An odd little duck of a film, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s If I Were You kicks around enjoyably for quite a while in the same sandbox as some of Woody Allen‘s mid-career farces, before eventually pivoting and skipping off into less rewarding territory. The story of a woman who accidentally learns of her husband’s infidelity and then enters into a strange friendship and pact with his unwitting mistress, this bouncy but meandering comedy would benefit from an editorial haircut that trims down some of its less inspired subplots.

It’s a shock for New York City focus group and marketing manager Madelyn Reid (Marcia Gay Harden) when she stumbles across her husband Paul (Joseph Kell) one afternoon in a restaurant, in a lover’s clinch with his mistress. When he gets nervous and scampers off after an exploratory phone call from her, the young woman, a would-be actress named Lucy (Leonor Watling), is despondent and hysterical. Madelyn follows her back to her apartment, where she foils a bungled suicide attempt.

When her unsuspecting rival opens up to her, Madelyn at first sees an opportunity to seize the upper hand. But Lucy, stressing their shared unhappiness, suggests that they start making choices for one another (“The way to fix our lives is to stop making our own decisions!”). Madelyn slowly accedes, and trips into a contemporized production of King Lear when she accompanies Lucy to an audition. Hijinks ensue, wouldn’t you know — with Madeyln lying to Paul about an affair she’s not having, Paul getting jealous about a co-worker of Madelyn’s whom he believes to be the offending cuckolder, and a handsome and affable stranger, Derek (Aidan Quinn, quite good), popping up at a moment of crisis.

It’s not merely the introduction of the King Lear gambit that makes If I Were You easy to imagine as a stageplay; it’s a fairly hermetic story, with lots of talky one-on-one or small couples scenes. This tack works for a while, but a sense of claustrophobia eventually sets in, aided by the movie’s lack of compelling visual vocabulary. It’s a low-budget offering, understandably, but Carr-Wiggin and cinematographer Bruce Worrall deliver a flat telling, and Aidan Leroux and Sean Breaugh’s spare production design offers little by way of distinguishing features.

If I Were You‘s abundant early charms are built largely around the amusing interplay of the distraught, distracted Harden and the deliciously flighty, simple-minded Watling. But several subplots — including one with married co-worker Keith (Gary Piquer), who’s enthusiastic about Paul’s infidelity, figuring it opens up the door for he and Madelyn to have a fling — aren’t as amusing as Carr-Wiggin imagines them to be. A far tighter focus, and re-imagination of the piece as basically a three-hander, would have given it greater punch and pay-off. As is, If I Were You is only worth a look for hardcore fans of the talent involved, or indie comedies of existential crisis more broadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. If I Were You opens in select theaters nationwide, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. (Kino Lorber, R, 115 minutes)

Horror has always been a popular format for anthologizing, both because of its DIY roots and the fact that certain kernels of elemental discomfort often don’t quite rise to the merits of a full-length story or movie. A massive anthology film rooted in those children’s educational books from days of yore, producers Tim League and Ant Timpson’s The ABCs of Death corrals 26 short movies from 26 different directors — assigning each a letter of the alphabet and then giving them free reign in choosing a word (or phrase) to encapsulate a story involving death. It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but one that never fully congeals or takes flight, owing to the vast qualitative spread of the offerings.

A natural (and popular) selection at both last year’s Fantastic Fest and the Toronto Film Festival, The ABCs of Death features a number of known or critically anointed young genre directors, but also as much as anything serves as a hand-up showcase for young talent. That experiential diversity is reflected in the breadth of the work. Some entries are under-sketched while others, like Jon Schnepp’s aptly named WTF!, are stylistic orgies of pointlessness. Many, like Noburo Iguchi’s giggly-gross Fart, actually have a comedic bent.

