If we’re keeping tabs on the evolving filmography of ex-mixed martial arts fighter and future The Expendabelles centerpiece Gina Carano, In the Blood, from director John Stockwell, slots considerably below Haywire, her at once lithe and bruising collaboration with Stephen Soderbergh. And yet there’s still a certain ramshackle appeal to the film, a starchy, Taken-meets-Turistas revenge picture which could just as easily be titled Woman on Fire. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 109 minutes)

An extremely low-boil wartime farce that contents itself to wring quiet smiles and silent laughs from viewers, A Farewell To Fools unfolds in Nazi-occupied Romania in 1944, where a group of pious townspeople try to prevail upon the town idiot to sacrifice himself for their benefit after a German soldier is discovered murdered. While it doesn’t exactly pull any muscles reaching for unerring period-piece credibility, director Bogdan Dreyer’s film, starring Gérard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel, more or less works as a sort of lightly affected, darkly comedic parable. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media/Shoreline Entertainment, PG-13, 84 minutes)

There will be a time when young, aspiring indie filmmakers return predominantly to shooting what they know, which will give us a surge in chatty, beer-soaked navel-gazing — a quality that in many ways would seem almost radical in today’s cinematic environment. This is not yet that time, however, as the extraordinarily derivative, forthrightly titled and essentially pointless Alien Abduction confirms. Eschewing more sophisticated and higher-degree-of-difficulty moodiness for lots of panicked thrashing about, this found-footage horror tale is an exercise in well-intentioned tedium. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 82 minutes)

An indie horror movie that makes decent use of its real-life setting, but otherwise runs aground fairly early in its already concise running time, unable to come up with enough incidents to generate any legitimate sustained suspense, Happy Camp represents one of the particular perils of a low-budget, calling card-type film. Piecemeal, the scene-to-scene work of young multi-hyphenates Josh Anthony, Anne Taylor and Michael Barbuto is fine. But absent a story that generates any sort of clearly defined stakes or rooting audience interest, the movie elicits more of a yawn than any lasting impression. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Gravitas Ventures/Flower Films, unrated, 74 minutes)

A tense, knotty (in more ways than one) valentine of leaching amorality that evokes memories of the infamous Milgram Experiment, the darkly comedic psychological horror film Cheap Thrills is a satisfyingly warped walk on the wild side. Playing puppet master to wonderful effect, director E.L. Katz oversees a superb, smartly constrained technical package and a rich quartet of gripping performances, resulting in a violent, emotionally charged romp with surprising undertones of social commentary.



Cheap Thrills unfolds in Los Angeles, where would-be writer Craig Daniels (Pat Healy) is feeling the pinch of his occupational failings, what with a 15-month-old son and the eviction notice that greets him on his door as he heads out to work at an oil change establishment. Later in the day, he’s fired — the result of some unfortunate downsizing. Unable to immediately face his wife, Audrey (Amanda Fuller), Craig heads out for a drink at a dive bar, where he runs into an old friend from high school, Vince (Ethan Embry).

In short order, Craig and Vince meet a pair of generous partiers, Colin (David Koechner) and his young wife Violet (Sara Paxton). At first they seem only a bit quirky, but when they all repair to Colin’s well-appointed Hollywood Hills home, it’s not long before an underlying unscrupulousness is revealed. A series of friendly bets quickly become decidedly less so; soon Craig and Vince are shitting in Colin’s neighbor’s house and then much, much worse — all for cash that Colin doles out without a care. A grim race to the bottom of the ethical barrel ensues.

In a movie like Saw, the villainous Jigsaw had a rationalized motivation — and indeed, what might be described as an overarching worldview. That’s somewhat lacking here in what motivates Colin and Violet (at least in more explicitly underlined fashion), but the script for Cheap Thrills, by Trent Haaga and David Chirchirillo, deftly taps into latent fraternal competitiveness and socioeconomic class conflict between friends. As it unspools, it also assays moral rot, and the fissure points in the America that exists for the “rest of us” majority when one-percenters see fit to make entertainment out of our financial desperation. The allegory connects with a bracing thump, even if it’s not the main thing.

