Amazing things happen every day, all the world over, but the perils of sticking too closely to chronological fact in the cinematic adaptation of what by most accounts is an interesting true story are amply demonstrated in The Chameleon, an emotionally opaque drama about a wayward European youngster who — with the help of a deeply dysfunctional family, each of whom perhaps has different reasons for wanting to believe — passes himself off as a missing Louisiana teen before finally being outed by federal investigators. A solidly sketched sense of place can’t elevate this torpid tale, which lurches awkwardly to and fro, seemingly most hamstrung by a case of protagonist hot potato.

Nicholas Randall went missing when he was 12 years old. Four years later, his fractured family receives word that he’s been located in France, suffering from localized amnesia but telling a most extraordinary and terrible story, of being kidnapped, raped and tortured for years on end. Sister Kathy (Lost‘s Emilie de Ravin, above right) physically identifies him and brings this young man (Marc-Andre Grondin, above left) home to his small Louisiana hometown. Nicholas’ mother, Kimberly Miller (Ellen Barkin, in a gritty performance), however, barely speaks to him, and his older, ex-junkie brother, Brendan (Nick Stahl), can scarcely seem to contain his violent impulses around him.

While “Nicholas” tries to fit in, FBI agents Jennifer Johnson (Famke Janssen) and Dan Price (Tory Kittles, doing a cut-rate Denzel Washington impression) sense something fishy about this news story, and pump their boss (Nick Chinlund) to let them dig further. When they figure out the young man is indeed an impostor, it sets off a chain reaction of assorted bizarre behavior by the aforementioned family members, raising questions about whether this Frenchman’s crimes and head games are the worst of this messy situation.

Taken from a French journalist’s nonfiction book of the same name, The Chameleon‘s screenplay, by director Jean-Paul Salome and Natalie Carter, is seemingly hewed to conform to as exact of a chronological replication of events as possible. The problem is that this robs the movie of any sense of audience identification, or a greater momentum. We know definitively by the 30-minute mark that Grondin’s character is not Nicholas, yet we crucially do not get into the impostor’s head, rendering later passages — an abortive cat-and-mouse sequence where he summons Jennifer to a dive bar, seemingly to establish the publicly verifiable impression of her stalking him — lame and impotent.

Repeatedly, The Chameleon‘s plotting works against its better interests. A straight investigatory approach would work fine, yet the full middle third of the movie unfolds after the FBI has established this Nicholas to be a fraud, but also after (in a laughably brief scene) he is taken back in by Kathy, “because he’s still a minor.” (Are minors perpetrating crimes not subject to detention?) Instead of plumbing deeper into the divisions within the family, however, Salome and his charges try to tease along a sense of ambiguity — which means none of the townspeople can say anything about or approach Nicholas, while other characters like Kathy’s husband (Brian Geraghty) are required to act with a thunderously stupid incuriousity, saying things like, “Nicholas, or not Nicholas — I don’t know anymore, and I don’t care!”

The Chameleon earns minor points for not devolving into empty, skulking menace, but then again I gather that was never part of the original story. The film’s strength, undeniably, is its rooted sense of place, and authentic location. Shooting in Baton Rouge, Salome, production designer Martina Buckley and the rest of his crew achieve an engaging sense of grimy, swampland authenticity on a budget that had to be fairly lean. Unfortunately, it’s in the service of a grifter’s tale that’s emotionally crippled, no matter how emotionally motivated its confused central figure supposed to be. Note: In addition to opening in theaters, The Chameleon is currently available on VOD. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (LLeju Productions, R, 93 minutes)

A fanciful teen travelogue with the requisite number of tall dark strangers, Monte Carlo charts a small town girl’s travels through Europe after high school graduation, where she ironically finds herself by assuming another person’s identity. More than a bit silly and contrived, but so agreeably cast and well executed as to certainly mitigate these shortcomings for its core audience, the film is a pleasant slice of re-worked, tween-targeted entertainment — diverging wildly from its source material, a novel by Jules
Bass, and starring Selena Gomez, Katie Cassidy (above) and Leighton Meester — that should find embrace from fans of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, as well as their younger siblings. Gorgeous production design and superb costuming and girlie accoutrements help float this improbably romantic adventure and lend it an airy grace, as does a score from composer Michael Giacchino that classily evokes swirling romance without hitting antecedent influences directly on the nose. (20th Century Fox, PG, 109 minutes)

