With cable channels, poker is, literally, now on television every day of the year, oftentimes for many hours. Powered by an explosion in online playing, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, and a far cry from the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the game was in decline. These trends and more get spotlighted in Douglas Tirola’s All In: The Poker Movie, an achingly comprehensive documentary that unfolds in scattershot form, yet still remains entertaining enough to engage non-players, even as it neglects to provide a basic overview of different styles (the insidious, divisive creep of “Texas Hold ‘Em”!) or indeed a working definition of the game itself.

Celeb aficionados like Matt Damon, Jennifer Tilly, Denny Crum, Evander Holyfield and The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon get face time here, but most of the interviewees are industry insiders, whose stories — about high-stakes, secret Mayfair Club matches, or Henry Orenstein’s card camera innovation, which helped make poker watchable for the layperson — are interesting and colorful. There’s plenty of high-falutin’ talk that wildly lionizes the game (I’m willing to entertain a description of it as “the epitome of capitalism,” and emblematic of the American spirit, but less certain that poker is “love, life, religion and politics, all wrapped up into one”), yet Tirola has clearly cast his net far and wide. Using Chris Moneymaker, a self-described “gambling degenerate” and Joe Everyman who pulled off a shocking victory at the 2003 World Series of Poker, as his narrative spine is also a good choice. It gives All In some semblance of normal heartbeat, even if a viewer doesn’t know a straight flush from a full house.

A darkly comedic anthology look at the sexual confusion, appetite, insecurity and frustration of a group of modern-day Chicago couples, Autoerotic is an at once breezy and deadpan little indie film that doesn’t overstay its welcome but instead delivers a few pin-prick precision assaults on both masculine and feminine foibles and preoccupations, and then skitters away, pleased and laughing quietly to itself. While not dynamically acted, it’s a subversive, mumblecore-type exploration of the boundaries of self-pleasure, and a nice little cinematic aperitif that could slot nicely with any number of tonier Hollywood explorations of lust run amok. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight Films, unrated, 73 minutes)

War stories are often terrible and grim, but their high moral contrast allows room to compellingly highlight some of the best instincts and aspects of humanity, alongside the worst, of course. Set against the backdrop of one of those amazingly under-told stories of real-life history, the compelling and pedigreed Sarah’s Key, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, is a sort of cold-case ancestral mystery, except rooted in character and told with an admirable self-discipline often lacking in thematically similar films.

The story centers around Julia Jarmond (Scott Thomas), an American magazine journalist married to a Frenchman, Bertrand Tezac (Frederic Pierrot), and living in Paris with he and their daughter. Tasked with writing an article about the notorious Vel d’Hiv round-up of over 10,000 Jews which took place in the city in 1942, Julia learns that the apartment her family is about to move into was acquired by Bertrand’s family when its original Jewish occupants were rounded up and deported. Digging deeper, Julia presses Bertrand’s father, Edouard (Michel Duchaussoy), who was a boy at the time, for more information.

Intercut with this present day material is one story of one of the objects of Julia’s investigation, Sarah (Melusine Mayance), a young Jewish girl who is cruelly separated from her parents at an internment camp, but then escapes with a friend, finally seeking refuge with a reluctantly helpful French couple, Jules and Genevieve Dufaure (Niels Arestrup and Dominique Frot). Racked with a strange guilt she’s not able to entirely articulate, Julia becomes obsessed with the mystery of Sarah and her younger brother, and whether they might somehow still be alive. After several dead ends, Julia eventually tracks down a man, William (Aidan Quinn), whom she believes can help put her investigation to rest, but his assertions end up raising another question.

Based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s three-million-copy-selling novel of the same name, the film that Sarah’s Key will likely most immediately draw comparisons to might be Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader, another World War II adaptation centering around Nazis and dark secrets. Sarah’s Key, though, lacks that movie’s portentous self-importance, and it doesn’t bathe in pathos. It’s hardly upbeat, but the split structure, between past and present day, serves the material well, and director Gilles Paquet-Brenner threads his film with an emotional restraint that gives it room to breathe.

