Years ago, when the NC-17 rating was first created, it was serious-minded, almost grim explorations of adult sexuality like Shame that its champions no doubt had in mind. Of course, along came the campy Showgirls, which didn’t help matters. Mostly, though, the NC-17 rating was a non-starter for Hollywood studios not only because they tend to instinctively shy away from art and controversy like a cat avoids rain, but also because many newspapers — bowing to the tom-toms of local morality police — refused to carry advertising for NC-17 films, which made their attempted distribution more of a hassle than they were worth, frankly.

In the intervening years, of course, the Internet has changed life and commerce, not the least of which with its readily accessible graphic depictions of sexual intercourse. Simultaneously, sexual compulsion and all other manner of addiction have gone mainstream — via VH-1’s Celebrity Rehab and Sober House, among other outlets — and so the table has been set for something like Shame, a very glum, austere putative snapshot of modern emotional disconnection co-written by director Steve McQueen and Abi Morgan.

The film stars Michael Fassbender as Brandon Sullivan, a white collar New York City guy whose extreme and seemingly insatiable sexual proclivities — he frequents prostitutes, he’s wrecked his office computer with porn, and he chronically masturbates in a manner more furious than blissful — have taken over his life. Brandon is extremely isolated, without any friends to speak of. The one semi-acquaintance he does have is his boss David (James Badge Dale), who, though married, hits on chicks in a second-nature manner, like breathing. This fact further exacerbates problems caused by the sudden arrival of Brandon’s wayward sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), when David picks up on her and enters into a fling.

Fassbender and Los Angeles Film Critics Association New Generation Award winner McQueen previously collaborated on 2008’s Hunger, a movie with a similarly ascetic design and chilly vibe. That film, about the 1981 Irish hunger strike, featured an unbroken, 17-minute take in its middle, and while Shame doesn’t completely mimic that captured stageplay aesthetic, it does unfurl at an unambiguous remove, including a confrontation between Brandon and Sissy that unfolds in a single shot from behind. It largely lacks, however, the historical mooring that gave Hunger some of its punching power.

Shame has some value or merit as a more or less honest exploration of the reach of adolescent sexual abuse and trauma, and the adult dysfunction and acting out that such problems can create without treatment. But its subtextual markers are obvious (Chic’s “I Want Your Love” makes a soundtrack appearance, to underscore the notable lack of true intimacy in Brandon’s life), and its narrative arc kind of banal. The power and hold of addiction — be it via drugs, sexual compulsion or whatever else — lies in the fact that the acting out for a good period of time works, as an emotional salve and substitute. Shame never shows the audience any real evidence of Brandon’s disease working for him, only a downward spiral with a few elliptical hints at a nasty past. (“We’re not bad people, we just came from a bad place,” says Sissy in the movie’s sole, half-hearted concessionary stab at catharsis). Ergo, there’s no emotional involvement or sense of powerful revelation — just a mild, chilly appreciation, from a distance.

With its copious (male and female) nudity, McQueen’s film seems created chiefly to court praise of its “braveness,” which isn’t to say that Mulligan or Fassbender’s performances lack in focus or commitment. His output over the past several years — inclusive of Inglourious Basterds, Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, A Dangerous Method and this, among many other films — have shown Fassbender to be the rarest of commodities: a movie-star-in-waiting with serious acting chops and a preternatural understanding of and gift with nuance. And Mulligan, with the faintest trace of baby fat still rounding out her cheeks, has a face that captures and conveys a tremendous vulnerability. Still, in Shame they’re stuck in a vehicle that mistakes hermetic artfulness for insight — characters whose stories remain frustratingly incomplete. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox Searchlight, NC-17, 99 minutes)

On the small screen, AMC’s Breaking Bad has shined a light on the production of methamphetamine, and wrung much drama from the heightened stakes of a seemingly regular family man’s descent into moral and criminal contravention. Writer-director David Pomes’ effectively grimy Cook County takes a look at the ravaging effects of the same drug from a user’s point-of-view, detailing the familial chaos surrounding three generations of addicts living in rural East Texas. A gritty, pungent drama with some nicely attuned performances, the film is well worth seeking out for fans of off-the-beaten-path independent fare.