A dramatic competition title at the Los Angeles Film Festival, writer-director Amber Sealey’s How To Cheat is a seriocomic depiction of the messiness of modern marriage, and the temptation of infidelity. On the surface, a minor sort of thematic companion piece might be something like Kate Aselton’s The Freebie, in which she starred with Dax Shepard as a married couple who, trying to liven up their stagnant sex life, agree to mutual one-night-only, no-strings-attached hall passes, only to find discord and regret in their decision. Sealey’s movie, however, is a bit more subjectively focused and channeled through the male perspective, while also glancingly recalling the sort of Silverlake “diorama-dramas” of multimedia artist Miranda July, though quite without the same precious handmade qualities found therein.

In short, How To Cheat is the story of a married Los Angeles couple, Mark (Kent Osborne) and Beth (Sealey), who seem stuck in a rut, even as they continue trying, unsuccessfully, to conceive a child. The invasive prying and cooing of some friends who are themselves newbie parents certainly doesn’t help matters, and Mark, a towncar driver driven to distraction by the stories of sexual conquest of his friend (Gabriel Diamond), turns to online dating. Upfront about his marriage, and desire for a strings-free extracurricular sexual relationship, Mark is met with mostly sneers and slaps. He finally finds a willing receptacle… err, partner, but after his fling with Louise (Amanda Street), Mark finds himself having to tend to that relationship in slightly unexpected fashion — which is in a manner reminiscent, though in far less of a madcap fashion, of the Rachel Boston-Noah Bean comedy The Pill, which recently debuted at the Dances With Films festival. The truth eventually outs, leading to tough choices for all those involved.

Sealey’s low-budget movie is shot in an engagingly raw style, and its performances — rewarded with a Best Ensemble Performance award at the Los Angeles Film Festival — are admirably free of vanity. As an actress, Sealey has a pinch of that same vulnerable charm of Catherine Keener, and a kind of atypical sexiness. Osborne, meanwhile, emanates an oddball sympathetic quality, even when he’s not doing much; he looks like Mark Duplass crossed with Ray Romano, and kind of acts like the same, with perhaps a pinch of Garry Shandling.

So why, then, does How To Cheat never really take sail? Part of the reason is that Sealey is caught up in indie posing. The film opens, with some floppy male nudity, in a manner that says this is fundamentally a comedy, so there’s no need to really take seriously any of its feelings or thematic underpinnings, or certainly Mark’s quasi-articulated fears of becoming invisible to Beth, just needed for fertilization to “complete” their family snapshot. Other cutesy touches unfurl, such as a woman presented to seem like a therapist (Paulette Osborne, Kent’s real-life mother) but that in short order turns out to be Mark’s mom. This bit is never particularly paid off, and when the movie pivots into more serious terrain, then, it just comes across as kind of off-key and false.

On a technical level, How To Cheat is a solidly enough realized indie film that one need not bear any lasting animosity toward. But it doesn’t possess any of the dark or snappish fun one might think its title augers, and neither does it connect or linger in an emotional way. It imparts no particular lessons, it just is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Part Participation/Buffalo Moon Films, R, 87 minutes)

One of the interesting things about international genre cinema is witnessing how long and in what ways Hollywood and breakthrough American independent movies often trickle down and influence aspirant filmmakers. With the Sundance entry Trollhunter, Norwegian commercial helmer and debut writer-director André Ovredal delivers in fitful fashion on a simple premise that its title reflects quite literally.

The story, framed in a mock-documentary format, centers around three college kids who set out with a video camera to investigate mysterious occurrences in the nearby mountains and woods. After tracking down a grizzled bounty hunter, Hans (Otto Jespersen), a sort of Norwegian Van Helsing, they convince him to let them tag along, and learn of a sprawling governmental cover-up of the existence of trolls.

Trollhunter‘s special effects work is impressive, especially for a low-budget effort. And some of the scenes are incredibly imaginative in their quirky detail, as when a group of Polish subcontractors posing as painters start wrangling over the price of a bear carcass used to frame the aftereffects of an incident as a mauling, or when a veterinarian explains why some trolls explode and others turn to stone when exposed to light.