On a more immediate level, Cheap Thrills works because of its superlative cast, all of whom deliver wonderful performances. While still lined with larger-than-life notes, Koechner gets to showcase a darker nature than his supporting roles in movies like the Anchorman films and A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy have afforded. Paxton, meanwhile, imbues her blithe vixen with an unsettling detachment that registers outside of the movie. It’s Healy, though, who’s the film’s anchor. Clean-scrubbed and bespectacled, but with healthy pinches of anxiety and exasperation, he has the perfect countenance for Cheap Thrills — a surrogate for Everyman America, struggling through a dark game that may or may not be totally rigged but either way is surely damaging to the soul. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, unrated, 87 minutes)

Cineastes the world over can readily agree that Catherine Deneuve, who came of age as the muse of a number of influential filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s, is an enchanting screen presence. And they can presumably agree that quality, leading roles for women as they age — complex roles in which they drive the action and don’t stand as an accessory to the men in their characters’ lives — are at a premium. Reasonable minds can agree on these things and still not walk away thrilled and uplifted by On My Way, the road trip venture writer-director Emmanuelle Bercot crafted especially for Deneuve. A competition premiere at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, this testy and at times offbeat French import, more ramshackle than pleasingly ambling, never gels in a meaningful manner. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its ongoing theatrical engagements, On My Way expands this week in Los Angeles, opening at the Laemmle Playhouse 7, the Laemmle Town Center and the Regal Westpark. (Cohen Media Group, unrated, 116 minutes)

Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s epic take on the epic Biblical story of Noah and the Great Flood is a movie that obliges an epic review, in many respects — more epic than this relatively straightforward appraisal will likely oblige. It’s a big and interesting and evocative and at times sigh-inducing work, for a whole variety of reasons. Boiled down, Noah is also poised somewhere halfway between a work of pure wonder and a more explicitly religious action text, resulting in a film whose fitful energies rather demand one’s attention, even when things aren’t quite working.



Noah centers on the title character (Russell Crowe), the last of the Antediluvian patriarchs, roughly 10 generations removed from the Garden of Eden and the first humans, Adam and Eve. Against the unforgiving backdrop of a barren landscape, Noah lives with his wife Naameh (Jennifer Connelly) and three sons, Ham (Logan Lerman), Shem (Douglas Booth) and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll). After a dream of a violent and deadly flood wiping out all humankind, Noah heads to visit his grandfather, Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins), to seek guidance. En route, Noah and his family happen across a group of slain people and one survivor, a girl named Ila (Emma Watson).

Noah’s conversation with Methuselah sets his mind. Convinced that the Creator wishes to destroy all humankind and start anew, Noah plants a seed from the Garden of Eden and then sets about building an ark to house all the animals of the world — an act which attracts the antagonistic attention of Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), a warrior king descended not from the bloodline of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, like Noah, but the violent Cain.

From his debut film, Pi, on through to The Wrestler and Black Swan, Aronofsky has shown a penchant for obsessive and self-destructive characters. His sixth film is no different. While a family man in the broadest sense, this Noah is also very much of the Old Testament — a stern figure who embraces the cold indifference and vengeance, even, of the task for which he says the Creator has chosen him. For many viewers but especially movement conservatives who like to cherry-pick (or selectively focus on) which aspects of the Bible to take literally, that makes for a third act rife with plenty of uncomfortable moments and insinuations.

Aronofsky and co-writer Ari Handel make a number of other interesting and bold choices, though. They skip past much of the ark-building proper, and the sort of dissent and ridicule that would bolster Noah as a heroic figure, and interweave a few elements that could best be described as magical. Their boldest flourish involves the depiction of the Watchers, fallen angels conceived of here as giant, rock-crusted day laborers on loan from some offshoot of the Transformers series. Plenty of viewers will accept these beings simply as “cool,” but they definitely take some getting used to.

There are moments of hard and simple truth that peek out from the script, here and there. When Naameh plaintively says, “I want my sons to have children — I can’t bear the thought of them dying alone,” it gives us everything we need to know about her character. Noah, though, remains somewhat inscrutable (we witness more one-sided conversations with the Creator than combined complex interactions with Naameh and Methuselah), as does both Tubal-cain (when he bellows, “Your ark, your beasts and all your women now belong to me!” it feels like the progenitor of “All your base are belong to us!“) and the state of the Earth more broadly.