At the movie’s center is Tommy, aka Bump (Anson Mount, above left), a perpetually strung-out addict and meth cook who lives with his girlfriend Lucy (Polly Cole) and a series of other burn-outs who seem to come and go. The ruination of his own life might not be so bad, but Bump’s six-year-old daughter Deandra (Makenna Fitzsimmons) is also caught up in the mix, and a continuous victim of his curious combination of obliviousness and over-protectiveness. Bump’s teenage nephew, Abe (Ryan Donowho), tries to look out for his younger cousin as best he can, but lives in constant fear of his uncle’s violent rages and irrational paranoia. He’s older, but no less stuck and a victim of his circumstances than Deandra.

An uptick of hope arrives when Bump’s older brother and Abe’s dad, Sonny (Xander Berkeley, above right), returns home after a two-and-a-half-year absence. He’s gone clean and sober, and unbeknownst to Bump has also done a stint in prison, and is thus required to check in with a parole officer. Abe at first welcomes his father back, but then old resentments come bubbling up. Trying to finally do right by his son, Sonny wonders if his brother is too far gone, and if so whether it’s too late to extricate the rest of his loved ones from the dark clutches of drugs.

The winner of the prestigious Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival, Cook County is a solidly constructed little film that casts its lot with a group of game actors. If Mount — emaciated and sporting a scruffy beard that makes him look like a crazed gold rush ancestor of Daniel Day-Lewis — sometimes feels like he’s overdialing his accented impression of Matthew McConaughey, he certainly nails the flitting mindset of a drug addict, in which tangential thoughts collide and battle for mangled articulation. Donowho, who kind of recalls Lou Taylor Pucci, exudes a basic sympathetic nature. The underrated Berkeley, meanwhile, particularly shines as a fundamentally decent but in-over-his-head guy trying desperately to pay down the sins of his past. Crucially, there is humanity here in all these characters, regardless of their sins and shortcomings.

Director of photography Brad Rushing and production designer James Fowler, meanwhile, abet Pomes in creating a movie with a grungy authenticity. Sweat pours off of almost every character in every scene (Mount probably never wears a shirt during the entire film), and the rank aroma of frantic hopelessness can almost be smelled coming off the screen. That things end badly is no great surprise, but there is hope in the pinched battle for redemption that unfolds in Cook County. This may not be a pleasant slice of Americana, but it is unfortunately part of our modern collective story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Hannover House, R, 94 minutes)

A refined and not entirely disagreeable slice of square-jawed drama with the smooth, uncomplicated contours of film made to please the broadest possible audience, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse clings steadfastly to very old-fashioned — and sometimes torpid — notions of emotional engagement. With its episodic stabs at poignancy, there’s not much to assail with fury here, but neither is there much about which to get passionately excited or interested.

Notwithstanding the well received nature of its source material, and the array of accomplished below-the-line artisanship brought to bear in its adaptation, War Horse — a self-consciously epic story, set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during World War I, about a teenager (Jeremy Irvine) and his connection to and unlikely reunion with the family’s horse — is a movie with very rigidly prescribed and not particularly ambitious melodramatic inclinations. Screenwriters Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, working from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, get plenty right in the period detail, but never find a way to make a dramatic throughline really stick, and when the film actually goes off to war its grip loosens considerably. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DreamWorks, PG-13, 146 minutes)

Answers to Nothing is an unfortunately all-too-apt title for director Matthew Leutwyler’s sprawling thematic think piece, which focuses on the hard knocks and self-deception of a disparate group of Los Angelenos. The filmmakers seem to be reaching rather nakedly for early Paul Thomas Anderson territory here, but the copped moves come off less as artful homage and more as the nervous half-formed duplications of a mentee who’s left the nest too soon.

While Ryan (Dane Cook) and Kate (Elizabeth Mitchell) try to conceive a child, Ryan is also carrying on an affair with would-be singer Drew (Aja Volkman), as well as dealing his mother Marilyn (Barbara Hershey), who seemingly lives in a cocoon of denial over the fact that her long-away husband is somehow going to suddenly return home. Frankie (Julie Benz), a police detective investigating a missing child case, is at first convinced that the skeevy Beckworth (Greg Germann) is the guilty party, but runs up against a dead end. Teacher Carter (Mark Kelly) seems increasingly fraught by news coverage of said event, while rookie cop Jerry (Erik Palladino) floats through his days and nights lonely, and other characters come and go.

