An animated automotive espionage adventure (say that quickly five times) that improves upon the leaden moralizing of its predecessor, if not in strikingly original ways, Cars 2 delivers base-level entertainment on a familiarly laid racetrack. While unfolding against a sumptuous visual backdrop, the movie doesn’t have the same adventurousness of spirit that marks Pixar’s best efforts. An utterly delightful new seven-minute short featuring Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story gang uniting to put on an impromptu vacation for Ken and Barbie precedes the feature presentation. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, G, 106 minutes)

British period piece import Toast, playing at a handful of Laemmle theaters in Los Angeles this weekend as part of their “From Britain With Love” series, is a well-acted if somewhat meandering and pedantic coming-of-age story, based on the memoir of Nigel Slater, a popular English food writer, journalist and broadcaster. Fans of EastEnders and all other sorts of across-the-pond television, as well as kitchen-sink dramas in general, will find reward in the detail and clarity of this tale.

The movie opens in Wolverhampton in the late 1960s, where nine-year-old
Nigel (Oscar Kennedy, quite superb and sympathetic) lives with his
mother (Victoria Hamilton) and father (Ken Stott). Nigel seems bright
and curious, about food in particular, but neither of his parents seem
to understand him very much. A plaintive voiceover tells us he’s “never
had veggies that weren’t from a tin,” and his mother not only
discourages any culinary adventurousness but also seems basically
clueless in the kitchen. (The film takes its title for the default
family dinner when things get burned, or Nigel’s mom forgets to open
cans before boiling beans.)

Nigel tries his hand at cooking, but
as his mom falls ill with an inoperable respiratory condition, the
family falls apart. When she passes, Nigel is left alone with his
father. Until, that is, housekeeper Joan (Helena Bonham Carter) sets her
romantic sights on him, targeting his heart via his stomach. Flash
forward more than a couple years and Nigel, now a teenager (Finding Neverland‘s Freddie
Highmore, above), feels even more isolated, having moved away from his friends
and out to the country. Joan, as ever, still holds sway over Nigel’s
father, and they eventually wed. But, emboldened by a home economics
class at school, Nigel makes plans to pursue his culinary interests more
fully, and “out-cook” his un-matronly nemesis, thus winning over his
father.

If one wasn’t familiar with the fact that Toast was based
on a true story, one could easily intuit that from the movie’s faults.
The adaptation, by Billy Elliot screenwriter Lee Hall, aims righteously
for adolescent feeling, and has a capable enabler for that mission in
neophyte Kennedy. The problem is that Toast feels rather scattershot in
its focus and tone, and doesn’t successfully identify a main problem or
conflict. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (BBC Films/Ruby Film & TV, unrated, 96 minutes)

A lot of nature documentaries, or films that look at animals, focus in either/or fashion on their behavioral impulses or relationship to and interaction with humans, ignoring the potentiality of a more complex causal relationship. In other words, do human masters, even kind ones, make some animals sad? The heartwarming and thought-provoking new documentary One Lucky Elephant tacitly asks this and other tough questions in presenting a look at a compassionate but aging pachyderm owner who’s searching for a suitable place to retire his circus elephant.

David Balding adopted Flora, an orphaned African baby elephant, when she was only two years old, and made her the central attraction of his St. Louis-based traveling show. After 16 years, however, Balding, beset with some health problems himself, begins to sense that Flora is no longer happy performing. Not wanting to merely sell her to a zoo or another circus, Balding first explores a tribal reservation in Botswana, but that falls through. While he beseeches Carol Buckley, the operator of a sanctuary in Tennessee whose organization does not take African elephants for fear of mixing them with their Asian elephant population, to change her mind, Balding makes arrangements to temporarily house Flora at the Miami Metro Zoo. An incident there, however, risks Flora’s extended stay.

