie of considerable production design (hat tip to Jennifer Spence), insofar as its nightmare sequences pack a to-scale punch of jangly, unsettling discomfort.

But while Zombie trots out a few interesting and provocative premises (“A lack of sensory pleasure is the principle root cause of violence,” intones the TV in the background in Heidi’s apartment), he fails to fully chase down and wrestle to the ground any of these themes in an engaging or meaningful way. Instead, The Lords of Salem basically just works its way through very familiar notions of rekindled pagan idolatry and evil. The movie charts a weekly timeline, but there’s not really much of a ticking clock driving the plot, so its swan-dive into arbitrariness from the second act on is fairly complete.

The best of Zombie’s big screen efforts have a sense of leering, organized chaos — of merrily depraved yet finely calibrated manipulation. The Lords of Salem, though, feels… well, tame isn’t the right word. Zombie exploits the history of the Salem Witch Trials a bit, but not in quite as wild and memorable a manner as one might expect. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

As an avowed, no-nonsense peddler of cinematic excess, director Michael Bay would in some respects seem to be the ideal candidate to bring to the big screen the deliciously weird and over-the-top true crime story at the center of Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson. Unfortunately this down-and-dirty air-quote character piece, a florid and casually misogynistic action dramedy that marks Bay’s least expensive production since his debut film, comes unglued early on, and then spends two hours-plus thrashing about wildly, to only middling effect. Madly trading off rambling voiceover narration from character to character, like a relay race baton, Pain & Gain takes the tale of a group of brutal yet idiotic criminals and twists it into a series of hyper-masculine poses masquerading as some sort of statement on the new American dream. It’s like Bottle Rocket by way of Savages, but not really in a good or interesting way. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Paramount, R, 129 minutes)