Still, for all its technical accomplishment and cultural specificity — including some natural scenic beauty, wonderfully captured by cinematographer and sole camera operator Hallvard Bræin — Trollhunter never really clicks on all cylinders. It’s mostly droll, but it doesn’t consistently foment either dread or delight, owing mainly to the need for sharper characterizations. Part of what made The Blair Witch Project so successful was a real sense of bickering divide and tension amongst the characters. That never develops here, and so the amusing moments aren’t quite steady enough and don’t gather enough downhill momentum to qualify the movie as anything more than a cultural curio. (Magnet, PG-13, 103 minutes)

A remarkable snapshot of underclass life, love, humor and despair, Position Among the Stars, which picked up the Special World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and recently played at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is an utterly absorbing and strikingly humane nonfiction film that, in non-judgmental nor holier-than-thou fashion, locates the universality of human struggle in charting the tumultuous ups and downs of an extended Indonesian family trying to work their way out of the slums.

Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich takes as his subjects the Shamsuddins, a Jakarta family whom he previously followed as their country shook off the three-decade rule of President Suharto (2001’s The Eye of the Day) and experienced a rise in Islamic power and influence (2004’s Shape of the Moon). While there’s obviously some overlap, one need not be at all familiar with those movies, as Position Among the Stars, after a bit of a slow start, digs into Indonesia’s fast-changing society and various sociocultural issues and problems in a very relatable manner. Grandmother Rumidjah (above right) is openly Christian, but her son Bakti (above left) converts to Islam, he confesses, because of peer pressure. Getting a government job processing welfare payments, Bakti tries to scrape together enough money to help put his niece, Tari, through college, but finds himself hiding “luxury items” (like a television) when fellow bureaucrats come to check on and process a similar claim for eldest son Dwi.

From scripted films like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! and recent Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire to documentaries like Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa, there is of course a rich history of movies that seek to soak up as much grungy, grimy slum-land atmosphere as they can, frequently to illustrate just how much better Western audiences have it. Helmrich, though, neither luxuriates nor shies away from his setting. He simply presents it as it is. There’s the grotesque spectacle of roaches scattering to and fro, and a rat and cat squaring off, but Position Among the Stars is also often quite funny, as when Bakti and Tari conspire to have a joke at Rumidjah’s expense about Tari’s high school exams. The film shows that, issues of comfortability and living condition notwithstanding, family dynamics are remarkably the same the world over.

In the Shamsuddin family, Helmrich, who also serves as one of the movie’s two camera operators, has a group of subjects who are so completely at ease with his presence as to give Position Among the Stars the complete and total feeling of an exhaustively staged drama. There are no weepy, direct-address confessionals, nor sideways glances at the camera’s lens. Everything plays out in straightforward fashion. When Bakti physically loses it after his wife Sri kills the beta goldfish he was training to fight to use in street betting matches, or Rumidjah says to Bakti, “You failed in life, why should [Tari] have to fail too?” the audience experiences these not as contrived explosions, but the uneasy natural product of months of simmering tensions.

Abetting this is the film’s stunning visual style and editing. Its savvy, beautifully engaging cinematographic expression is best characterized as conforming to the single-shot methodology of the French New Wave, which means that dozens of real-life moments are pieced together to create a grander temporal reality. The deeper the film progresses, then, the more we know and feel about these characters. An intimate, achingly real and heartfelt portrait of some of the bonds and binds that we all share, Position Among the Stars is a first-rate third-world journey worth taking. For the film’s trailer, click here; for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Scarabee Films/HBO Films, unrated, 111 minutes)

A propagandistic telling of the origins of the Chinese Communist Party on occasion of its 90th anniversary, co-directors Huang Jianxin and Han Sanping’s Beginning of the Great Revival encompasses war, crumbling social institutions, societal upheaval, melodrama and plenty of political backbiting and gamesmanship, all in a package to be perhaps more admired than enjoyed. For fans of sweeping historical tales, the film’s technical accomplishment and narrative scope win out, by only the slimmest of margins, over plotting that is stodgy and characterizations that are thin and functionally sketched. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 124 minutes)

Monte Hellman’s first film in more than two decades, Road To Nowhere, is, whatever else one says about it, first and foremost a work that wouldn’t exist were it not for other movies. A referential slice of film noir which enjoyed its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, recently screened as part of a retrospective of the director’s work at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, and now opens wider in Los Angeles and other markets throughout the summer, Road To Nowhere takes grab-bag elements and splintered fractions of dramatic conflict — blackmail, a murder mystery, dubious identities, a woman in trouble — and flings them at the screen, excusing any rigidity of plotting by having certain characters involved in the making of a (same-named) movie, scenes of which are then interspersed throughout. The result is a jumbled, unengaging mess that counts on the awestruck quietness of an audience certain that the film’s makers are pursuing “art.”