Another way of saying this, of course, is that Sarah’s Key unfolds with all the vagaries and pockets of slack one might expect to find in an adaptation of historical fiction. And it’s true that it does take a bit of an emotional adjustment to submit to the movie’s waxing and waning rhythms, and it also does occasionally lose its way — most often in awkwardly attempting to shoehorn in a subplot involving Julia’s unplanned pregnancy. Very much a literary device, and oh-so -ripe with metaphorical significance, this narrative strand never really comes together in a satisfactory way, and could have been jettisoned without damaging the film’s poignance. There’s also a deathbed-type familial confession that is dispiritingly on-the-nose, and almost a cliche of such scenes. If it’s lifted from the book it’s unfortunate and myopic case of fidelity; if it’s invented, it’s incredibly contrived and lazy.

That said, fine performances and an artful, emotional modulation make this drama feel real and lived in rather than mawkish. Scott Thomas’ fine bilingual performance anchors Sarah’s Key, but the real revelation is Mayance, who is natural and heartbreaking as the young Sarah. Her character, and performance, are each a reminder of the ancillary horrors of war — of innocence ripped away from children who should be protected for as long as possible from the malice and brutality of the world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 102 minutes)

Apart from Steve Carell, the cast of The Office hasn’t had much luck breaking out as front-and-center movie stars, perhaps because that hit show so resolutely commodifies and reinforces their ordinariness. Alas, A Little Help will not much help transform that track record, even though Jenna Fischer turns in an engaging, pleasantly addled performance as a self-medicating Long Island dental hygienist who must grapple with some serious life changes.

Written and directed by Michael Weithorn, the co-creator of The King of Queens, A Little Help centers around Laura Pehlke (Fischer), whose life gets turned upside down when her possibly philandering husband Bob (Chris O’Donnell) passes away and leaves her on shaky financial footing, further calcifying the emergent remoteness of her chubby 12-year-old son, Dennis (Daniel Yelsky). While a strengthened friendship and possibly more with her brother-in-law Paul (Rob Benedict, above left) develops, Laura also finds herself wrapped up in two lies — one told by Dennis at his new school, that his father was a 9/11 hero, and the other involving a malpractice suit over Bob’s death that Laura knows to be based on false pretenses.

Weithorn’s film aims more for winsome poignance than ha-ha funny, but, flatly, the more dramatic material and particularly the mother-son stuff here doesn’t especially play, in part owing to some performance issues, but also because the stakes are so ill defined. Much more interesting, if only kind of fitfully engaged, are the pressures Laura feels from her snippy mother and sister (Lesley Ann Warren and Brooke Smith, respectively), and the burgeoning relationship between Laura and Paul, an affable, henpecked guy who’s come to feel boxed in by life and his wife. Despite some interesting characters, A Little Help never quite convincingly locates a singular tone or point of focus that would kick it up and make it recommendation-worthy. For an interview with Weithorn, meanwhile, click here. (Freestyle Releasing/Secret Handshake Entertainment, PG-13, 108 minutes)

A debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and the closing night gala presentation at the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All is a well constructed, emotionally rich, issues-oriented drama that unfolds through the perspective of a determined young South African girl. Based on Allan Stratton’s respected novel Chanda’s Secrets, the movie should receive modest embrace in arthouse and specialty markets drawn to foreign films, especially given the gravity and unfortunately enduring topicality of the tough circumstances with which its grown-up-too-soon protagonist grapples.

In a dust-ridden village on the outskirts of Johannesburg, 12-year-old Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka, above, quite good) lives with her mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), and two younger step-siblings. The death of Lillian’s youngest child, a newborn little girl, has stirred up old chaos and addictions. Chanda’s alcoholic stepfather Jonah (Aubrey Poolo) has fallen off the wagon, convinced that Lillian’s breast milk poisoned his “good seed,” and killed their baby. Already distraught and depressed, Lillian becomes sick, and given Jonah’s philandering ways Chanda thinks her mother might have contracted the AIDS virus. When, on the advice of a local shaman, Lillian leaves town without her children, Chanda’s relationship with her helpful but increasingly judgmental neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Lenabe), is further complicated by her attempts to intervene in the troubles of her best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who has turned to prostitution.

