With the proliferation of online pornography, the advent of “sexting” and the ever-present synaptic connection of social media, sexual maturation and in particular notions of womanhood are changing for adolescents and twentysomethings. Sexy Baby, an inquisitive and engaging new documentary from Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus, attempts to sift through this mass media assault and shifting mores, to determine the toll this seeming increase in titillation is taking on America. In addition to its iTunes and VOD availability, Sexy Baby opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, visit its website and/or Facebook page. (Area 23A, unrated, 83 minutes)

Provided one submits to its base level of intentional ridiculousness, there’s some wacky charm to be found in the low-budget, somewhat awkwardly titled 3,2,1… Frankie Go Boom, a comedy of fraternal bickering that hinges on scrambled efforts to squash a leaked sex tape. A bawdy conceit worthy of Judd Apatow gets a madcap spin by way of Get Shorty in writer-director Jordan Roberts’ self-financed affair, a choppy collection of character-based sketch ideas that’s elevated by a talented, game cast.



The Los Angeles-set film aims to wring laughs chiefly from putting its title character (Charlie Hunnam, of Sons of Anarchy) through the wringer. When his older brother Bruce (Chris O’Dowd, of Bridesmaids) graduates from rehab, their parents (Nora Dunn and Sam Anderson) guilt Frankie into coming home and seeing him for the first time in years. Frankie still stings from shame attached to years-ago Internet infamy, when would-be filmmaker Bruce posted a humiliating wedding video online. History repeats itself after Frankie hooks up with the recently jilted Lassie (the delightful Lizzy Caplan), but initially fails to achieve an erection. Bruce’s “artistic” ambitions get the most of him, and his surreptitiously recorded sex tape falls into the wrong hands. Escalating insanity ensues, as Frankie and Bruce turn to the latter’s prison pal Phil, now transsexual Phyllis (Ron Perlman), for assistance in removing the video from the Internet.

Roberts’ movie feels a bit less like a cogently plotted narrative and more like the product of an over-caffeinated bender following the injected enthusiasm of a gung-ho, DIY screenwriting class. It’s all about energy, and forward momentum; even the dialogue isn’t so much concerned with the traditional patter of set-ups and jokes as it is winding up its colorful characters and having them play off one another, their agitation stoking fires of shocked amusement. But Roberts’ cast tackles the material with gusto, and squeezes out from it a lot of fun. Perlman and Caplan are particularly lively and memorable, and Whitney Cummings and Chris Noth — the former as Bruce’s editor/jock-warmer, and the latter as Lassie’s deranged dad — also have some delicious scenes.

Most big screen comedies exist on either a laid track of genteel hamminess or cynical misanthropy, which Frankie Go Boom eschews. Everyone in this movie is a bit unhinged and damaged — even its putative protagonist, who can’t establish proper boundaries that would enable him to move on with his life. It’s not at all a naturalistic or even moralizing film, wherein capital-L lessons are learned, but in its own way Roberts’ movie makes the point that family relationships are often so uncomfortable and potentially toxic because they afford us the opportunity — and almost oblige us — to slip back into old roles and exhausted power dynamics, where bad habits and choices exist. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 88 minutes)

An earnest and deeply personal exhumation of proverbial skeletons in the family closet, director Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat is nonetheless deadly dull — a movie that churns up yards of speculation in delving into the intertwined history of a married Jewish couple and their strange, rekindled, post-World War II friendship with some German counterparts, but with increasingly diminishing returns.

When Goldfinger’s 98-year-old grandmother passes away, he and his family descend upon the Tel Aviv apartment she and her husband shared for decades, since immigrating from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Sifting through a dense collection of letters and bric-a-brac, Goldfinger begins to uncover clues that point to a much more complicated family history than he could have guessed. His grandparents, it seems, were friends with Leopold von Mildenstein, a man with connections to the SS prior to the war, and possibly even Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine later on. Seeking to understand how deep Mildenstein’s Nazi connections really ran — and how much of his history his grandparents and Mildenstein’s own family knew — Goldfinger delves into old letters and press archives, tracking down friends and colleagues of the aforementioned parties.