It’s simpler and perhaps just as instructive to talk about what Road To Nowhere lacks as much as what it has, given its putative areas of interest. The big, easy thematic touchstones in the script, by former Variety executive editor Steven Gaydos, are the three works of David Lynch, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, that make use of multiple and/or fractured identities, film production, and more generalized Hollywood deceit. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly compelling about any of the film’s characters, and certain no woozy charm or charged sense of danger in its construction.

Is there a moodiness to cinematographer Josep Civit’s work that informs a larger, accumulating sense of tension? No. Are there moments of pin-prick terror or dark comedy? No. Are there breathtaking performances, alternately eerie, heartrending, erotically charged or flat-out unnerving? No. Is there at least a teasing, palpable sense of how all these events fit together, and a larger point or singular emotion? No. A mere sense of momentum, then, perhaps? No. Hellman — who’s achieved a sort of industry-insider legendary status due in large part to Two-Lane Blacktop and “discovering” Quentin Tarantino, and producing his film debut — dutifully pulls the levers of Gaydos’ script, but there is no slickness, nor danger, nor joy. There is no “there” there, in other words. Road To Nowhere is, sadly, aptly titled, because it is exists merely as a yawning collection of indulgent scenes. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 121 minutes)

When has justice been served, and a criminal debt paid? When a victim’s family announces its forgiveness, and lobbies for the release of imprisoned? When new evidence casts a pall over a guilty plea? When an inmate is diagnosed with a terminal illness? These and other questions are at the heart of director Yoav Potash’s Crime After Crime, a documentary that spotlights the extraordinarily heartrending case of Deborah Peagler, a woman convicted in 1983, under a variety of extenuating circumstances, in the death of her abusive spouse, who it turns out pimped her out while she was still in high school and sexually abused his stepdaughter.

Potash delivers a methodical and effective but very posed drama, leaning heavily on pro bono attorneys Nadia Costa (above right) and Joshua Safran (above left) as his guides through the case, even though Peagler appears throughout as well. The evidence the movie cites is compelling, and the fact that the film spans such a lengthy period of time gives it an additional, natural dramatic pull; unexpected, complicating factors pop up, repeatedly lengthening the odds for Peagler. Still, while the film chronicles emotionally charged subjects like sexual and physical abuse, as well as unjust imprisonment, it has a fairly dispassionate heart, which is something of a blessing or a curse depending on one’s point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Independent Pictures/Oprah Winfrey Network, unrated, 93 minutes)

Most big screen comedies — even a lot of independently mounted affairs — trade in the familiar, at least on a narrative level, operating under the assumption that audiences want to see witty banter and outlandish comeuppance visited upon recognizable scenarios that are easily transposed to a viewer’s own life, whether that’s workplace misery or the fickle nature of love. It’s unusual, then, to see something like The Best and the Brightest, a movie which eschews a more broadly relatable area of focus in favor of something much more specific and divisive, and with a bunch of warped characters and an over-the-top tone to boot.

The film centers around Sam and Jeff Jasinkis (Bonnie Somerville and Neil Patrick Harris), a married Connecticut couple who, with the vague goal of “conquering the big city,” move to New York with their five-year-old daughter Beatrice in tow. Desperate to get her into a top-flight private school the ensuing fall, the pair find nothing but bemused smiles and years-long waiting lists. Lacking connections, they hire a special consultant, Sue Lemon (Amy Sedaris), who sets up a meeting at Coventry Private School with chairwoman Katharine Heilmann (Jenna Stern). There, the transcription of a raunchy IM chat from Jeff’s sleazy friend, Clark (Peter Serafinowicz), is mistaken for trailblazing “poetry,” the artistic occupation rather arbitrarily assigned Jeff by Sue in order to impress the powers that be. Lies are then compounded, as Jeff and Sam work overtime to circumvent Katharine’s objections to their suitability for Coventry’s single open slot, and convince a randy, philandering board member (Christopher McDonald) and his politico wife (Kate Mulgrew) of the deserving nature of their daughter.