Not entirely unlike Jennifer Lawrence’s character in last year’s critical darling Winter’s Bone, Chanda is forced into a situation whereby she must serve as a caregiver to younger (half-)siblings, while also attempting to modulate difficult circumstances further compounded by adults who have checked out. The narrative here, however, is a bit less bleak and more constructed for a sense of audience-friendly uplift, even given the potentially dark nature of some its subject matter. As the title of its source material might suggest, the film unfolds through Chanda’s perspective, and in this important respect Life, Above All has a guide worth following — sympathetic but untethered to mannered formality.

The story charts a fairly expected path but Schmitz, a South African-born filmmaker of German descent, obviously has a unique connection to the material — a sort of insider’s outside view, one might say — that keeps the movie from tipping over into the maudlin or contrived. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 102 minutes)

Its innocuous title recalls some perfectly anonymous Steven Seagal flick, sure, but this frenzied French thriller from co-writer-director Fred Cavayé is much more rooted in humanistic impulses and recognizable motivations than most of its skull-cracking brethren on the other side of the Atlantic.

At the center of the film is male nurse Samuel (Gilles Lellouche, above), who unwittingly sets into motion a madcap chain of events when he saves the life of a mysterious thief, Hugo (Roschdy Zem). This then leads to his pregnant Spanish wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) being kidnapped by Hugo’s compatriots… or possibly someone wanting to kill him. Powered by on-the-fly deduction, a harried game of cat-and-mouse ensues, with an on-the-lam Hugo and Samuel being framed for a cop’s murder by rogue elements of the police force, led by Commandant Werner (Gérard Lanvin), for some reason at odds with their own.

The crooked-cop particulars here are in the end not very interesting, and handled with a dismissive air of obligation. And Point Blank‘s ridiculous final act, set amidst the hustle and bustle of a police station, basically cedes any reasonableness in favor of jumbled catharsis, marking the movie (in case there were some doubt) as a pure exercise in genre calisthenics. Still, the acting is invested (Lellouche is fantastic), and Cavayé’s stylish, briskly paced film is refreshingly less about chase-thrill razzmatazz and more about the innate human panic of its characters, especially Samuel. After all, what other recent American action movie can you recall in which an escape sequence ends with the protagonist throwing up? (Magnolia, unrated, 81 minutes)

There are true stories that make good movies and then true stories that are so rife with implausibility that they make terrible movies, and in Tabloid, masterful, Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris has taken the latter and made an incredibly entertaining nonfiction film with all the wily narrative surprise of a tawdry B-movie run amok. A jaw-dropping, wonderfully bonkers look back at one of the stranger gossip-rag human interest tales of the 1970s, Tabloid is a streamlined treat that offers up a crafty, academic case-study overview of both romantic obsession and journalistic overreach, all without sacrificing for a moment any of the wonky side-street particulars that make the unlikely story so deliciously engaging.

Morris’ film focuses on Joyce McKinney, a former North Carolina beauty queen who in the 1970s moved to Utah and fell in love with Kirk Anderson. When Anderson, a devout Mormon, left for the United Kingdom on his church-mandated, two-year mission, McKinney became convinced that the man of her dreams had been indoctrinated into a cult. So, in a most peculiar way, she focused her attention on tracking him down and setting him free. Hiring a prop-plane pilot and a personal bodyguard for accompaniment, the lively blonde flew from California (where she was living by that time) to England, determined to pry her would-be husband from the oppressive clutches of the Mormon church. What ensued — decades before Paris Hilton and the Kardashian sisters — was a surreal blooming of celebrity for McKinney, and a tabloid tug-of-war in which two competing papers would paint very different portraits of her innocence, past and motivations. In its third and final act, Tabloid pivots again, jumping forward in time. Those thinking McKinney’s story couldn’t get any weirder have a surprise, involving the attempted cloning of her beloved dog, Booger.