Directed by Lisa Leeman, One Lucky Elephant is an extraordinary movie about inter-species relationships, and the beauty, enrichment and, ultimately, constraints of those bonds. Beginning in the infancy of the new millennium, the movie showcases a seemingly impatient and at times unhappy Flora, stuck in her teenage years with no other elephant companions. As the film tabs Balding’s progress in placing her long-term and Flora’s adjustment to various new surroundings, however, it also smartly winds its way back a bit to 1984, showcasing Flora’s training.

Much to its credit, Leeman’s film doesn’t lean solely on the majesty or stirring wonder of its intimate proximity to this enormous, hulking animal, which chows down on over 400 pounds of apples, potatoes, carrots, bran, grass and other food per day. One Lucky Elephant also devotes ample time and resources to capturing and exploring Balding’s conflicted feelings about owning and exploiting Flora, as well as the myopic limits of his own realizations. While Balding is extremely remorseful about having split up two-year-old Flora from her sister when he first purchased her, and also admits to broader feelings of regret related to Flora’s need to “just be an elephant,” he resists the professional diagnosis of Flora as having post-traumatic stress disorder. To Balding, it’s inconceivable that his occasional appearance for visits at Flora’s new home would or even could summon up intense feelings of abandonment and anger within Flora.

One Lucky Elephant spans an extraordinary amount of time, over a full decade, and this fact allows it to achieve a sort of natural, relaxed ranginess, without dawdling too long or foisting pat “conclusions” on an audience too soon. In fact, Leeman’s movie eschews black-and-white didacticism. Balding is seen to be a loving and devoted caregiver, but also ultimately simply unable to provide Flora with the sort of companionship she needs from others of her own kind. Their time together was beautiful, but it was destined to end. That’s a lesson with broader applicability to life, one of but several reasons that One Lucky Elephant resonates so deeply. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (LLC/Sandbar Pictures, unrated, 84 minutes)

Based on the novel by Marieke van der Pol, Dutch import Bride Flight is emblematic of the particular sort of heritage cinema that is from the outside and at first glance stuffy and a bit boring but, if one gives it time and an open heart and mind, eventually blossoms due to the strength of its characterizations.

Directed by Ben Sombogaart (Twin Sisters) and based on true events, the film opens in the present day at a funeral and then flashes back to 1953, as a plane full of (mostly betrothed) women escape post-World War II Holland by emigrating to New Zealand for what they hope will be better lives. Marjorie (Elise Schaap), Ada (Karina Smulders, above) and Esther (Anna Drijver) strike up a conversation with the rakishly handsome Frank (Waldemar Torenstra), an agricultural college graduate looking to make his way with his own farm and tempted by the chance at cheap land. Frank represents a certain temptation for each of the women, but upon landing they meet their respective fiances and set about with their lives, to varying degrees of happiness. A casual fling between Frank and one of the ladies yields a pregnancy, while another grapples with the possibility of infertility. Secret pacts are then struck, which have far-reaching consequences throughout the rest of the years that members of the quartet remain in touch.

Once the element of progeny is introduced, Bride Flight charts a fairly predictable narrative course. But it’s made enjoyable through technical acumen and a clutch of strong performances. Torenstra has an appealing, square-jawed charisma that kind of favors Hugh Jackman by way of Simon Baker. He radiates decency, which is integral to an audience’s embrace of Frank, since he behaves not as a cad, per se, but just a guy seemingly ill at ease with the consequence of any of his attachments. All of the female leads beautifully inhabit their characters, meanwhile — especially Smulders, who gives a nuanced and conflicted turn as Ada, torn later in life between a choice to remain with her children and the chance for a new life with Frank.

One assumes that the split structure owes to import from the novel, but Sombogaart does more than pay lip service to these flash-forwards to present day. He imbues them with a full-bodied emotional integrity that give the movie’s final act punch some force, no matter the fact that one can see it coming. The actors playing all the characters in their golden years are also superb (Rutger Hauer pops up as Frank), making Bride Flight a solid arthouse offering for fans of quality international drama. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box, R, 130 minutes)

After being very publicly forced out of his dream job as host of The Tonight Show in order to make way for the return of Jay Leno (and his equally large contract and chin), Conan O’Brien was at a place most of us have been at some point in our lives — very angry, but in front of a large group of people, and unable to really express or address it. Of course, O’Brien was being paid millions of dollars not to say anything, as the final legal details of his buyout and exit were hammered out.