Documentaries as personal histories are of course widespread. Plenty of movies, from Stevie and The Devil and Daniel Johnston to Capturing the Friedmans and even the recent Photographic Memory, have delved into painful and shocking pasts, or addressed at least tangentially the manner in which time and distance tend to cleave from one’s memory the more unpleasant aspects of some particular recollection. The Flat, though, feels curated by the most dispassionate theme park ride operator of all time. It’s devoid of catharsis, or indeed any real feeling at all; it’s perhaps aptly titled, in that regard. Though narrated by Goldfinger, it lacks much in the way of emotional response to any of its investigation.

Ergo, vague and scattered notions or even scraps of evidence remain crucially unconnected, contextually. There is an objectivity here, and a kind of scrupulous demonstrative remove that invites very intellectualized analysis of human denial (late in the film, there’s a too-brief interview with a psychologist that touches on this topic), but it robs the film of any sense of cresting momentum or investment. The Flat is damned by its own incuriosity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 97 minutes)

In David Lynch‘s trippy, 1997 neo-noir psychological thriller Lost Highway, Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison explains his aversion to video cameras thusly: “I like to remember things my own way.” When pressed for a further explanation, he offers, “How I remembered them — not necessarily the way they happened.” For documentary director Ross McElwee — whose films have almost always been reflexively autobiographical, delving into his familial relationships and ancestral connections — it’s almost the opposite. His memories have, for years, been filtered through first his photographs and writings, and then his ever-present camera lens, to the point that even he begins to question how real, or accurate, some of his memories actually are.

The vehicle for this reflection is the beguiling, homespun Photographic Memory, triggered by some early-onset empty nest syndrome and domestic struggles. Attempting to make peace with the surliness, technological addiction and emotional waywardness of his 20-year-old son, McElwee decides to retrace some of his own footsteps from when he was around the same age, and spent a year abroad in France. The result is a delicate, mesmeric rumination on family, memory, the necessary growing pains of young adulthood, and the sloping banks of generational chasm that will always exist.

We first glimpse Adrian McElwee as a youngster, cavorting about with his younger sister. McElwee frequently filmed his kids growing up, and they used to love it. Now, despite his interest in becoming a filmmaker and/or graphic artist, Adrian is tired of his father’s looming lens; he’d rather hang out with friends, blow off school, smoke a bit of pot and film himself doing extreme ski tricks. Narrating his frustration, McElwee tries to channel and focus his son’s energies, while also dolefully noting certain behavioral similarities to his own adolescent wanderings.

McElwee deftly intercuts this story — of all the poking, prodding, hoping and cajoling attached to his son — with his own journey back in time, and a set of conflicted emotions that arise. Traveling back to St. Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, France, for the first time in almost four decades, the filmmaker tries to track down his first employer, a photographer named Maurice, as well as Maud, a woman with whom he had a brief but memorable romantic liaison.

On the surface Photographic Memory may sound simple, or irretrievably blinkered and personal, but McElwee has a self-awareness, sharp sense of observation and droll wit to boot that easily locates the universality of the material. McElwee’s film is honest about the sort of parenting mistakes born of trying to protect his son from himself, as well as wry articulations about the deep but tested roots of unconditional love (“Teenagers often don’t realize how protected they are from strangulation by the memories of smaller versions of themselves”).

If all that sounds a little too ethereal, Photographic Memory is also just a great little travelogue mystery, with the filmmaker subject’s twangy, Carolina-infused French, in his efforts to find Maurice and Maud, matching the uniquely accented sheer entertainment value of Werner Herzog’s nonfiction self-narration. So does McElwee locate these people from his past? Or are his memories of their time together, and reasons for parting, at all reliable? And what lessons might he learn from all of this travel in dealing with his son? McElwee makes movies to assay the human condition and try to sort things out for himself. This is another good one, full of both answers and questions, feelings and wonder. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (First Run, unrated, 87 minutes)

Using Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz’s found-footage horror flick Grave Encounters as a self-referential leaping-off point, Grave Encounters 2 gathers up a head of loose-limbed steam and bundles it up in a rather impressive technical package, but ultimately fumbles it away on a story that buckles under the weight of layered self-consciousness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 98 minutes)

A sweet-natured and loose-limbed coming-of-age tale that delivers by way of its smart, sympathetic performances and an accumulation of telling details, actor Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules the World, tells a simple and familiar story, but one with not inconsiderable emotional purchase. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Outsider Pictures/Arc Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)

There may not be a more important documentary released this year for the general health of especially sports-playing American kids than Head Games, director Steve James’ impactful look at the trauma inflicted by repeated concussions. Using Chris Nowinski’s November 2006 book of the same name as a leaping-off point, the film digs into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) and its longterm links to memory loss, early-onset dementia, depression and even suicide.

Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, knows of what he writes and speaks. After his professional wrestling career was cut short from the lingering after-effects concussion, he went on to research and write his exhaustively footnoted book, and eventually co-found the Sports Legacy Institute with Dr. Robert Cantu, in reaction to a new crop of medical research showing brain trauma to be both a latent and booming public health crisis. Nowinski was at the forefront of some of this research, too, convincing the families of a handful of recently deceased athletes to donate their brains for scientific study.

Owing to the fact that the NFL is where the story broke and played out, after the 2006 suicide of ex-Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, Head Games devotes about the first half of its 91-minute running time to professional football before cycling through progressively less time devoted to NHL hockey and soccer — as funneled through the perspectives of former player Keith Primeau and Olympic medalist Cindy Parlow, respectively — and, essentially, a third act-as-closing argument. Nowinski shares his own experiences, as does his best friend and college teammate, while New York Times writer Alan Schwarz walks viewers through the unfolding story from his perspective.

Still, Head Games isn’t just a jeremiad or hand-wringing assault on all physical activity, though. While the brutal collisions of football get the most attention, James (Hoop Dreams) uses the articulate Nowinski and others to sketch out a timeline of changing dynamics, and how research can hopefully be used to foster better concussion diagnosis, and perhaps even develop better equipment. Smartly, the director doesn’t overload his movie with voices; the doctors number no more than a half dozen, and this tightened focus benefits the material.

The first-person testimonials of the aforementioned ex-athletes carry a lot of significance as well, and give the movie sympathetic heft. Parlow talks about suffering from chronic headaches during her career, and even now always leaving on her car’s GPS guidance system, even on familiar streets. The grander importance of Head Games — what makes it a movie that isn’t just about a problem in professional sports — lies in how James also spotlights the competitive drive of various kids playing these sports, often with less equipment and certainly with less medically informed training and supervision than their sports idols. Late in the film, one doctor estimates that around 15 percent of even one-time concussion sufferers endure persistent cognitive dysfunction. Darkly, plenty of viewers might leave Head Games wondering if why they can’t find their car in the parking lot has some connection to all those Pop Warner football games years ago. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Variance Films, PG-13, 91 minutes)

If the key to girl-next-door romantic comedy appeal is said to lie in an actress’ aspirational qualities, then the same is true of another subset of comedy embodied by Kevin James, whose stocky physicality but surprising grace with it feed an affable, self-effacing demeanor that serves as a pleasantly embraceable stand-in for legions of weekend warriors with anecdotes of past athletic glory and romantic prowess. Conventionally plotted but bighearted, crowd-pleasing teacher-turned-fighter tale Here Comes the Boom serves as James’ most well-rounded starring vehicle to date. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG, 104 minutes)

A thunderously stupid horror movie of slapdash construction and ping-pong tonalities, Smiley builds its narrative around the notion of a viral video serial killer who’s summoned by way of a specific web chat incantation. Impressive only for its ability to chase unlikeliness and viewer frustration down an ever-increasing rabbit hole of bewilderment, director Michael Gallagher’s motivation-free genre exercise is populated with characters who, when not busy exhibiting the decision-making and inner emotional landscapes of 12-year-olds, are pantomiming the same age group’s mindset of adults and scariness — all ideas which they’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis.



College freshman Ashley Brooks (Caitlin Gerard, possessing a nice smile and beatific presence) is still recovering from the suicide of her mother just a year earlier, but becomes fast friends with Proxy (Melanie Papalia) when she moves into an off-campus house with her prior to her first semester. Proxy takes Ashley to a party where she introduces her to a bunch of anonymous users of a message board she frequents. These include alpha male Zane (Andrew James Allen, getting his “acting” on), who flirts seemingly by talking up his interest in “the intersection of the strange and the retarded,” as well as Binder (Shane Dawson), a meek kid bullied and kicked out of the party ostensibly for flagging inappropriate content like child pornography.