A checklist of the Tabloid‘s ingredients — infatuation! sex! trans-Atlantic intrigue and escape! kidnapping! self-delusion! Mormonism! bondage! pay-to-play journalism! identification by dogs! — comes across as a shopping list for two or three labyrinthine scandals, not merely one, and in their insane, commingled glory they’re almost all as timely today as ever, especially in the wake of the recent phone hacking charges against Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and the endless, cable news loop reportage of Casey Anthony’s private life during the trial over the death of her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. A good part of Morris’ film is about the disruptive and transformative power of libidinal surge, yes — how love can make one see what they wish to see. But Tabloid is also very much about journalistic ethics, both past and present, how the media can choose to frame a narrative or cast a character, and then pursue doggedly confirmatory evidence to support that vision.

Those familiar with The Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure will recognize Morris’ use of his patented off-camera interview machine, which he calls the “Interrotron.” Though he relies only a small, very trimmed and intimate roster of interviewees, the director gives Tabloid a proper dollop of scope via smart use of archive material and re-purposed media. Competing reporters from the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, the two papers which served as the main conduits of information on the case to a hungry British public, offer up their blow-by-blow reminiscences of the case, which are by turns fascinating, hilarious and slightly unnerving.

The hyper-articulate, decidedly strange McKinney, though, is of course the chief attraction. Somewhere in the gulf between her account of events, crimes with which she was charged, and stories that subsequently came out in the tabloids, there is the real story of what happened in 1978. But Morris delights in this muddy ambiguity, and makes this point besides: what is a definitive and objective truth if one or more parties still never concedes to it? While it is about love, obsession, self-delusion, journalistic ethics, the gulf between sexual need and religious stricture, and many more things, Tabloid is, in the biggest sense, a fascinating story about the sometimes slippery and illusory nature of truth, especially as it relates to matters of interpersonal connection. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Select/Moxie Pictures, R, 88 minutes)

In Salvation Boulevard, repentant Grateful Dead follower Carl Vanderveer (Greg Kinnear) has given up his wild ways, settling down with wife Gwen (Jennifer Connelly, in the throes of some feverish acting exercise) and her teenage daughter Angie (Isabelle Fuhrman, of Orphan), where he’s a lapdog member of the local super-church run by the charismatic if somewhat oily Pastor Dan Day (Pierce Brosnan). Following a debate between Dan and noted atheist author Dr. Paul Blaylock (Ed Harris), there’s a terrible accident, and Dan tries to pin the blame on Carl, leading to all sorts of shenanigans.

Kinnear and Brosnan made for an intriguing pair before, in the 2005 down-tempo black comedy The Matador, but here they connect with less success. Salvation Boulevard has a certain pedigree, being based on a book by Wag the Dog author Larry Beinhart, but so much of this material doesn’t rise to the level of its putative conceit. Two characters seem to initially figure more prominently into the proceedings, but fall out in the middle, only to lamely pop up again later. And when the film loops in a business contractor (Yul Vazquez) with designs on blackmailing Dan, it sags under the weight of a misguided focus.

In both his documentary Hell House and 2007’s Joshua, director George Ratliff has handled religious themes before (though not always well), so it’s somewhat strange that this film feels so toothless and schizophrenic — broad at times, and either unwilling or unable to commit to a darker path. More pointed religious satire would have been good, or even just crisper characterizations across the board. In a small part as a hippie security guard who crosses paths with Carl, meanwhile, Marisa Tomei gives the movie some lift. It’s a source of considerable frustration that viewers can’t pivot, follow her character off on another path, and look for their own salvation. (IFC Films, PG-13, 107 minutes)

A unique slice of Southern Gothic that premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Septien is sort of the embodiment of what more American indie film should be doing and trying — which is to say identifying universal themes or feelings worthwhile of exploration for the creators, and then coming at them in a roundabout or subversive manner. An off-kilter dramatic mystery that trades in low-level mischievousness, and a kind of quietly comedic snapshot of deep-fried familial dysfunction, Septien is the ultimate chameleonic cinematic experience — it is chiefly what one wishes it to be, based on their mood while watching it, and interpretation of its rhythms. Regardless, it’s sure to be unlike almost any film you see this year.