Still, trying to channel that debilitating rage into something more constructive was at the heart of O’Brien’s decision to launch his “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” live tour, which, starting of April last year, spanned 44 dates in 33 cities. His traveling show — part high-energy song-and-dance routine, part variety sketch show, all smiling exorcism — is lovingly chronicled in the ramshackle new travelogue Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.

A bit of brief interview footage with O’Brien sets the stage, and we see him and his team discussing and concocting details of how to roll out the announcement for his show — even before they really know what it’s going to be. After that, however, the film mostly unfolds in a straightforward chronological fashion, rolling from city to city and bearing witness to the highs and lows of creating, honing and delivering a live show, while also pressing the flesh with fans at after-show events and figuring out what comes next in life.

Director Rodman Flender’s film is an admirably candid look at the sheer amount of work that is married to this sort of high-wire creativity, and in that respect the movie is, perhaps surprisingly, somewhat reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s This Is It. Regrettably, the film could use a bit more of a streamlined vision. Those early, direct chats with O’Brien that give an interesting glimpse into the gaping need for acceptance that drives so many of the most successful showbiz psyches unfortunately melt away. Flender doesn’t spend much time soliciting the opinions of the comedian’s peers and employees, which would complement the footage of O’Brien onstage and round out a professional portrait of the man.

Instead, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop kind of morphs into the ultimate backstage video, which is surely not the worst thing in the world. Fans ply the tall, exceedingly friendly, once and future TV host with “masturbating panda” pizzas and an endless stream of photograph requests. He’s only human, though. O’Brien finally does lose it just a bit, and question the sanity of exhaustive pre-show and post-show meet-and-greets with everyone and their families. One day he’ll stop, maybe — just not yet. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Abramorama, unrated, 98 minutes)

If part of the reason action movies resonate so broadly is because most of us are simply never going to have a chance to go Action Jackson, let alone drive a truck off a freeway ramp or swing by rope from a helicopter and kick open a skyscraper’s window, then prison dramas also provide vicarious entertainment at a comfortable remove. After all, we can enjoy all the cursing, fighting and vengeful plotting without fear of sacrificing our own behymens.

Case in point: the starkly titled R, a Danish prison flick that strongly recalls HBO’s The Wire and the recent, award-winning French import Un Prophete. The fiction film debut documentary of directors Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer, and the winner of the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film at the prestigious Gothenburg International Film Festival, the gritty and well acted R is strongly sketched enough to leave a mark with predisposed audiences, no matter its subtitles.

The story here is quite familiar and charts a rather expected path, more or less, whether one has seen a small handful of prison films or upwards of five dozen. Still, the precision and care with which it is rendered mark it more than some time-whiling throwaway. The ethnic and religious divisions, also on display in Un Prophete, are solidly elucidated without ever becoming overbearing or pretentious, and there are nice, relaxed parallels drawn between Rune (Pilou Asbaek, above) and fellow prisoner Rashid (Dulfi al-Jaburi), a Muslim, by way of the respective family members who come to visit them. They are doppelgangers, in a strange way, and the slow dawning of this point gives the movie a nice and somewhat unexpected depth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Olive Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

The word “Riverdance” isn’t really used, but that’s what the documentary Jig puts under the microscope — the story of the 40th Irish Dancing World Championships, and specifically the leg-splaying competitions between certain youth subsets. To that end, there’s some absolutely fantastic talent on display in this ambling but only passably inquisitive nonfiction film, meaning that those inclined to like this sort of thing (those who might have a TiVo season pass for TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras, say) will find in this plenty to like. General audiences, however, may feel a bit danced out.

