Nobody can push buttons of exasperation and pull levers of hair-trigger emotional reaction quite like family — those folks who know all of the faces of the past you’ve tried to shake and shed. That truth is borne out in Julie Delpy‘s witty, winning new comedy of relationships and culture-clash, 2 Days in New York. A nominal follow-up to 2007’s 2 Days in Paris, in which Delpy played the same character with a different love interest, this rather delightful romp eschews complicated plotting to instead luxuriate in and connect via a fresh, fun, wound-up energy all its own.



French-born photographer and artist Marion (Delpy) lives comfortably with her radio talk show host boyfriend Mingus (Chris Rock) and their two children from previous relationships. But on the eve of a big show — the centerpiece of which is a conceptual piece in which she’s offering up her soul for sale, for $10,000 — Marion gets plenty of extra stress when her family arrives for a visit. This includes her over-sexed sister Rose (Alexia Landau); her sister’s outrageous, weed-obsessed boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon), also one of Marion’s exes; and her merrily bizarre and gregarious father (Albert Delpy), who thinks showers “deplete the immune system.” Falling back into old patterns, Marion starts spinning out of control, and this new glimpse of craziness puts Mingus further on edge.

Delpy collaborated on the script with Landeau and Nahon — each of whom also reprise their characters from Paris — and it’s clear that their offscreen rapport informs much of the rapid-fire bickering and gussied-up misunderstanding that fuels the movie’s comedy. Yet Delpy’s worldview and tone — neurotic, but knowing — also echo a female Woody Allen by way of Lina Wertmüller, funky and funny without tipping over into tedium or speechifying. Much of this balancing act owes to her directorial style, which is light and playful throughout, incorporating photo montages and a bouncy score of her own composition.

The pairing of Rock and Delpy is also a true delight. It gives Rock a chance to stretch a bit and do something different while also playing to his verbal strengths. Mostly, though, 2 Days in New York simply provides a showcase for the unexpected mash-up of Rock and Delpy’s respective styles and rhythms. It’s the same premise, basically, behind Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell’s casting in Bewitched, except that Delpy’s loose-limbed, lived-in movie is actually funny. A couple days with this brood will put a smile on one’s face. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For a one-on-one Q&A chat with Delpy, meanwhile, click here. (Magnolia, R, 91 minutes)

In 2004 Jonathan Caouette made a film, Tarnation, about his tumultuous upbringing with his maternal grandparents and fractured, on-and-off-again relationship with his disturbed mother, Renee, who suffered from psychosis after undergoing shock treatments in her adolescence following a period of time being paralyzed. The movie became something of a media sensation for being edited on free iMovie software on a Mac and having a budget of only a couple hundred dollars (though subsequently brushed up sonically prior to a theatrical release), but it was no parlor trick. An intense and unsettling autobiographical bricolage, the movie had important things to say about psychological abuse and the familial legacy of mental illness.

Walk Away Renee represents Caouette’s follow-up to Tarnation, as it also centers around his 58-year-old mother, now living in a group home in Houston, diagnosed with acute bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. While partially framed around a 2010 road trip to bring Renee to an assisted living facility closer to him, in New York, the film is, more broadly, an achingly melancholic, fairly haunting and inescapably human document that shines a light on some of the less typically discussed dimensions of mental illness.

The mode of its telling conforms to Caouette’s collagist instincts, incorporating digital home video footage, large swathes of photo flashback montage, probing but casual conversational footage, and even a staggering string of answering machine messages from his mother that captures the wild swings of her many moods. During the road trip, Caouette — wearing under his eyes the bags of someone who’s had to spend a lifetime emotionally bobbing and weaving — deals with lost medications and seemingly ad hominem attacks. But what gives this material extra depth and resonance (whether or not one has seen Tarnation) is his skillful touch with tapestral downheartedness.

In a sense, Walk Away Renee is both a love letter and a break-up letter. It shows a deep bond between single mother and only son, but also the limits of this relationship, and the veritable chasm that mental illness represents between those struggling with it and those who love them. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To view the film online via VOD, click here. (Sundance Now, unrated, 88 minutes)

A generally agreeable but perhaps hopelessly meandering documentary snapshot of one young guy’s attempt to hit the road for 31 days and live off the alms of America’s new, digital age thrift store, Craigslist Joe isn’t the first nonfiction film to throw a light on the namesake popular classified advertising website, but it is the first to arrive with the imprimatur of executive producer Zach Galifianakis.

Departing Los Angeles with only $200, his laptop and bookbag, a cellphone, tooth brush and the clothes on his back (oh, and a cameraman, whom he of course met on Craigslist), Garner relies on listings — both his own, and those already on the site — for food, shelter and transportation. Via a couple ride-shares, he heads north, to Portland and Seattle, and then finally east, along the way trolling Craigslisted free events (charity gatherings, open-mic nights, breakdancing classes, Hanukkah celebrations) where he can mingle, grab a bit of warmth and try to find a place to crash for the evening.