The cast certainly delivers some amusing performances. Recent Tony Awards host Harris has impeccable comic timing, and wields his lines smartly. Similarly, Sedaris (though playing a needlessly amped character whose caffeinated energy hijacks a couple scenes) has a knack for locating small, telling bits of physical humor or canted inflection amidst her torrent of dialogue. (She even rocks a New Kids on the Block T-shirt at one point.) McDonald and Mulgrew, meanwhile, evince a nice rapport as a rich, for-show couple who take delight in needling and cutting down one another (Sample exchange: “I don’t care what anyone says, you looked hetero as hell out there.” “My God, you’re droll…”), all with the knowledge that their arrangement benefits a lavish lifestyle.

Working from a script co-written with Michael Jaeger, Josh Shelov, making his feature film directorial debut, oversees a production of undoubtedly challenged means, so there isn’t a lot of visual flash or pizzazz, which might have benefited the material. The novelty of setting most recommends this effort, honestly. While a lot of its dialogue pops, the movie’s chief problem, really, is the fact that it doesn’t seem to wholly embrace the arguably detestable nature of its characters. Having the best interests of one’s child at heart is a universal story or concern; maniacally charting the trajectory of their elite education before grade school considerably less so.

The Best and the Brightest has some fun with Sam’s increasing fretfulness and histrionics, and stands for a while on the precipice of something darker, of all-out lunacy. A lot of these characters are sociopathic, deranged and/or wildly irresponsible, but Shelov only occasionally fully cashes in on those traits. The Best and the Brightest would be better if it were bit darker, and not about any of the best instincts of parental protection, but instead more wholly their corruptive influence. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (PMK-BNC, R, 93 minutes)

A recent premiere at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival, as part of its summer showcase, director Lisa F. Jackson’s Sex Crimes Unit is an emotionally pulverizing documentary look inside the special, same-named division of the New York City District Attorney’s office. An incredible snapshot of justice deferred but thankfully not denied, the movie will continue to air on HBO as part of its summer documentary series. “Entertaining” is of course very much not the right word to use, but it is uplifting to see and feel and know and have ratified and celebrated that, in a world of much darkness, there are those who fight for right. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Jackson Films/HBO Films, unrated, 87 minutes)

A creative lifestyle breeds a certain amount of introspection in and of itself, as, often, does big city life. Combine those two facts along with the ironclad reality of further navel-gazing that the downward-spiraling cost of feature film production in the digital age encourages, and one has a fairly good idea of the framework that underpins A Love Affair of Sorts, an intellectually restless new indie film that, not entirely unlike Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi’s Paper Heart, blurs the lines of introverted romance, art project and mockumentary.

Working from a loose story concocted by its two stars, A Love Affair of Sorts unfolds in Los Angeles over the span of about a week during the Christmas holiday season, and centers on a lonely painter and multimedia artist, David (director David Guy Levy). Already kicking around an idea to film himself as he interacts with the world, David meets Hungarian nanny Enci (Lili Bordan) in a bookstore, when he catches her on his ever-present flip-camera while she may or may not be trying to shoplift a tome. After a bit of back-and-forth, they strike up a friendship and enter into a pact to film one another, with the ethereal, esoteric goal of revealing and capturing their “true selves.” A more tentative romantic relationship then blooms between the duo, complicated by Enci’s quasi-boyfriend, Boris (Ivan Kamaras), and David’s brutally honest friend, Jonathan (Jonathan Beckerman). Are David and/or Enci merely posing and preening for the camera, or are they really falling in love?

It doesn’t give too much away to say that A Love Affair of Sorts is both a delicate, mumblecore-esque romance, and a deconstruction of sorts of the same, delving into a modern generation’s penchant for stiff-arming the messiness of reality through the insertion and embrace of a technological filter, and a simultaneous discomfort with having cameras turned on themselves. (Everyone’s the star of their own reality show, but it’s not always easy or pleasant to submit to someone else’s view of us.) There’s a nervous bundle of ideas and energy here, in other words. Unfortunately, the romance is never particularly believable, and the movie’s ideas and ambitions don’t really coalesce in a memorably meaningful way, or even come close.