Unfolding in the final months leading up to the aforementioned March, 2010, competition in Glasgow, Jig charts a number of highly skilled young folk dancers — precious few of whom have any connection to the rapid step-dancing genre’s link to Irish culture — and loosely pairs off some of them who will eventually be competing against one another. The film is comparable to but not quite as engaging as the recent documentary Make Believe: The Battle To Become the World’s Best Teen Magician. The subjects in Jig all put in an equal amount of hard work and dedication, but the latter movie has significantly better guides, if you will, and a sharper focus. It succeeds in eliciting information and perspectives from its young would-be magicians, whereas most of Jig director Sue Bourne’s interview chats, while perfectly amiable, are less revelatory. They do less to connect the kids’ passion for dance to the different ways it makes them feel, and how they see it eventually integrated into their adult lives.

Watching excellence in almost any field, and the pursuit of the same, can be a fortifying and rewarding experience. And it’s certainly interesting to see the wide variety of personalities (a group of Russians, an adopted Sri Lankan teen living in Holland) drawn to this extremely difficult and competitive discipline. But Jig doesn’t spend a whole lot of time elucidating the actual steps of Irish dance (perhaps by design, as one judge later says it’s a highly subjective art form), and the movie unfurls as a haze of practice and performance footage — again, frequently impressive — with neither much contextual mooring nor ambition in staging. It’s just kids dancing, and competing. Some eventually win, and some will lose — as often happens in life. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media, PG, 93 minutes)

Because of the very simple nature of the human voice, and what its sound means to us, music captures the human experience in a special way that other art forms cannot. If joy is nearly impossible to contrive, then listening to the joyous, excited and unblinkingly forthright celebration and expression of community, faith and gratitude to simply be alive can be a profoundly moving experience, one impractical to resist. Such are the life lessons communicated by Don McGlynn’s Rejoice and Shout, an exhaustively comprehensive documentary about the 200-year musical history of African-American Christianity.

Gospel music is of course informed by the plantation and slavery experience of African-Americans many generations ago, and McGlynn — a filmmaker well-versed in musical documentaries — connects that historical fact to the unbowed spirit of its earliest practitioners and progenitors, while also tracing it all the way forward in time to the emotional, participatory qualities of worship still found in many predominantly African-American churches. Using a wide-ranging roster of interview subjects, from academics like The Gospel Sound author Anthony Heilbut to singers like Ira Tucker, Smokey Robinson, Mavis Staples (above) and more, McGlynn crafts a genre-specific portrait that may be among the most detailed in all of music-related nonfiction film. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 115 minutes)

Scalene, a recent world premiere at the Dances With Films festival, opens with a jolt, in large part because one doesn’t expect to see Margo Martindale, a veteran character actress with more than 80 credits under her belt, doing physical battle with Hanna Hall, the young Jenny from Forrest Gump, and later costar of Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake. And yet there they are — one with a gun, the other in flight. They scuffle, yell and run about, giving clues of a greater familiarity with one another. Soon we’re winding backwards in time, and learning more about the specifics of just how things went so wrong.

Scalene bills itself as a perceptual thriller, which is a perhaps fancy way of saying it’s a psychological drama that toys with audience sympathies via shifting perspectives. Martindale stars as Janice Trimble, the single mother of Jakob (Adam Scarimbolo), a 26-year-old, live-in mute with other unspecified developmental and/or behavioral disabilities. When she starts quasi-dating divorcee Charles (Jim Dougherty), Janice places a few fliers for a part-time caregiver, and soon-to-graduate college student Paige Alexander (Hall), looking for work to bolster her resume with potential social work further down the line, responds to Janice’s need. Eventually there’s an accusation of rape, which pits the two women against one another.

Scalene unfolds more or less in reverse, actually, with a mediator advising Janice to accept a court-ordered psychiatric hold and multi-year rehabilitation program for Jakob, and the tearful mother swearing that her son is innocent. As director Zack Parker, working from a script co-written with Brandon Owens, navigates back in time, the film juggles two slight and eventually increasingly divided points-of-view in regards to Janice’s treatment of Jakob.