Of the spread, though, seven were by my count passably entertaining, and only around five others truly superlative. The cream of the crop share a penchant for experimentation — the lifeblood of short-form film and video. Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s heady, gorgeously shot, investigational Orgasm leaves a mark upon one’s memory, as does Simon Rumley‘s grim Pressure, a slice of kitten snuff porn. Srdjan Spasojevic’s Removed tantalizingly hints at something deeper, while Xavier Gens’ deeply unsettling XXL presents a fat girl’s self-immolation. The best effort, though, may just be Marcel Sarmiento’s slow-motion Dogfight — a twisted, how’d-they-do-that rendering of an underground death match between man and dog.

It sounds perhaps racist to say, but The ABCs of Death could have perhaps benefited from a few more Western voices. A number of entries dote in yawning fashion on weighted topics that are familiar psycho-sexual stand-ins (Japanese schoolgirls, female body taboos), while others — with Nazis, and a girl with a tattoo of the exploding Twin Towers on her breasts — seem designed for empty shock. This compilation lacks some great genre minds, and overall pales in comparison to other recent anthologies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, R, 129 minutes)

Cop thrillers are ubiquitous, but it’s fairly rare to see a movie that takes as its primary focus other emergency responders. That novelty is but one of several factors that help distinguish and elevate The Call, an enjoyably nerve-racking thriller of imperilment that takes as its heroine a distraught 911 call center operator. Solid performances by Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin abet a rigorous, smart packaging from director Brad Anderson.

If much of the enjoyment of The Call is not necessarily in what happens so much as how it happens, the movie still imparts good, popcorn-level tension and thrills. Further adding to its differentiation, The Call also delivers a nice end twist that isn’t so much a wild revelation as just a little spiky add-on of moral ambiguity. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking done right — stirred cocktail of tension, with the ability to also actually spark a conversation. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 94 minutes)

Language of a Broken Heart is exactly the movie that one expects it to be — a frustrating quality for some, perhaps, but smooth medicine for those who trust and like writer-actors’ puppy dog tales that unfold loosely in the vein of the work of Edward Burns. An earnest, uncomplicated and funny-around-the-edges little romantic comedy about a guy on the rebound but still stuck in psychological orbit of his ex, multi-hyphenate Juddy Talt’s movie works best as a showcase for his talents.

The story is paper thin, even by genre standards. Nick (Talt) is a best-selling author who can write eloquently about feelings and love, but can’t ever seem to find a woman that doesn’t cheat on him. (There’s some truth-in-therapy insights about his romantic picker to be tilled, but this isn’t that movie.) When his fiancée Violet (Lara Pulver) suggests a break after a dalliance with another man, Nick leaves New York City and heads home to reconnect with family and friends, including best pal Cubbie (Ethan Cohn) and his mom Mimi (Julie White). A luggage screw-up leads him to meet free spirit Emma (Kate French), who wears berets, shoots a mean game of pool and pushes Nick out of his comfort zone.

Emma is of course a total cinematic fantasy construct — the perfectly made-up girl with beaming white teeth and “dorky hip” glasses who, you know, also manages an unopened antiquarian bookstore she recently inherited from her grandmother. She’s fun-loving and “spontaneous,” and uses words like scallywag. And Nick, as written, isn’t necessarily much better developed; he’s kind of clueless, and a doormat, which doesn’t track with his professional success.

Still, just when one might be ready to either punch themselves in the head or the filmmakers in the nuts over the preciousness of said logline and description, it’s a pleasure to report that Language of a Broken Heart wins out — at least on the margins, for those predisposed to have an interest in laid-track rom-coms — by way of its way of its performances and interplay. It’s kind of nice that Talt doesn’t resort to slapstick-y hijinks or gross-out humor; his screenplay, however functional the characterizations, is at least rooted in the interactions and recognizably human frustrations of those characters. Oscar Nuñez, of The Office, contributes a funny supporting performance as Nick’s therapist, who’s undergoing his own divorce, and there are some smart little well-observed barbs, too, as when Cubbie, in only the manner a best friend can, takes the piss out of Nick by saying, “I read somewhere that depressions effects losers the most — that’s just science.”