Part of the production story behind the movie is that A Love Affair of Sorts is the first feature film to be shot entirely on flip cameras, an unverifiable novelty that allows for a small handful of striking verite compositions, but nonetheless eventually comes across as an excuse for a sort of stylistic sloppiness. There are parts here that are somewhat interesting. In need of much better plotting and execution, however, this Affair just wasn’t meant to be. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin, unrated, 91 minutes)

A well acted and nicely detailed if somewhat familiarly plotted immigrant drama, Chris Weitz’s A Better Life shines a light on the razor’s edge of poverty, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send the undocumented working poor tumbling into bankruptcy, criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise.

Single father Carlos Riquelme (Demián Bichir, quite good) lives in East Los Angeles and works as a gardener. His son Luis (José Julián) is a good if lonely and at-risk kid, surrounded by potentially dangerous influences. When Carlos’ truck gets stolen, it sets off a chain of events that threaten to tear him and his son apart.

It sounds perhaps weird or counterintuitive, but a bit less interaction between Carlos and his son would have actually spoken volumes about his feelings for him. In ditching gangland menace and concentrating more on Carlos’ pent-up inner struggle and feelings regarding his perpetual absenteeism, occupational shame and the like — powerful adult feelings that kids, who typically don’t come to regard their parents as actual people until sometime their 20s if ever, can’t understand or appreciate — the movie would till new narrative ground.

As is, A Better Life‘s tonal consistency and cultural and geographical authenticity are amongst its strongest selling points, particularly for fans of films like Quinceañera, Biutiful and In America; it’s firmly rooted in a place that communicates social substratum without beating you over the head with it. Immigrant life is wildly different depending on region, but the specificity of this portrait still trades in universal emotions. (Summit, PG-13, 97 minutes)

Two hundred million years ago, turtles were exclusively creatures of the land. Though their ancestors were driven into the oceans by the predatory prowess of dinosaurs, even today loggerhead turtles retain the unusual practice of birthing their young on the beach, setting the scene for one of the most amazing and improbable stories of new life on Earth. Narrated by Miranda Richardson, director Nick Stringer’s Turtle: The Incredible Journey charts this fascinating tale, and does so in a fashion as visually captivating as it is informative.

The product of more than two years of filming, Turtle opens on a beach in Florida, where we witness buried hatchlings finally burst through the sand into daylight, after almost three days of struggling blindly upward. What follows is astounding, as these delicate babies — no bigger than the palm of a child’s hand, and still soft-shelled — instinctively make their way to the sea, past a maze of hungry crabs and swooping pelicans. If they’re lucky enough to make it that far, the swirling surf batters and knocks them around, while they struggle to make it past the breaking waves and out to calmer waters. Fifty miles of nonstop swimming awaits, where they then try to hook on to a patch of seaweed that will finally afford them their first living sleep, and hopefully get picked up by the Gulf Stream, carrying them further north. Watching this unfold, it’s easy to understand why the mortality rate for loggerhead turtles is 50 percent in the first several hours of their above-ground existence.

A lot of nature documentaries aim for elegant absorption, unfolding in a mannered style at a delicate remove. But Stringer’s movie, with its intense, close-up cinematography and smart framing and editorial choices, unfolds as an almost entirely subjective experience. The result is invigorating, particularly in its first third, which comes across like the animal kingdom equivalent of storming the beaches at Normandy. With each new hurdle these baby turtles face alone — from the aforementioned predators to the perils of the stagnant Sargasso Sea, devoid of currents or winds — one’s appreciation of their indomitable spirit increases by multiple factors.

Perhaps most impressively, Stringer doesn’t let the style of his telling overwhelm the material, or cloud his instinct for narrative. Melanie Finn’s script for Richardson’s narration nicely juggles the difficulties of making the stories of these turtles palatable for different age groups, all without pandering or sacrificing factual context, as DisneyNature’s African Cats unfortunately did earlier this year. And it undercuts not one iota the visceral and emotional charge of, say, seeing a baby loggerhead turtle struggle with trying to digest plastic jetsam, get hooked by a commercial fishing line, or barely escape the clutches of a Portuguese man-of-war.

Just as much as there is a value in human empathy, there is a certain value that comes from knowing and understanding the life journeys of other creatures on this planet, because it lends awareness to our innate interconnectedness. Turtle reflects this, in a warm and involving manner. It edifies and illuminates in equal measure, and is a film that truly an entire family can enjoy. For more information on the movie, click here. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Hannover House/SeaWorld Pictures, PG, 76 minutes)