Writer-director Michael Tully stars, along with Onur Tukel and Robert Longstreet (each of whom receive story credit), as a trio of brothers, the Rawlings, who occupy a rundown house somewhere in the rural South. (The movie was filmed in Tennessee.) Septien opens with the return of Cornelius (Tully), the prodigal son who now sports a crazy prospector’s beard that makes him look like a homeless Vincent Gallo or the disaffected stunt double for Joaquin Phoenix in I’m Still Here. In the years-long absence of their brother (which he doesn’t much want to really explain), Amos (Tukel, above center) has taken up outsider art, painting twisted and sexually perverse living hellscapes, while Ezra (Longstreet, above right) has doubled down on henpecking oversight, and (over-)embraced his caretaker’s role by sometimes sporting dresses.

The Rawlings’ friend Wilbur (Jim Cunningham) also hangs around like a stray mutt, eventually sparking the idea for an “art party” when he finds an old, buried video camera and shoots some random footage of nature. Cornelius, meanwhile, just kind of loafs about, sleeping and occasionally hustling unsuspecting dupes in unlikely sports wagers. As the brothers — individually and collectively, but also somewhat implicitly — try to figure out if they can repair their fractured family, a plumbing problem brings an old codger, “Rooster” Rippington (Mark Darby Robinson), to their home, and in tow a young girl, Savannah (Rachel Korine), who might be but probably isn’t his daughter. Eventually, an old connection to Rooster comes bubbling to the surface, forcing the brothers to confront difficult issues and emotions head on.

Septien is, by turns, curious, bemusing, inviting, standoffish, darkly funny, quietly unnerving and pleasantly confounding — but always relaxed, and comfortable in its own skin. It’s not some wildly esoteric waste of time, but neither is Septien comfortable completely and solely in any of the little genre sandboxes in which it dabbles. It moves to and fro, touching on themes of repression, fraternal connection, gender identity, trauma, religion, revenge and redemption.

Shot on Super-16mm, the film feels like an ageless assemblage of time periods every bit as much as genres. With an understated acting ensemble that teases along a viewer’s interest, Septien is, with just a couple exceptions (a self-conscious evocation of Of Mice and Men, for instance) a strikingly original and enchanting work, the type of which we need more of. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Note: In addition to its theatrical engagements, the film is available
nationwide on VOD via IFC Midnight. To follow its makers on Twitter,
meanwhile, hit up @SEPTIENFilm. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 79 minutes)

Impressing a pretentious story of metaphorical ancestral connection upon an equally rote story of deathbed regret, director Wayne Wang‘s adaptation of Lisa See’s 2005 bestselling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan rather gracelessly straddles two time periods. Weighed down by a leaden and ineffective script, the end result is a turgid, generations-spanning melodrama that deifies and fetishizes the idea of feminine companionship’s intense depths without substantively delivering a fully rendered portrait of it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Fox Searchlight, PG-13, 102 minutes)

There are movies whose plot twists and turns hinge on the interactions of fully fleshed-out characters, and their fairly believable reactions to various extreme situations, and then there are movies like The Perfect Host, whose actions reveal them to be bullshit head feint exercises designed from the ground up as merely a collection of goosing scenes.

Posing as the friend of an out-of-town friend, career criminal John (Clayne Crawford), having just robbed a bank of $300,000, and needing a place to hide, talks his way into the home of Warwick (David Hyde Pierce), an effete Los Angeles intellectual. When his ruse breaks down, John gets violent with Warwick. Before long, though, the tables are turned, with Warwick proving to be far more demented and dangerous than John. Flashes back in time, meanwhile, indicate that a relationship with ailing bank teller Simone (Megahn Perry) may have factored into John’s robbery. As dawn approaches, could a game of chess really decide the fate of two men?