Against the ongoing backdrop of a reason and ethics class taught by Professor Clayton (Roger Bart, coming the closest to escaping this mess unscathed), Ashley and Proxy decide to test out the urban legend of Smiley by typing three times “I did it for the lulz,” which sounds like something a stoned, kitten-loving Limp Bizkit fan would have dreamed up circa 2000. They then witness a murder, and soon other members of their little group are felled as well. Fearing that her fragile sanity is unraveling, Ashley reaches out at various points to Proxy, Zane and Binder, trying to get to the bottom of this brutal killer.

The script for Smiley, by Gallagher and Glasgow Phillips, is a hodge-podge of clichés and nipped bits from many other horror movies, from The Ring and Bloody Mary to the Scream sequels. Its handling and portrayal of the average twentysomething’s relationship with technology is frequently silly, and its efforts to achieve notional topicality by way of basing its story around a Chat Roulette-type website already feel dated and lame. The movie tries to paper over all these deficiencies by way of spurious leaps in logic and some half-hearted mumbo-jumbo about the Internet achieving a greater consciousness (“From The Terminator, like Skynet — or like Neo!”). All other shortcomings (of which there are many) and red herrings are “solved” by a lazy, post-modern twist that feels cobbled together like a Mad-Lib.

Smiley is a movie of obviously limited budget and resources, but its failures run much deeper than that. The result leans on jump-scares and sound design in an attempt to summon some small modicum of dread or tension. On a purely visual level, the actual character of Smiley — with stitched shut eyes and a carved jack-o-lantern grin — is creepily effective, not unlike the striking slasher Chromeskull of a couple years ago, from Laid to Rest and its sequel. But everything about Smiley is nonsensical, derivative, or both — right down to an air-quote shocking ending that then tries to leave room for ambiguity or a sequel but only further undercuts the stupid narrative choices made by its makers. Leave this turd alone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Fever Productions, R, 90 minutes)

No, this is not the story of a crayon-obsessed kid and his plot to nourish and grow seedlings of Stubhub’s “Ticket Oak,” alas. A rangy coming-of-age drama based on Marianne Fredriksson’s Swedish book of the same name, Simon and the Oaks spans a couple decades in telling the story of an outcast adolescent of partial and secreted Jewish heritage growing up amidst the considerable political and social turmoil of World War II. Arthouse appreciation for this attractively photographed recipient of 13 Guldbagge nominations, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, will depend on a given viewer’s tolerance for broad-strokes melodrama of intertwined fates that lacks the ambition and emotional complications of many similar screen works.

Simon and the Oaks is directed by Lisa Ohlin, and there’s no doubt that the film’s technical package is a solid one. The cinematography and score are both superlative, and the film never feels phony or even less than entirely authentic in its period piece detail and evocation of a bygone era. The acting, too, is solid, giving the movie a collection of many strong, self-contained scenes.

It’s just that the sum is less than the whole of its parts, since the film continuously opts for narrative forward movement rather than a deeper exploration of motivations and feeling. Ohlin’s film is beautiful, but John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas — both its 2008 cinematic adaptation, and the original source material — remain stronger evocations of Jewish-rooted World War II drama, the early intrusion of “the dark hour of reason” upon adolescence, and the dramatic consequences thereof. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Simon and the Oaks opens this week in New York City at the Paris Theater and in Los Angeles at the Landmark, expanding nationally from there. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Film Arcade, unrated, 118 minutes)

Middle of Nowhere may have a nondescript title, but the skill of its staging is anything but pedestrian. An intimate, confidently directed and superbly acted humanistic drama that is utterly at home in the subtle push-and-pull of long-standing family arguments and tensions, the Los Angeles-set film casts a long spell — not unlike the recent For Ellen — through its beguiling maintenance of melancholic mood.

Written and directed by publicist-turned-filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and released via a distributor, African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, that she helped co-found, Middle of Nowhere focuses on Ruby (the wonderful Emayatzy Corinealdi), a bright medical student who puts her dreams on hold and suspends her career when her husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) lands in prison — hopeful that he can be released early for good behavior, after five years of an eight-year sentence.

Four-plus years later, as an important parole hearing looms, Derek seems more than a little ambivalent about a return to domestic normalcy. Against the backdrop of a pair of complicated relationships — with her sister Rosie (Edwina Findley), a single mother, and their own mom Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint) — Ruby is forced to stare past some of the walls she constructed to convince herself of her marriage’s solidity. She also meets Brian (David Oyelowo), a bus driver who seemingly offers her a stability and presence that Derek cannot.