Many other movies, from Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia to Garden Party and even the Oscar-winning Crash, to name but a small handful, have delved into this melancholic “underworld” of the City of Angels, where so many dreams die hard. While Frankie and Kate are best friends, and other characters share some connections, though, there isn’t quite as much overlay as one might expect in Answers to Nothing, and subsequently the film leans on behavioral similarities and a couple late twists to drive home its point: that we each construct rationalizations and tell ourselves lies, whether big or small, to help frame, situate and create comfort with our own actions. This is all fine and good, but there’s not much “oomph” to the picture, given the varying degrees of emotional payoff.

To be sure, the characters aren’t wildly over-sketched, and Leutwyler admirably keeps the film’s collective temperature turned down, so that each story strand plays out on equal footing and the looming specter of the missing child doesn’t overwhelm the movie. The performances are of the same piece, tonally. But the result is a film without much of an electric charge or mystery — problematic though not necessarily damning except for the fact that so many of Answers to Nothing‘s moments of small observation also feel nipped or overly familiar rather than natively insightful. The movie unfolds dutifully, over the course of two hours. And then, just a short time later, all memories of it are gone as well. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 123 minutes)

Cameron Crowe tries on something of a forcedly whimsical tone in We Bought a Zoo, a well-meaning and sentimental but lumbering family drama that never quite connects. Existing in a kind of wan emotional middle-ground, only occasionally punctuated and illuminated by Matt Damon‘s winning lead turn, the film is a search for familial rejuvenation and self-renewal in only the vaguest terms possible.

Based on a memoir by journalist Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo tracks closely in its massaged feeling to Marley & Me, which distributor 20th Century Fox had great success with in the same holiday frame in 2008, pushing to $240 million worldwide gross. But while character-driven, tonally commingled qualities have always been a hallmark of Crowe’s big screen efforts, this film exudes the feeling of an artist reaching more than halfway to make contact with an audience that market-parsers have told him should be right in his wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 124 minutes)

A sprawling tale of power, sleaze and ambition in the vein of City of God, The Departed, Infernal Affairs and The Wire, writer-director Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is a howling, labyrinthine lament against the brawn and fraudulent self-protection of entrenched institutions that could and perhaps should well find a welcome audience amongst #OccupyWallStreet cineastes. Brazil’s official Academy Award Best Foreign Language Film submission, the movie — which is set in Rio de Janeiro and unfolds at the intersection of drugs, crime and high-level governmental corruption — is programmatic, and tipped heavily toward procedural rather than emotional payoffs, but nonetheless still packs an effective, gritty punch.

At the center of the movie is Rio’s Special Police Operations Battalion, or BOPE (so named for its native-language acronym). When a mission to bring an end to a jail riot ends in violence, it puts several men on a trajectory that will eventually result in unlikely new alliances. Andre Mathias (Andre Ramiro) willingly takes the fall for the raid, out of devotion to BOPE, but his superior, Beto Nascimento (Wagner Moura, quite good), fails upward, and finds himself installed as Sub-Secretary of Intelligence, where he oversees the city’s wire-tapping programs. Academic and social activist Diogo Fraga (Irandhir Santos, above), meanwhile, decides to enter politics, winning a position that puts him further at odds with a crooked mayor and the moneyed political-discourse entertainers who prop up their efforts with much on-camera bloviating.

Nascimento is no friend of Fraga’s either. He views him as a pain, and his irritation is exacerbated when Fraga takes up with his ex-wife, and starts influencing his son’s view of Nascimento’s work. Then there’s the fact that Nascimento comes to realize that by strengthening BOPE and bringing low the drug gangs that run the slums, he’s actually only made things easier for the corrupt cops and dirty politicians who are actually pulling the strings from above, including a particularly brutal police captain (Sandro Rocha) who has no qualms about flaunting his thuggishness.