Helmed by feature debut director Nick Tomnay, The Perfect Host actually cruises along for a while on the relative strength of its two wholly invested lead performances. The first twist, Warwick’s extreme instability, isn’t a spoiler, because it occurs 20-25 minutes in, and is being featured in the film’s marketing. Subsequent pivots, however, are all variously obvious or completely ludicrous. As the movie trips into the next day and tries desperately to find a way to extend its conflict, all manner of logic and reason breaks down, and it becomes clear that Tomnay and Krishna Jones’ script is only a collection of desultory, attention-whoring bits that ape a young film school graduate’s ill-formed idea of dramatic payoff. Of course, if one wants to see Pierce boogie down in surreal fashion to Rose Royce’s “Carwash,” this is probably the only chance you’re going to get. (Magnet, R, 93 minutes)

A major box office player in its native Italy, and the country’s
official 2011 selection for Best Foreign Film Academy Award
consideration, The First Beautiful Thing (also known as La Prima Cosa
Bella) is a movie that’s both heartrending and heartwarming, and never
falsely so. Fabulously staged and rapturously acted, it’s an honest and
perceptive tale of adult reconciliation — of coming to the recognition
that one’s parents are actually people too, and loving them with their
faults and shortcomings, all the same.

The story opens in 1971, at a small town fair, where Anna Michelucci (Micaela Ramazzotti, above left), out with her family, is thrust onto the stage and ends up winning a “Young Mothers” pageant. This enthralls her daughter, embarasses her son and eventually irritates her possessive husband Mario (Sergio Albelli, above right), a drunken lout who keeps her under his thumb. Anna eventually makes the decision to leave Mario. The rest of the film cuts back and forth between the peripatetic life of Anna and her kids (at one point they’re kidnapped back by Mario, and then rescued again in the dark of night by Anna and an accomplice) and them as grown-ups, as Anna lies terminally ill, and likely ready to pass away.

As an adult, Bruno (Valerio Mastandrea) is an irritable, junkie vocational school teacher who long ago gave up on his secret passion, poetry, and can’t appreciate his long-suffering girlfriend, Sandra (Fabrizia Sacchi). His sister Valeria (Claudia Pandolfi) is stuck in an unhappy marriage, and full of barely concealed resentments toward her older brother’s isolation. When she finally succeeds in dragging him to see their mother at the hospital, he pulls aside a doctor to try to hit him up for prescriptions. As Bruno and Valeria each spend some time with Anna, however — and Bruno in particular comes to terms with the difficulty of looking at his mother as a sexual creature — the many shared difficulties of their childhoods take on a greater contextual resonance.

Scripted by director Paolo Virzi, Francesco Bruni and Francesco Piccolo, The First Beautiful Thing captures with striking clarity the pain and trauma of kids caught up in a brutal tug-of-war between two parents. The child actors playing the young Bruno and Valeria are quite good, but more than that Virzi also has a smart sense of how to use them, and delineate small differences in reaction to their mother’s dalliances with new men, or her work as an extra on a Marcello Mastroianni movie. The differences fit together, hand in glove, with the adult personalities of Pandolfi’s Valeria and Mastandrea’s Bruno — their standoffishness and feelings of unease with the world at large, respectively.

The film’s smart and deft dance, its balance of heartbreak and uplift, flags a bit in its final third, with the introduction of a plot point involving a possible third sibling, put up for adoption. Virzi never comes up with a truly convincing way to integrate this strand, and consequently it feels like an element of such underscored, tangible separation and difference as to serve only as a device to foist some emotional finality upon Bruno and Valeria. That it doesn’t entirely work is definite, but doubly so for American audiences, who may find the situational embrace of certain characters head-scratching if not outright whiplash-inducing.