Talt, who sort of recalls Owen Wilson by way of Chris Evans, is an appealing peg on which to hang Language of a Broken Heart, even if it is a well-worn jacket. And French is beautiful and appropriately, engagingly flirty. Apart from a nice time-lapse bit in Times Square, director Rocky Powell delivers a fairly straightforward and blandly shot interpretation of the script. There’s never a real suspension of disbelief here — one always knows they’re watching a movie. But it’s a popular track for a reason, so rom-com fans with an indie appreciation might enjoy just saying, “Play it again, Sam.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the movie’s trailer and more information, visit its eponymous website. (House Lights Media, R, 98 minutes)

Nope, the directorial debut of Jules Stewart, the mother of Twilight star Kristen Stewart, isn’t a flash-forward sequel to James Belushi’s K-9, or the tale of an exponentially high mountain range. Instead, the bewildering K-11, at once intense and archly presented, is a careening updating (send-up? celebration?) of women-in-prison exploitation flicks like Caged Heat. In his Hollywood Reporter review from its Turin Film Festival premiere, Stephen Dalton characterized K-11 as feeling like “a deranged John Waters remake of The Shawshank Redemption,” but a Lee Daniels re-imagination of a gender-indiscriminate Girl, Interrupted might be another appropriate shorthand descriptor of the movie’s looniness.

A pulpy, psychologically hollow and emotionally indiscernible mélange of phony jailhouse intrigue and showy gender-politicking, with a bit of anal rape sprinkled in, Stewart’s film is too ridiculous to be taken seriously and not tightly scripted and purposefully tongue-in-cheek enough to track as parody (behold the photo above). For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its 15-city theatrical engagements, including the Laemmle NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, K-11 is also available day-and-date across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Breaking Glass Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

The ghost of Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer who held the imaginations of television news producers captive for a week several weeks ago when he went on a rampgage, shooting several cops and their family members as part of a twisted statement of grievance, hangs over The Kill Hole, a well meaning indie drama of post-traumatic stress disorder and ex-military account-settling. Despite a fairly convincing evocation of mood by writer-director Mischa Webley, this spare yet affected would-be thriller never ripens past the point of a wobbly character study. It’s a half-developed Polaroid, and as such an artful yet shrug-inducing time-whiler. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (RBC Film Group, unrated, 92 minutes)

The United States of America is celebrated as the land of the free, and heralded as a place of great opportunity for entrepreneurs. While true, there’s also a dark grey lining to the silver optimism of that sunny-faced reading, because for almost every societal innovation that helps change and better the way we live, there’s some tale of an enterprising inventor getting screwed out of credit or otherwise left twisting in the wind due to corporate ruthlessness. The engaging documentary Genius on Hold details one such story, and if its attempts to weld a larger allegorical framework extending both backwards and forward in time onto a more structured familial narrative come across as rather hamfisted overreach, there’s still enough of interest here to generally satisfy alt-history buffs. It’s a movie that underscores that the winners and losers of some battles of capitalism aren’t always confined to a single generation; its shadows are long ones. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing/Top Cat Productions, PG, 91 minutes)

The title of Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey is somewhat misleading. An indulgently apportioned look at the classic rock band Journey and their recent reinvention with Arnel Pineda, a Filipino lead singer found through YouTube, director Ramona Diaz’s film takes what could and by all rights should be a fun, engaging fairytale story and stretches it out to near interminable lengths. Two parts shambling tour document and self-congratulatory biography for every one part cross-cultural coming-of-age story, the sporadically lively Don’t Stop Believin’ is all mic-ed up, but also all mixed up.