The qualities that most benefit Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (it’s actually a sequel to Padilha’s 2007 feature debut, featuring several holdover characters) are also what make it slightly impenetrable at first — its density, and attention to detail. There’s also the matter of Nascimento’s overwritten narration, which serves as an effective hatchet through some of the bureaucratic bramble but also bleeds the movie of the chance for a more rooted emotional connection. Eventually, though, the movie’s pieces start to fit together, and somewhat disparate strands cross paths in interesting ways when old allies become enemies, and vice versa.

Padilha, who got his start in documentary filmmaking, has an obvious eye and ear for the sorts of information that makes this material seem snarlingly current. It’s a fictionalized tale, but one rooted in real scandal as it relates to both BOPE and Brazil’s government. The film is also properly awash in the shades of grey morality required to tackle a telling of such systemic indecency and corruption, which is quite separate from individual malice. “War is like medicine — it keeps the mind busy,” says Nascimento early on, who comes to realize the double-edged nature of that statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 115 minutes)

Crazy Wisdom focuses on a subject perhaps worthy of a documentary, but hopelessly obscured by fawning and myopia. Director Johanna Demetrakas sets her sights on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a personable and unique Tibetan monk who on foot escaped the 1959 Communist invasion of his homeland in quite unlikely fashion, studied and taught at Oxford University, and then shattered Westerner’s preconceptions of Buddhist enlightenment, renouncing his monastic vows, bedding students, drinking alcohol and eventually eloping with the 16-year-old daughter of an aristocrat. For more information on the film, click here; meanwhile, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Crazy Wisdom Films, unrated, 89 minutes)

Humans are inherently social creatures, and the manner in which we each form a perception of our place in the world around us — and how our ego takes shape and form from our id — certainly relates as much to our interactions as any ingrained or telegraphed sense of social acceptance and duty. Capturing the fickle progress of that individual transformation, however, is a difficult task. A tender and perspicacious look at the toddling steps of adolescent character and personality, writer-director Celine’s Sciamma’s French import Tomboy assays the gender confusion and willful but not malicious deceit of a 10-year-old girl. Against a backdrop of overly programmed “issue dramas,” this movie is notable for its strong foundation in character and wholesale investment in psychology, rather than salacious plotting. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Rocket Releasing, unrated, 82 minutes)

The directorial debut of Joshua Leonard, The Lie is an uncommonly assured and engaging portrait of post-millennial and particularly male uncertainty, and how the snowballing effects of impulsive dishonesty will eventually run you down from behind like a jackrabbit. Buoyed by strong performances, this meagerly budgeted but intelligently scaled and smartly told indie film deftly takes the pulse of anxious, arrested times.

Married Los Angelenos Lonnie (Leonard) and Clover Leonard (Jess Weixler, above right) were once upon a time go-it-their-own-way idealists. Now, faced with raising a two-year-old daughter, they’ve come to also face some of the material realities of adulthood, and aren’t sure they like what they see. As Clover wraps up her final year of graduate school, she receives an appealing job offer from a pharmaceutical company — the sort of place she wouldn’t have ever considered working years earlier.

Lonnie, on the other hand, is barely scraping by at a commercial editing job, where he’s reached his maximum capacity for pretending to care, thanks in large part to a screaming boss (Gerry Bednob, of The 40-Year-Old Virgin) who rides him like a rented pack-animal. Not much helping matters is Lonnie and Clover’s friend, Tank (Mark Webber), who lives in a van down by the beach and provides an ever-present reflection of all the carefree, guileless nonchalance of their younger years. Lonnie doesn’t lust for other women, but he is put off by the offhand, public manner in which Clover reveals her job offer. A bit emasculated, and a bit jumbled and confused, he starts skipping work and then retreats back into occupational fantasies of music, where he pens a not-very-thinly-veiled screed against workaday responsibility called “Soulcrusher.”

Lonnie also tells a lie. Pressed by his boss, he impetuously says that his daughter has died. This gets Lonnie off the hook for a few days and gives him space to breathe, and recoup his energy and focus. Naturally, though, it is a respite of invisible constraints and limited duration. When sympathetic co-workers start bringing over casseroles, and then even take up a financial collection, it seems only a matter of time before Clover finds out about Lonnie’s galling dishonesty.