All that said, Virzi’s film is a warm and welcome foreign film treat. The First Beautiful Thing reminds us that our struggles — however weighty and very much our own — are not the first of their sort in all of human history, and they might even amount to much less than we would have had if not for actions of our parents and loved ones, no matter their screw-ups. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Palisades Tartan, unrated, 122 minutes)

A hobbled sci-fi thriller that cobbles together various disparate mythologies, the independently produced Fading of the Cries clearly doesn’t have the money to compete with the genre big boys, but it also lacks an imagination in presentation or execution that might enable it to escape the downward pull of its limitations. Writer-director Brian Metcalf utilizes special effects as a sort of tech-age concealer, to try to spackle over various production cracks and shore up narrative deficiencies, but the result is a risible hodge-podge of quarter-baked cliches and jumbled action that is a non-starter for even generally forgiving genre fans. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Eammon Films/Ratio Pictures, PG-13, 93 minutes)

A British coming-home-from-war drama that toes the line between pedestrian and interesting, though tilting toward the former, In Our Name connects chiefly as a gender-shift curiosity given its main focus on a female soldier. Joanne Froggatt’s engaging performance, which picked up the Most Promising Newcomer prize at this past year’s British Independent Film Awards, is the chief selling point of writer-director Brian Welsh’s sophomore outing, which otherwise cycles through the expected interpersonal difficulties of trying to readjust to civilian and married life.

In Our Name opens with Suzy Jackson (Froggatt) returning from a tough tour in Afghanistan, and finding her young daughter Cass (Chloe-Jayne Wilkinson) emotionally distant. Racked by nightmares and sensory flashbacks, Suzy finds readjustment to domestic life a bit hard. Suzy’s connection, however real or imagined, with fellow platoon member Paul Reynolds (Andrew Knott, who slightly resembles Edward Norton’s hypothetical younger English brother) only further exacerbates tension between she and her husband Mark (Mel Raido), who is also a soldier. As they try fitfully to reconnect, Mark’s insecurities and fairly nasty temper eventually boil over, leading Suzy to make a discovery that questions whether they have a future together.

Ignoring the fact that In Our Name comes across like that recent Saturday Night Live movie trailer parody of a thickly-accented English crime drama — most pronounced in scenes with Suzy’s sister Marie (Janine Leigh), and between Mark and his drinking buddies — the main problem with Welsh’s film is the rather familiar trajectory of its dramatic plotting, which touches almost all of the expected bases, at a leisurely clip. Flashbacks and other post-traumatic stress indicators? Check. A war-zone victim who reminds the troubled protagonist of his/her own offspring? Check. The covering up of post-traumatic stress problems so as not to damage chances at a military promotion? Check. Sexual frustration between man and wife upon reunion? Check. Paranoia and acting out over (perceived) infidelities or other signs of independence? Check. Lots of alcohol and flared tempers? Check. It’s not particularly that any of this material is terribly rendered, it’s just that it is mostly similar to what audiences have seen before in Stop-Loss, Brothers, American Son, Home of the Brave or any number of other, older return-from-war movies.

Peppered in amidst this rote drama, however, are a few uncommon and therefore quite interesting scenes, including an extended political discussion/argument with an immigrant cabbie (Shah Amin), and some scenes which really dig into Suzy’s attempts to reconnect with her daughter. Excepting a strange dedication (“To the thousands of servicemen and women who have been incarcerated in British prisons after attempting to return to civilian life”) that seems to exculpate its subjects from individual responsibility, Welsh’s movie is a seemingly sincere cinematic tip of the cap to members of the British military for their service, and a recognition of war’s inherent nastiness and emotional toll.

Aiding Welsh in this enterprise is Froggatt, who, as previously mentioned, gives a nice performance. Her turn isn’t showy, just solid across the board; she coaxes an emotional investment out of the audience. Cinematographer Sam Case also delivers some fine work. Unfortunately, they and the rest of the cast labor in service of a story that is — sadly, on several levels — all too recognizable.
For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (BBC Films/Front Row Films, R, 89 minutes)

The son of two doctors, Richard Raskind was a charismatic scholar-athlete and skirt-chaser at Yale who went on to graduate from medical school and continue his training as an ophthalmologist in the Navy. Raskind was also, however, an inveterate cross-dresser who for more than two decades grappled with confusion over issues of sexual identity. Later in life — after a five-year marriage and even the birth of a son — 41-year-old Raskind completed a sex change operation that he’d contemplated for years. Taking up the name Renée Richards and moving to California as part of the transformation, he (now she) went on to enter and win a handful of circuit-level tennis matches, and eventually enter into a protracted legal battle to win the right to play in the 1977 U.S. Open. Director Eric Drath’s Renée, which recently debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival, tells the story of this transsexual trailblazer, shining a spotlight — whatever ones thinks of its subject — on a remarkable reservoir of personal perseverance.