This is essentially a glad-handing fan project all the way, which certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world with a bit of clarity of vision. But Diaz’s film — which at 105 minutes could use more than just a little haircut — has no strong editorial point-of-view, and as such it drags and fumbles away one’s attention, like a song on repeat. Truly hardcore Journey fans may well greet it with open arms, but others will stop believin’ in its meaningfulness less than halfway through. (See what I did there?) For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its various, rolling theatrical engagements, Don’t Stop Believin’ is also available on VOD beginning today; for more information on both methods of viewing, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Cinedigm/Docurama Films, unrated, 105 minutes)

A documentary snapshot of American photographer Gregory Crewdson‘s decade-long quest to create a series of haunting, exactingly arranged, melancholic portraits of small town life, director Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a nonfiction affirmation of the latent sorrow and loneliness attached to certain surface images, and in its own way a quiet celebration of that almost telepathic connection. An example of narrowcasting through and through — Shapiro punts on a variety of ways to expand the canvas of his storytelling — the movie achieves a certain hold for those inclined toward psycho-social rumination, but by and large fails to connect its subject’s work to society at large.

Crewdson, perhaps best known, if at all, as the guy responsible for the print ad campaigns for Six Feet Under as well as Yo La Tengo’s album art, is an artist with a vision every bit as meticulous as filmmaker David Fincher. His photographs are essentially vast moviescapes crystallized into a single frame — at their core otherworldly moments of arrested time in the lives of the disenfranchised or quietly desperate, with a barely submerged drama lurking just underneath the surface. This sort of attention to detail helps explain the costs involved, which can often rival an independent film production, as well as Crewdson’s inclination for involving himself in every department of his crew.

Almost all of Crewdson’s work is done in the same small Massachusetts town, including his “Beneath the Roses” series, which Brief Encounters captures. A friendly if not quite effusive guy, Crewdson talks some about the impact of seeing David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (which has a similar interest in suburban decay), as well as the influence of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock too; though it evolves into something else, one of his photographs even takes Psycho as its leaping-off point. But these shared anecdotes have a certain surface-only quality. It would be interesting to hear more about Crewdson’s artistic inspirations, which seems to draw as well from Diane Arbus and Stanley Kubrick.

As the son of a psychoanalyst — he recalls laying on the ground as a kid with his ear to the floor of his father’s downstairs office, and that being a potent metaphor for his work now — Crewdson has a keen grasp of the myriad inner feelings and impulses that drive his photography, which can’t be said for all artists. He’s also open to discussing them (unlike, say, Lynch). But Shapiro seems to leave a lot of heavy or more probing questions unasked. Similarly, while some of the small town residents who serve as the subjects in Crewdson’s pictures are interviewed, it would give Brief Encounters a nice sense of contrast to further spotlight their thoughts and impressions about his work.

For those inherently interested in photography, and the relationship between images and human feeling, Shapiro’s hands-off tack more or less works. But, somewhat frustratingly, Brief Encounters also presents viewers with all sorts of unexplored side avenues. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, whose exclusive Los Angeles engagement takes place at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 77 minutes)

A lot of movies wash over you, and that’s OK, even — many are almost designed to. Others, however, cast a pall over your day, and stick to your bones. Alex Gibney‘s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is an example of the latter. One case of child sexual abuse is certainly a tragedy, but the stories at the core of this movie are beyond the pale. A gut-punch nonfiction look at the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal as filtered through the experiential prism of a group of victims from a single Midwestern school for the deaf, and their long quest for justice, the Oscar-winning Gibney‘s documentary takes what seems by now to be an almost depressingly proforma tale of outrage and humiliation, and connects the dots to a much larger and systemic international cover-up by the Vatican. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 107 minutes)

A terrifically fresh narrative backdrop and the often delightful interplay of two timing-savvy comedians, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, help give wings to director Paul Weitz’s Admission, an airy and engaging adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of the same name. Evincing a pleasant yet not too demanding sense of depth, this comedy of midlife awakening digs into issues of loss and love but in an ultimately comforting manner, resulting in a crowd-pleasing film that should connect heartily with slightly more adult audiences.