Throughout, The Lie captures in convincing fashion the deeply held ambivalence of a generation that grew up in peacetime but then saw the world change momentously with the events of September 11, two wars and a near-worldwide financial collapse. A less manifestly bleak adaptation of a T.C. Boyle short story, The Lie is not explicitly about any of those events, but it is about feeling out of place and under-equipped to handle the challenges of modern-day adult life, which is very tied to those occurrences.

Notably, Leonard’s film also bears a passing thematic and tonal resemblance to Sam Mendes’ Away We Go. Whereas the young parents-to-be in that film hit the road and grappled with feelings about not being ready to be caregivers and not having the answers or knowledge that they felt they would and should have as adults, the characters in The Lie are already parents, and rooted in one place. They are, however, no less shot through with uncertainty. Leonard, too, has an intuitive understanding of his (and his cast’s) ability to convey nuanced specificity, and doesn’t dive headlong into cheap drama. The Lie could take the same concept and go places that are bigger, and have more outlandish or starkly defined stakes. Instead, it keeps things intimate, and ergo feels unerringly honest about its characters’ motivations, as well as their reactions.

Its endgame is somewhat preordained, but still handled with a sensitivity that makes it feel special. There’s also a unique combination of enervated fretfulness and sanguine hopefulness in The Lie, giving voice to the contradictory impulses inside each of us. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here. (Screen Media, R, 82 minutes)

As the push for Oscar short film short-list consideration has progressed throughout the fall, one movie stirring up some attention is multi-hyphenate Warren Pereira’s Salt and Silicone, a purported dark comedy offering up split perspectives of the same event — a public conversation about breast implants.

Vex (Pereira) is conflicted about the fact that his girlfriend Keira (Katie O’Grady) is scheduled to get breast augmentation. Out for a drive, they spot an acquaintance who has had the procedure, Jamie (Rachel Myers, above right), and stop to get her perspective. They head into a furniture store, where Vex fumblingly asks about her enhancement and the store’s worker, Jerome (Ethan Atkinson), insinuates his way into the conversation. Two more episodes offer up different takes on this chat.

Pereira’s film, even in its reticent first incarnation, has a certain cocksure verve throughout. But there is no substance to it, nothing really said about either how men regard women with boob jobs, or how women in turn feel about both their decisions in that regard and the reaction(s) of men to their decisions. Its depth is pantomimed, and imaginary — all bristling energy, as if the tonal differentiation in and of itself somehow makes for profound commentary. The dialogue is trite, which in turn certainly doesn’t help the performances.

On a technical level, the film is largely fine — it’s attractively shot (by Jeff Streich), with a few effectively subtle variations in style to draw attention to its changes in personality — but composer Daniel Reynolds’ music doesn’t match the moments, throughout. Faced with the choice of salt or silicone, viewers might instead be looking for a third box to check — neither of the above. For more information, click here. (W Films, unrated, 25 minutes)

The drums of war, whatever the specific conflicts, almost always create an opportunity for much in the way of collateral damage. Director Martyn Burke’s Under Fire: Journalists in Combat takes the psychological temperature of those who would devote their lives to taking the sort of extraordinary risks that modern day war reportage entails. It’s an involving documentary look at a razor’s-edge occupation, as well as the coping mechanisms of the human brain under stress. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.

More hormonal catnip arrives in the form of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1, the fourth film in the mega-successful, teen-friendly, modern day vampire love story franchise, and a workmanlike effort that sets the table for series wrap-up next year. An emotionally fraught, dramatically leaden tale, the movie again proves the experiential sweet spot of the franchise — that of surging adolescent feeling trumping rational thought, and in this case lucid plotting.

Scribe Melissa Rosenberg, a veteran of the entire series, does a decent job of distilling some of the main conflicts from the 750-page novel that serves as the source material for the final two films. But dialogue howlers and largely soapy, melodramatic performances abound, and director Bill Condon’s staging is inert. Somewhat dispiritingly, but not surprisingly, the movie leans inordinately upon composer Carter Burwell’s goosing music cues, but also a litany of modern rock songs. Breaking Dawn isn’t the first teen movie to try to move some soundtrack CDs, but the sales success of previous iterations does seem to have informed in circuitous fashion some of the creative choices herein, where songs are used as spackle for incomplete scenes. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG-13, 117 minutes)