Garner — who hatched the idea for his feature film debut while serving as an assistant to Todd Phillips on The Hangover — is a pleasant and engaging enough guide for this trip. And as a travelogue litmus test of human kindness, Craigslist Joe is satisfying entertainment, on a surface level. It warms the heart a bit, and certainly proves to be an emotional and enlightening experience for Garner. So watching him achieve some emotional fulfillment and growth emits small pulses of positive energy. But even on just a personal/psychological level the movie lacks a strong enough thesis, definition and stakes, and could benefit enormously from more direct-address confessionals. It doesn’t necessarily need the personality infusion of a chattering Morgan Spurlock, but Craigslist Joe does cry out for more of a sense of Garner’s state of mind during his actual travels.

Craigslist Joe isn’t bad, and will in fact prove quite enjoyable to those utterly bewitched by its mere conceit. But in terms of pure slice-of-life quirkiness, melancholy and Americana, Austin Lynch (David Lynch’s son) and his friends achieved more with Interview Project, a striking series of three-minute shorts they produced traveling across the country. With Garner’s film, one can’t help but feel that it’s also a case of a concept not quite completely cracked — a tech-age experiment entered into with more feeling than thought. For more information on the movie, visit its website. For the full, original review, meanwhile, click here to visit ShockYa. (CLJ Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

The Bourne series is that rarest of Hollywood commodities, a genre franchise with downhill, increasing commercial momentum and upmarket critical appeal. Swapping in Jeremy Renner for Matt Damon, and expanding the narrative playing field to tell a parallel story of intrigue and frightened governmental cover-up, The Bourne Legacy doesn’t miss a beat in doling out smart action kicks. It’s a fantastic piece of well constructed pop entertainment that has a certain air of erudite emotional remove, and doesn’t nervously or foolishly rush into revealing twists in order to satisfy or attempt to pander to impatient viewers.

Director Tony Gilroy had a hand in writing each of the previous Bourne films, and his chief value to The Bourne Legacy is as the architect of its expansive, chess board world. Abetted by the steely work of cinematographer Robert Elswit, the movie is of a piece with the other tony, slick, adult-market-minded films, Duplicity and Michael Clayton, on which Gilroy served as director. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 134 minutes)

Years ago, our minds warped by the spectacle of Dennis Rodman, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mickey Rourke appearing alongside tigers and exploding soda machines in Tsui Hark’s certifiably insane Double Team, a friend and I jointly speculated that Hollywood was on a path to ditching any semblance of narrative genre filmmaking and just releasing a movie called Tricks and Stunts. A feature-length indulgence of the same-named stunt spectacular, which used its MTV show in 2009 to spark a string of bestselling DVDs and, eventually, a live show in Las Vegas, Nitro Circus: The Movie 3D is pretty much a realization of that theory.

Using the latest compact camera rigs and other innovations in 3D cinematography, co-directors Gregg Godfrey and Jeremy Rawle provide viewers with bucket-seat and bird’s eye perspectives of much spectacle and mayhem as Travis Pastrana, the decorated freestyle motocross champion who co-founded Nitro Circus and still serves as one of its merry ringleaders, and his cohorts engage in all sorts of bike-, auto- and skate-inspired shenanigans. The roster of stunts includes purposefully flipping cars, ramped jumps into various bodies of water, back-flipping bikes over a chasm between two 60-story buildings, and trying to land an elusive double back-flip on modified tricycles amongst the mulch mountains outside of Pastrana’s Maryland home. For more information, visit the movie’s website. Meanwhile, for my full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Arc Entertainment, PG-13, 80 minutes)

A somewhat sloppy collection of relationship bits and shrewdly observed comedy of gender differences, the Los Angeles-based Celeste and Jesse Forever, which made its bow at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, marks the screenwriting and leading lady debut of Rashida Jones. A rom-com push that coasts along on the accrued goodwill of its game cast, this low-fi offering is built for the self-identifying embrace of mostly urban indie fans, but marked by a blend of sarcasm and end-game sincerity and life lessons that will strike other viewers as too cloying and calculated by half.



Celeste (Jones) is very career driven, the owner of her own media consulting firm, and the trend-analyzing author of pop culture book Shitgeist. Her best friend and husband Jesse (Andy Samberg), however, is less occupationally inclined. In their 30s, the couple has drifted apart — but only to a degree. Though they’re getting divorced, they still live together in a synchronized domestic routine. Their friends (Ari Graynor, Eric Christian Olsen) find this strange, and off-putting, but Celeste and Jesse swear that it works. Until, of course, it becomes manifestly apparent that it doesn’t. When Jesse breaks the difficult news that he’s gotten another girl (Rebecca Dayan) pregnant, it freaks Celeste out, and forces her to reconsider a decision that she previously found mature and progressive. Are she and Jesse meant to be together, or have they truly outgrown their relationship?