In seriocomic films like About a Boy, In Good Company and Being Flynn, Weitz has tapped into familial rediscovery via stories of adrift protagonists who either struggle with or feel outright that they don’t have anything to offer emotionally. Though shot through with a harried quality which feels like a bet-hedging surrender to the casting of Fey (this could easily have been her stab at Truman Show-type reinvention, if only the filmmakers would have had more courage), Admission slots comfortably in the aforementioned canon of Weitz, as a loose-limbed movie whose nominal sins are of omission rather than commission. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 106 minutes)

An achingly earnest immigration drama whose compelling low-budget artistic vision can’t save it from its overly programmatic dramatic roots and muddled assemblage, Dreamer is the sort of expressive indie film one wants to like and recommend more than one honestly does and can. A recent premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival, writer-director Jesse Salmeron’s movie is loosely in the mold of something like Chris Weitz’s well received A Better Life, from a couple years back — each film showcases the razor’s edge of life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send a hard-working but unfortunate person tumbling into criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise. The problem is, Dreamer isn’t as good, and poignant, as the macro story it’s telling. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Undocumented Productions, unrated, 91 minutes)

Somewhere deep inside The Last Exorcism Part II may lurk an intriguing idea for a character-based horror movie follow-up, but it never manages to quite tease it out. Ditching both the mock-doc framework of the original 2010 possession film (which was inventive but undone by some thunderously stupid editorial choices in the third act), as well as its flashes of dark humor, this technically efficient but wholly pointless follow-up fails to expand on its mooring mythology in as compelling a fashion as in something like the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (CBS Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)

It seems incongruous during a rampant obesity epidemic in the United States, the notion of around 49 million Americans suffering from “food insecurity” — not knowing where either their next meal will come from, or the money for it. But the smart and poignantly argued new documentary A Place at the Table, in assaying governmental farm subsidy policies and other social welfare assistance, casts hunger and obesity as neighbors, not distant and exclusive conditions separated by a yawning chasm. Engorged with feeling, this nonfiction tale leads with its heart, and successfully makes a persuasive case for social investments that offset future “up-stream” societal costs across a wide range of arenas.

Against a backdrop which has seen a 40 percent rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables over the past three decades, versus a 40 percent decrease in the price of processed foods, A Place at the Table puts in its crosshairs agricultural policies (including $250 billion in USDA subsidies since 1995) that underwrite the massive production of in particular corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar — the basic ingredients in many high-fat, high-sodium processed foods — but not other staple crops, or whole grains. It does this mostly by polite cajoling, though, rather than heated hectoring.

The film’s rhythms sometimes tip toward the sedate, and while co-directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson succeed in finding articulate and compelling interview subjects, they sometimes have trouble picking effective editorial pivot points and sharpening the spear tip of their arguments, making full sense of their case subjects’ situations. Still, with original music by T Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars, A Place at the Table aims to be a movie with more emotional punching power, which isn’t to say that it’s shoddily researched, just sensitive (perhaps a little too much so) to charges of wonky factorial overkill.

Not unlike Food, Inc., though, it shines a light on just the dispiriting degree to which so many — and especially so many children — are prisoners of a system in which the vast majority of the scope of their diet lies outside of reasonably expected mechanisms of their own control. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the more about the movie, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia/Participant Media, unrated, 86 minutes)

If superhero tales are our modern-day big screen myths, fairytale adventures like Snow White and the Huntsman and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters are attempting to run a certain zeitgeist side game, blending fantasy folk legend with a decidedly contemporary appetite for action swashbuckling, albeit of the sword-and-crossbow variety. Peddling pat celebrations of valor and perseverance, but marked by distressingly humdrum characterizations, director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer arrives as a piece of showcase entertainment for the continued advancement of in particular facial motion-capture, putting its characters through an effects-laden steeplechase that squeezes out some synthetic bedazzlement unattached to much in the way of deep or transportive feeling. Nicholas Hoult, so great in the recent Warm Bodies, acquits himself here, but he has chemistry with Eleanor Tomlinson that can be described as lukewarm at best. Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane and Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, seem hedged in by the prescribed functionality of their characters. All in all, Jack tames, rather than slays. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 114 minutes)

When Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction hit big in 1994, like an open-handed smack to the face of the film industry proper, its stylized noir plotting, fizzy mixture of violence and pop cultural dissection, and in particular its partite storytelling structure spawned a tsunami of imitators. Almost two decades later, that influence can still be felt, most recently in the form of writer-director Leone Marucci’s caffeinated, terminally bizarre The Power of Few. A New Orleans-set tapestral affair whose disparate storylines nominally coalesce over the course of one afternoon, this jumbled mash-up of conspiracy-tinged action and armchair philosophizing is offbeat and unique in some respects but hamstrung by a strange combination of slapdash plotting and its own self-importance.



To say that The Power of Few, produced by co-star Q’orianka Kilcher (above), revolves around the theft and smuggling of the Shroud of Turin — which is what a retired Larry King, playing himself, pops up to bloviate about in a couple televised segments within the movie — makes it sound a lot more interesting and exciting than it actually is. Imagine if, instead of race and socioeconomic class, Crash was set in the Big Easy and more wanly about hope and positivity, and then just had an occasionally mentioned subplot about a stolen religious artifact. Oh, and a few select characters using slightly futuristic technology, to muddy the timeline. Oh, and then the movie was open to fan casting, as well as online editing suggestions in post-production. That seems to be The Power of Few, basically — an independent film casserole in which a mess of ideas are erroneously declared to add up to one big one.

Needing some medicine for his baby brother, a teenager (Devin Gearhart) goes to a store, where he mulls plans to hold up the pregnant cashier (Moon Bloodgood). Dom (Jesse Bradford) is on the run from a couple of gang-bangers (Anthony Anderson and Juvenile) looking to silence him in advance of testifying against their friend, and he finds himself rescued by Alexa (Kilcher), a courier who could be the sister of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character from Premium Rush, except by way of Aeon Flux. While a couple of homeless pals, Doke and Brown (Christopher Walken and Jordan Prentice), serve as the piece’s informal Greek chorus, police agent-types Clyde (Christian Slater) and Marti (Nicky Whelan, giving nice tough-grrrl) zoom around town arguing about finding the “mark” and “package,” which may or may not be an item given to Alexa.

Wound up nicely to music by Mike Simpson, The Power of Few delights for a while simply because one doesn’t know quite what the hell to expect from it. When Walken isn’t obviously reading lines from cue cards about having once gotten his hair cut every 3,000 miles, pegged to his oil change, his other dialogue (“I could eat the ass of a low-flying duck”) just as frequently sounds like the jazz-riff improvisations of a Ron Burgandy acolyte — which kind of works, actually, since his character is supposed to be a former television news anchor. But Slater and Whelan, meanwhile, appear to be in some sort of Southland Tales spin-off, while Tione Johnson — in a small but crucial role as a candy-loving adolescent — seems purloined from some hypothetical Nicole Holofcener dramedy with Catherine Keener lurking just out of frame as an after-school care-giver stricken with white guilt. There’s no tonal consistency or unifying vision to Marucci’s work, in other words.

Cinematographer Reinhart Peschke delivers a grab-bag assortment of styles, which helps give parts of the movie an undeniable pop. But production designer Ren Blanco’s work at times feels chintzy, and Marucci doesn’t have the benefit or editorial vision of smart pivot points to help try to corral his hopelessly careening, free-form narrative. As a result, The Power of Few feels like at least four distinct movies fighting for control of the overall apportioned running time. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Steelyard Pictures, R, 95 minutes)