Renée is fairly gripping, but chiefly just because of its subject matter, and the somewhat discombobulating sight of Richards, who is a weird blend of the skeletal and ethereal. Renée also benefits from its streamlined brevity; at a crisp, cool 78 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome. Still, one has to wonder about the subconscious motivations of a self-described “private person” who has a sex change operation, leaves behind a family and moves across the country, but then enters a high-profile tennis tournament knowing that any success will likely hoist them into the public arena. Richards’ hard-knock story and life is an amazing one, still laced with pockets of untapped mystery and intrigue. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (ESPN Films/Live Star Entertainment, unrated, 78 minutes)

A tapestral suspense drama about the intertwined romantic fates of a
quartet of Baton Rouge residents — each wounded in their own way, and
some more freshly than others — The Ledge exhibits a willingness
and desire to let its characters bat back and forth opposing
philosophies of life and faith more frequently found on display in
literature or off-Broadway theater. An interesting character study
only half-successfully masquerading as a kind of specifically plotted
romantic thriller, writer-director Matthew Chapman’s movie resembles
the smart and sensitive but still gangly teenager pushed out of the
door, wearing clothes they really don’t want to wear, to the party they
really don’t wish to attend.

The Ledge unfolds largely in flashback, with hotel manager Gavin Nichols (Charlie Hunnam) perched high atop a building, seemingly ready to plunge to his death. Detective Hollis Lucelli (Terrence Howard) is dispatched to try to talk him down, and Gavin feeds him a hell of a revelation — he has to stand there until noon, and then jump, or someone else will die. The bulk of the movie, then, is comprised of Gavin’s story to Hollis, though complicated by the fact that the latter has just found out that he is sterile, and therefore not the biological father of the two children he shares with his wife.

On the recommendation of an employee, Gavin hires Shana Harris (Liv Tyler, shifting her demure smile into overdrive), who as coincidence would have it has also just moved in down the hall from Gavin with her husband Joe (Patrick Wilson). A friendly get-together between the couple and Gavin and his gay roommate Chris (Chris Gorham) deteriorates when Joe’s religious fundamentalism is revealed. Slowly, Joe’s controlling and contrarian nature begins to chafe at Shana, and erode her gratefulness at saving her from a bad past. Gavin and Shana orbit around one another for a bit, but eventually succumb to physical temptation. This finally escalates into a battle of wills freighted with metaphorical import between believer and non-believer.

Writer-director Matthew Chapman’s ambition and intellectual leanings help drive and push The Ledge in interesting ways. The film’s dialogue is thoughtful throughout with respect to its character’s feelings, if sometimes a tad inorganic in its religious and philosophical debate. It’s rare, the movie that even tries to explore these different belief systems and the sorts of tensions they create, and The Ledge accomplishes this without shortchanging the honesty or emotional integrity of any of its characters. It’s also sincerely (if not primarily) romantic; Hunnam and Tyler have a nice chemistry, and the latter in particular captures how feminine vulnerability can sometimes slowly melt into attraction if met with the warmth of an honest and respectful embrace.

The film’s chief demerit is that the framing device of its conceit is beyond silly; it ignores the fact that the deadline imposed upon Gavin is inarguably better spent explaining his situational ultimatum rather than telling Hollis his story. Also, all of the thematic parallelism with Hollis feels like an overreach, and falls flat. The Ledge would be a leaner, more effective piece of entertainment — and hardly any less intelligent — if it jettisoned its awkward cold opening, in which Hollis learns of his sterility, and instead just reoriented itself as mostly a flashback tale of infidelity gone awry, and its terrible consequences. Narrative strain is hardly the most egregious cinematic sin, however, especially in a world with so much cookie-cutter movie product. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films/Sundance Now, R, 100 minutes)