There’s a wonderful ambiguity captured by scenes in which Janice greets Paige curtly, or acts toward Jakob in the same manner in Paige’s presence. The screenplay, though, doesn’t allow Martindale a lot of chances to trade in quiet subtlety, of which she is certainly capable. Certain scenes drag on for too long, though, past the point of conveying either the emotional essence of a given bit, or what’s functionally necessary to advance the narrative. Hall, too, is required to do some silent heavy lifting, and the contrast of her woodenness versus later emoting does the movie no favors.

Scalene is much more interesting when it flexes its ambition some, working to try to also incorporate Jakob’s subjective, jumbled recreated memories — which at one point find his mom recast as a physician, and introduces Paige to him in the doctor’s office, which is different from the reality we’ve seen. For a film that otherwise pivots on the offscreen spaces around a couple distinct, concrete scenes — albeit ones glimpsed from two different points-of-view — these bits are quite intriguing, a wily X-factor in how any given audience member might ultimately interpret Janice’s relationship with her son, and Paige’s accusation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Along the Tracks/Kachi Films, unrated, 97 minutes)

A Los Angeles-set indie flick which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, The Comedian at the Friday offers up an almost serially listless look at an interesting and creative occupation. Instead of getting caught up in the vicarious or behind-the-curtain thrill of even a fringe comedian’s quirky, atypical lifestyle, an audience watching it is much more likely to go through and ultimately bog down in the first half of the seven stages of grief — denial, pain, anger, bargaining, depression, etcetera — than enjoy any sort of fulfilling entertainment, let alone cathartic uplift. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Comedian at the Friday LLC, unrated, 92 minutes)

Based on the British television series of the same name, director Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip finds Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon again playing loose, bickering versions of themselves, uneasy partners on a restaurant-tasting road trip across the British countryside. After some contretemps with his girlfriend, Coogan is left without a partner for his weeklong foodie vacation, so he begrudgingly invites his actor pal Brydon. They then proceed to preen for attention, and spar in competitive, passive-aggressive fashion.

Largely improvised, The Trip is an example of something that probably works a lot better in its short-form incarnation, as an exploration of the cresting nature of comedic riffing. There are moments of pure, unadulterated delight here, in Coogan and Brydon’s arguments over Michael Sheen, or the latter’s hilarious impression of Michael Caine, even modulated to take aging into account. Other impersonations, like the guys’ dueling James Bonds or Woody Allens, are also funny. But the whole is far less than the sum of its parts, and the framework upon which it hangs — which purports to also tangentially assay the insecurity of actors — creaks under the weight of injudicious oversight by Winterbottom and editor Mags Arnold, who overindulge their stars. Like almost any journey, there are a few interesting sights along the way, but this Trip is too long and winding — a scenic route that becomes tedious. (IFC Films, PG-13, 107 minutes)

One need not be a horse enthusiast to appreciate Cindy Meehl‘s richly textured Buck, a profound and moving portrait of channeling misfortune into something positive, and far and away one of the best documentaries of 2011.

Horses are majestic creatures, but known to have their own personalities, which often leads to training practices predicated on harsh punishments. Soft-spoken, middle-aged Buck Brannaman (above), who travels the country more than eight months a year giving clinics to horse owners, preaches compassion and respect, and in doing so underscores how the animal-human relationship is in many ways a metaphor for the challenges of self-betterment, and life itself.

Part of the inspiration for both Robert Redford’s
1998 film The Horse Whisperer, as well as the novel upon which it is based, the
quietly charismatic Brannaman is an endlessly engaging and paradoxical figure — a figure who shuns the sort of attention he naturally draws forth. The delicate illumination of his incredible gift and way with horses is fascinating in and of itself, but Meehl shades her movie with plenty of Brannaman’s personal story, which includes the death of his birth mother and a terribly abusive early childhood. The love of his incredible foster parents, including the wry aphorisms of his mother Shirley (“Blessed are the flexible, for they don’t get bent out of shape”), seem to have penetrated a protective veneer all the way to Brannaman’s core, and serve as a powerful example of the roles that adult care, choice and focus play in overcoming fundamental disadvantages. The feelings Buck elicits linger with one long after viewing. It’s a deeply humanistic film, rendered with grace, compassion and an unfussy aptitude. For an interview with Meehl, click here. (Sundance Select, unrated, 88 minutes)

A lot of Hollywood romantic comedies unfold in worlds that are virtually unrecognizable from the real one, where couples meet in strange fashion and relationships often overlap in messy ways. Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s engaging The Pill, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is thankfully not one of those efforts.