Other swathes of Noah, too, feel wooden and pre-fabricated — or, perhaps more accurately, lest that seem like some sort of awkward, ark-based pun, beholden to investment recoupment. Tubal-cain is an entirely functional foil whose inclusion seems designed to afford some action combat. Composer Clint Mansell, meanwhile, marks the narrative shifts in momentum, and all their attendant emotional markers, with much gusto — too much, really. Noah feels rather self-consciously grand at times. It doesn’t have the stomach for severe doubt or deeply interior psychological grappling and reflection; Aronofsky is more connected to the narrative’s mythic qualities, and the lessons they hold. This works in half-measures, but also creates a work that is pro forma in some respects.

Still, there’s a certain undeniable visual grandeur to Noah, which admittedly feels like a particularly imaginative and daring leap into uncertain waters for a big Hollywood studio film. Its general scale and inclusion of the Watchers are one thing, but when Aronofsky aims for Tree of Life-style impressionism, as with Noah’s re-telling of God’s creation of Earth, which unfolds in time-lapse-like fashion that courts a bit of controversy, with its evolutionary stages, it’s utterly mesmerizing. Would that Noah had even more of this. (Paramount, PG-13, 137 minutes)

It’s possible for a movie to confirm the innate filmmaking gifts of its helmer while still not quite succeeding as a standalone film. Such is the case with the artful yet frustrating Hide Your Smiling Faces, directed by Daniel Patrick Carbone. Reminiscent of films like David Gordon Green’s stirring debut, George Washington, and, more recently, Tchoupitoulas and Only the Young, this coming-of-age drama values tone over incident, and pays homage in its own way to the impressionistic moves and rhythms of Terrence Malick, but it also has trouble establishing a strong and memorable identity of its own. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; to visit the film’s eponymous website, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 80 minutes)

Films that honestly and entertainingly assay the early teenage experience removed from lowest-common-denominator gross-out shtick and other emotional cattle-prodding are few and far between, which is a big part of the reason that the altogether charming A Birder’s Guide to Everything feels like such a breath of fresh air. Instead of pandering to one and only one sentiment, this offering — poised pleasantly between quaint and quirky — does entirely right by adolescent feeling, while also leading viewers on an adventure that puts just enough spin on the old familiar road trip formula.



Directed by Rob Meyer, the movie centers on David Portnoy (Kodi Smit-McPhee, above right), a 15-year-old birding fanatic who, along with classmates Peter Nessbaum (Michael Chen) and Timmy Barsky (Alex Wolff), makes up the entire membership roster of his school’s Young Birding Society. David’s love of birds was inherited from time spent with his late mother, and his father, Donald (James Le Gros), hasn’t taken the time to effectively bridge that gap and invest wholeheartedly in his son’s interests.

Of course, Donald is also busy getting ready to wed Juliana (Daniela Lavender), and it’s against this backdrop that an emotionally adrift David snaps a photo of a supposedly extinct duck that hasn’t been glimpsed in North America in over 100 years. After receiving some advice from an eccentric ornithologist, Dr. Lawrence Konrad (Ben Kingsley), David, Peter and Timmy procure a car from Timmy’s cousin and embark on an epic if messily planned quest to track down the migrating bird. Also along for the ride, since she has the high-quality camera which they lack, is Ellen Reeves (Katie Chang). Discoveries of an unexpected nature ensue.

Its title suggests a certain amount of preciousness, but A Birder’s Guide to Everything is both honest and earnest, without sacrificing its sense of humor. The screenplay, written by Meyer and Luke Matheny, is pitched at a perfect, slightly pubescent level that takes into account the libidinal surge of high school (Timmy talks constantly if generically of sexual conquest on the horizon, as yet unrealized) while also embodying the fact that feelings of attraction develop at different rates amongst friends, and before the tipping point of sexual drive turns urges into actions. David, for instance, is more freaked out than titillated when Juliana’s bathrobe slips open, flashing him. Later still, when David, in conversation with Ellen, refers to the acronym shorthand for bird identification — General Impression, Shape and Size — and it phonetically matches a certain slang for male ejaculate, the movie acknowledges the joke without grinding to a halt to overindulge in it. It’s a moment that feels perfectly real, and of the teenage experience, when oftentimes no party wants to elongate an awkward moment by harping on it.