DuVernay picked up Best Director honors at the Sundance Film Festival for the movie, and it’s easy to see why. The film’s plotting is familiar, and a couple of its gambits tired (the moment where the phone call of a daughter is briefly mistaken for that of another love interest), but there’s a lyrical quality to the direction, and the movie doesn’t attempt to distill Ruby’s contradictory emotions into neatly parceled, clear and direct motivations.

Much of Middle of Nowhere, DuVernay’s second film, is naturalistic in its own way, but cinematographer Bradford Young shoots in a muted fashion that underscores the movie’s melancholic, deeply interior vibe while not calling attention to itself. The result is earnest without being cornpone, slight without being simple, and beautiful without being overly adorned.

Corinealdi’s performance, an utter revelation, has a lot to do with this connection. She headlines a cast who captures, in smart, affecting and concise strokes, the inner restlessness and not easily articulated regret of characters fumbling toward an emotional equilibrium. Middle of Nowhere is an honest and moving account of some of the tough decisions that face those left on the outside when a loved one goes to prison — and when the not-yet-extinguished dreams of a life they wanted are commingled with a sense of shame over what their life actually is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (AAFRM, R, 104 minutes)

A contemplative, puzzle-box anti-thriller of the sort that seemingly only the French now make (even though it’s adapted from an American novel by Douglas Kennedy), The Big Picture is an artful if overlong drama that connects chiefly as a compelling vehicle for star Romain Duris. To call it understated is its own special sort of understatement; this is a film-as-character-study, but also one that hovers drone-like over its subject rather than digging in for deep psychological insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Pictures, unrated, 114 minutes)

A best-selling author, lifestyle coach and proponent of Eastern medicinal practices, Deepak Chopra is known to and beloved by millions. Of course, he’s also just a man — and a sometimes distant and curious one to his son, Gotham Chopra. Decoding Deepak, then, is a documentary devoted to unraveling a bit of the myth surrounding the public figure, as the younger Chopra follows his father for a year, chronicling his brokered ordainment as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and subsequent book tour for a fictionalized autobiography of Muslim prophet Muhammad. Smart, warm-hearted and inquisitive, it digs into one of the under-examined (and ongoing) difficulties we all face — recognizing and understanding our parents as actual people, and not just a mom or dad.

Chopra recognizes and respects his father’s intelligence and drive, but his relationship with him is also leavened by skepticism, and a certain disconnection from what he eventually characterizes as Deepak’s insatiable hunger to be relevant on a grand scale. Like any son or daughter, he’s frustrated when his father thinks he has nothing left to learn, and he sketches out the contours of their relationship thusly: for engagement, follow him into his work, and listen to him talk about… whatever.

A lack of something to say is certainly not a condition normal to Deepak, who is adept at elegantly phrased, bite-size morsels of wisdom, and a master of wrapping philosophical poetry around terrible moments of human despair or depravity. In Gotham’s view, his father can turn “any mundane question into a talking point for a book,” so ripples of an understated adolescent longing for more personal connection come bubbling to the surface by way of his innocent needling of his dad over the lack of his books at a train station kiosk (“You’re not as popular as The Secret“) during a trip to India.

The film doesn’t quite crack the ineffable remoteness of its subject, but it is humanizing. The portrait that emerges is an interesting and engaging one — of Deepak as a perhaps deep but also innately restless thinker, not a phony, really, but a spiritually-minded guru who also enjoys many of the material pleasures of life. He’s a man of contradictions, like us all. This is always why he can be seen as pondering the big questions of life, while still obsessed with both his Blackberry and a contentious Nightline debate with professional skeptic Michael Shermer from months earlier.

As a kind of well-captured travelogue, Decoding Deepak is of course quite specifically about its namesake subject, but it also has a much wider reach and sense of reflection and purpose than that. The film actually shares a good deal in common with Doug Block’s superb, little seen 2009 documentary The Kids Grow Up, and Agnès Varda’s slightly better known The Beaches of Agnès, both of which were highly reflective nonfiction self-portraits refracted through the lens of modern parenting, and by degrees about the difficult but necessary notion of evolving familial relationships. If life is about answering but a few questions and the process of discovering more and more with which to grapple, Decoding Deepak suitably captures that. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, and to view its trailer and information about its availability on VOD platforms, visit its website by clicking here. (Snag Films, unrated, 74 minutes)