While Samberg is the more well known comedic performer, his presence is a bit of a head feint, for a good bit of the movie’s best comedy is actually bound up in Celeste-as-hot-mess shenanigans, as with Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl. Celeste and Jesse bogs down a bit when it shifts its focus away from the mechanics of its relationship dynamics, and tries to fold in life lessons for its lead character by way of Celeste’s professional acceptance of a troubled pop star (Emma Roberts). This and the film’s other shortcomings, however, are mitigated by the fact that Jones is such a spry and immensely likable performer, as well as the fact that she and co-writer Will McCormack have such great ears for pithy dialogue. It’s a credit to their script that even if the trajectory of its fractured romance feels a bit choppy, the characterizations remain recognizably knowable, and more or less worthy of empathetic investment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 91 minutes)

Winner of jury and audience prizes at both the Sundance and Los Angeles Film Festivals, Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man is an unexpectedly fresh nonfiction tale that rustles up deep feelings of a life stolen. Part docu-mystery, part uplifting valentine about the universality and resonating power of music, the movie tells the story of Sixto Rodriguez, an enigmatic, Detroit-based singer-songwriter who in the early 1970s released two soulful but commercially irrelevant albums under his surname, and quickly disappeared into complete oblivion, only to find unlikely reception and fame in a completely different context, half a world away.



In 1968, two music producers went to a smoke-filled downtown Detroit bar to see an unknown recording artist who’d attracted a small following with his affecting melodies and mysterious penchant for playing with his back to the crowd. They were immediately bewitched with Rodriguez, a Mexican-American folk singer whose evocative lyrics seemed a beguiling mixture of wistful regret and dark prophecy. They recorded two albums, and despite superb reviews, 1970’s Cold Fact and its follow-up, Coming From Reality, were unmitigated commercial disasters, effectively marking the end of Rodriguez’s recording career. He disappeared, and all that followed were stories of escalating depression, and rumors of suicide.

But a funny thing happened. A bootleg recording of Cold Fact found its way into South Africa, where its socially plugged-in lyrics found welcome reception with a generation of Afrikaans struggling with the moral failings of their country’s apartheid. Over the next several decades, even though he was banned from government-controlled radio playlists, Rodriguez became a phenomenon (bigger than Elvis and the Beatles, we’re told). Two fans — an ex-jeweler and a music journalist — would eventually set out to try to get the bottom of his presumed death, with surprising results for all involved.

Music is at its core, which gives Searching for Sugar Man a passing familiarity to fellow docs like Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Devil and Daniel Johnston, the latter about a troubled singer-songwriter whose mental health struggles precluded any grander commercial breakthrough. The investigative/questing aspect of its narrative, however, is much more of a piece with Mark Moskowitz’s superb but grossly under-recognized 2002 film Stone Reader, which chronicled the filmmaker’s attempts to track down the seemingly vanished author of a striking 1972 debut novel. Unlike that movie, however, which leans on the critical assessments of Moskowitz and other talking heads, viewers of Sugar Man are able to bask in the contemplative melancholy of Rodriguez’s soulful music — a unique and frequently heartrending melding of Bob Dylan’s poetic lyricism, Donovan’s lilting phrasing and delivery, and Marvin Gaye’s pained urban unrest. There are plenty of lazy and unworthy nonfiction lionizations bumping around out there, but this isn’t one of them.

What gives Sugar Man plenty of extra “oomph,” though, are its socio-political heft as well as the engaging mode of its telling. In regards to the latter, plenty of documentaries are presented in staid fashion, as little more than a collection of talking heads; Bendjelloul’s movie, on the other hand, has a much more thoughtfully constructed visual template. Working with cinematographer Camilla Skagerstrom, the director presents an inviting pastiche of sweeping Cape Town cityscapes, and contrasts them in compelling fashion with the burned-out rubble of Detroit, both past and present. This, in turn, reinforces the amazing and unlikely social connection, spanning thousands of miles, found between young, mostly white South Africans and Rodriguez’s stirring poetry of defiance.

As more details regarding his life and family come into focus, a heart aches and swells for Rodriguez. Still, Sugar Man doesn’t offer up much in the way of definitive insights about its subject. Rodriguez remains a rather enigmatic, almost shamanistic figure. As well, given the manner in which he raises it and the strong feelings in viewers it evokes, Bendjelloul would also be better served addressing more substantively the issues of artist royalties, and the money trail leading to Clarence Avant, the onetime impresario of the label which held Rodriguez’s overseas rights.

That said, Sugar Man is still a little gem — an engaging rumination on fame and inspiration, swollen with feeling. It shows the world to be a wide place, and yet a hearteningly small one as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To purchase the movie’s soundtrack, meanwhile, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, unrated, 85 minutes)

Kind of loosely of a piece with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip, by way of The Hangover or Bad Santa, Scandanavian import Klown is another comedy that wrings most of its laughs from the premise that in the absence of a civilizing female presence males are apt to revert to despicable and idiotic behavior. A raunchy road movie starring Danish comedians Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen as exaggerated versions of themselves, director Mikkel Norgaard’s film is crisply acted and peppered with enough legitimately funny set-ups to win over the subtitle-averse, even if toward the end it seems to compromise the nature of some of its characters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, R, 89 minutes)