The cast, too, is great, and it especially helps that they’re legitimately age-appropriate for their roles. Smit-McPhee (The Road, Let Me In) has a gangly quality that fits David without over-articulating any air-quote dorkiness. Wolff has a forward-leaning charisma that is nicely modulated, while Chang is lovely, in a very pleasing and yet altogether innocent way. And Kingsley, as a dispenser of advice who eschews role model status, is spot-on — just the sort of slightly off-center, non-blood-related character from whom young adults can glean a life lesson. There’s nary a false note to A Birder’s Guide to Everything — this is a very pleasing movie about adolescent travails that can play to audiences both younger and older. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (Screen Media Films/Focus World, PG-13, 86 minutes)

“Which way do you think you’ll get the most out of my story — believing me or not believing me?” asks the central character in writer-director Lars von Trier’s new film. She’s an emotionally broken, physically beaten sex addict recounting her life less ordinary to an ascetic bachelor with a passion for fly-fishing, but the words might as well be from the filmmaker himself. In Nymphomaniac: Volume I, he’s inviting viewers to come along on a lurid trip, to submit to a survey of longing (emotional as much as sexual) threaded with intellectual riffs big and small, and allusions to dozens of other works.

Despite almost three decades of work in the feature realm as a provocateur of the highest order, von Trier has somehow avoided having his surname turned into an adjective, unlike a number of fellow outlier auteurs. But most of his films have achieved a unique synthesis of the philosophical and confrontational, the clinical and compassionate. In this regard, Nymphomaniac: Volume I is no different. A rigorous and riveting cogitation on sexual liberation, gender double standards, love, lust, sociopathy and any number of the filmmaker’s other obsessions, it’s a personal work that touches upon universal themes and ideas in a way that is inescapably… von Trier-ian? For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 110 minutes)

It may seem difficult to fathom, especially given the degree to which so much present day pop culture resembles a fishing lure designed to catch their capricious attention, but there was a time when teenagers didn’t exist. Sure, there were actual people who were 14, 15 and 16 years old, but they weren’t a demographic entity, to be either pursued or pilloried. Director Matt Wolf’s fascinating new documentary Teenage, then, casts an eye backwards, to that time and the ensuing decades. The result — an engaging collagist work assembled from rare archival material, filmed portraits and voiceover lifted from early 20th century diary entries — is an impressionistic rumination on the birth and, well, development (let’s not say maturation) of youth culture. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 77 minutes)

The chance to portray twins or at-odds characters in a single film is catnip for actors of a certain level of ambition, though not without potential pitfalls. The impulse to chew scenery or present grand differentiation is often difficult to resist. Enemy, though, which reteams Jake Gyllenhaal with Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve (though it was actually shot before that film), finds the actor trading in similarly subdued and thoughtful tones as he did in last year’s well received kidnapping drama. And, adapted from the late Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s 2004 novel The Double, the film offers up more than just a meaty pair of roles for Gyllenhaal. A woozy, mesmeric, danger-infused rumination on identity that triggers tripwires of personal panic and awakened sexual compulsion, Enemy is like a cold glass of water to the face of cinematic formalism. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (A24 Films, R, 90 minutes)

Divergent, the latest big screen stab at adapted young adult franchise lucre, is about a 16-year-old girl who doesn’t fit into one group, who is several different things at the same time, and at odds with herself. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the film, based on the first in a series of best-selling novels by Veronica Roth, is itself two things, and with much friction between them — attractively mounted and boasting some nice performances, but also peddling a thunderously stupid conceit whose dodgy details ask viewers to ignore what they know of basic human psychology.



Divergent is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future within a walled-off Chicago, where, based on personality attributes and virtues, people are divided into five distinct factions as they pass out of adolescence: Erudite, who are the intelligent; Amity, who are the kind and happy; Candor, who are the honest; Abegnation, who are the selfless; and Dauntless, who are the brave. (Oh, there are also those who are factionless, but they’re basically homeless and invisible within this story.)

Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) and her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) are of the ruling Abegnation clan, but disappoint their parents (Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn) when they take their government-mandated personality tests and then choose other clans. Tris’ test actually showed her to possess traits of multiple factions (hence the movie’s title), but this is rare and must be guarded as a secret, she’s advised in hushed tones. Tris opts for Dauntless, and while training with a bunch of new pledges under a taskmaster, Four (Theo James), she eventually stumbles across a conspiracy by Erudite leader Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet) to enlist a compromised Dauntless battalion in an overthrow of the Abegnation.

It’s easy, on a certain level, to understand the inherent young adult appeal of the source material, which trumpets emboldening life lessons like, “Trust yourself!” and “You are more than just one thing!” Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor’s screenplay may have other failings, yet it does a good job of establishing these bona fides out of the gate. But there are all sorts of things that just don’t track, starting with feebly delineated faction inter-relationships and the fact that the entire social order of this world hinges on this aptitude test for teenagers that is binding and super-important (“Faction before blood!”)… except, though, when it’s not, since kids are in the end free to choose their faction. Also, the Dauntless are supposed to protect everyone with an equal level of respect, but some of their members mock the factionless, which undercuts the rigidity of these distinctions and makes it just seem like these are arbitrary clubs with the typical spread of asshole members.

More fundamentally, though, Divergent asks viewers to accept — nay, embrace — a very stupid and poorly articulated worldview. The movie assumes that lost in whatever war that occurred 100 years earlier was all sense of what was known about genuine human behavior — that in the aftermath of a great and violent conflict pitting nation states against one another, the universal salve designed by survivors was… more tribalism, basically? When you have leaders and proponents of the faction system, who are attempting to consolidate their power grip over said mechanism but basically preserve this status quo, says things like, “It goes against human nature, but that’s the weakness we need to eradicate,” it begs the question — do you think your audience is brainless?

Counterbalancing (to a degree) this innately flawed logic is a very attractive technical package. Director Neil Burger oversees a visual palette that’s pleasingly engaging, poised somewhere halfway between grungy disrepair and futuristic rebirth. It helps Divergent feel a bit more real, like there are things with regards to infrastructure that people would get around to fixing (trains, for instance), and other stuff where they’d be like, “Ahh, fuck it.”

Woodley and especially James (looking like a cross between James Van Der Beek and Dave Franco) deliver nice performances, too, a fact which helps mitigate the awfulness of having to watch Winslet play a villain whose motivations are shiftless. But large swaths of Divergent don’t really work, at least not as a stand-alone movie. Conflict takes too long to develop; there’s not really enough intrigue here to hook and hold those outside of the tween and tween-sympathetic set.

Broadly, it’s true that Divergent lays enough groundwork to leave one more sincerely interested in the idea of future installments than a lot of other movies of its ilk. And if one could turn off their brain and simply enjoy the film as one girl’s future-camp coming-of-age story amidst a bunch of fanciful physical fitness routines, it might almost work. Unfortunately, Divergent has to keep reminding viewers of the stupidity at its core, by way of the outside world. That proves a recipe for failure. (Summit/Lionsgate, PG-13, 140 minutes)

A harmless if largely uninspired musical comedy offering that casts Jim Henson’s puppet creations on a globe-trotting adventure, Muppets Most Wanted shrugs, sings, wings and winks its way through a caper narrative, figuring or hoping that simply consistently acknowledging its shambolic narrative will somehow translate as wit. A lesser effort than its predecessor in every way, this cheerful confection will largely appease younger viewers but leave older audiences unstirred. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Disney, PG, 108 minutes)

The Art of the Steal boasts one of those interchangeable and instantly forgettable titles, though in its mind it’s a clever double entendre, since writer-director Jonathan Sobol’s con movie centers around the theft of paintings, sculpture and a Gutenberg-printed fifth holy gospel. See… art! How one feels about that wink and nudge, as well as their personal threshold for colorful characters over engaging plotting, will likely dictate the level of enjoyment they obtain from this derivative but hard-working crime comedy, starring Kurt Russell, Matt Dillon, Jay Baruchel and others. The thing that most recommends The Art of the Steal is the manner in which it basically owns the fact that it’s, ahem, totally familiar. If the plot specifics, which involve counterfeiting and other fake-outs, are basically a huge yawn, Sobol wisely keeps seriousness at bay, infusing his effort with a springy energy. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Weinstein Company/Alliance Films, PG-13, 90 minutes)