The movie centers around Fred (Noah Bean, Rose Byrne’s murdered fiancé on Damages), a New Yorker who hooks up with the free-spirited Mindy (Rachel Boston, above right), has pleasantly drunken but unfortunately unprotected sex, wakes up, and then spends a madcap day trying to avoid his girlfriend Nelly (Anna Chlumsky) and stick to his one-night stand, in order to make sure she takes the two-installment morning-after pill that will help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Claiming first that she “knows her body,” and later that the birth control pill is against her religious beliefs (“the one with the Pope”), Mindy is a grab-bag of resistance and whirling dervish energy, keeping Fred on his heels and making his quest mainly a furtive one, under the guise of striking up a more serious relationship. Dragged to a family party, Fred gets to meet Mindy’s parents (Jean Brassard and Lue McWilliams), as well as her engaged younger sister Rose (Gossip Girl‘s Dreama Walker), and ex-boyfriend Jim (Al Thompson). Slowly, Fred finds himself more attracted to Mindy in unexpected ways, complicating his problematic and possibly flickering relationship with Nelly.

The Pill‘s compressed timeline, and its conflict with New York City’s geographical realities, offers some opportunity for pin-prick critical deflation, but there’s a pleasant, forward-leaning energy to the entire film that mitigates this. This isn’t gritty and wildly insightful, or reinventing the wheel, but Khoury is honest about the varied and jumbled emotions of his characters, and lets them make/have made some dubious choices without judging them or bending over backwards to try to explain and justify everything. The Pill is reflective of the realities of the twenty- and even early-thirtysomething dating scene, in which people mean well but often find their attempts at monogamy tested in unexpected ways. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Shoot First Entertainment, unrated, 83 minutes)

An achingly sincere (and achingly familiar), Seattle-set drama of parental bereavement and relationship drift, writer-director Joseph Mitacek’s Morning, which just screened as part of the recently concluded 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is proof that there’s quiet, to-scale reward in plenty of indie cinema, if predominantly for those who don’t mind its gaping, laid-track similarity to so much heartstring-tugging Hollywood studio product.

Morning centers around Michael (Andrew Ramaglia) and Sarah Hade (Emily Cline), a married couple with a two-year-old son, and all of the typical sorts of challenges that come with trying to juggle both home and work. Sarah is going back to school and closing in on a degree, while Michael works on a fishing crew that’s seen better days. His stresses inform a certain boozy detachment and isolation, which in turn further calcifies Sarah’s resentments. Things take a turn for the tragic when Michael falls asleep while babysitting one evening, and their son drowns. Sarah, while understandably grief-stricken, is also additionally racked with a complementary sense of guilt since she stayed out for a drink that night with an old college boyfriend, Alan (Ryan Cooper). In this grey aftermath, the couple struggles with how, and whether, to say together.

Bluntly, Morning is the sort of film that could carve out a certain niche in the commercial marketplace if it had big stars or recognizable faces attached, but as rendered stands virtually no chance of doing so. There’s a legitimately melancholic soul to the movie that holds one’s attention in they’re feeling more or less sympathetic going in. And Ramaglia and particularly Cline offer up game performances. But, beat by beat, almost all of Morning’s arguments and scenes of dramatic intensity feel nipped from some well-worn screenwriter’s playbook of heightened stakes rather than flowing honestly from the characters.

Additionally, Mitacek handles these and other dramatic turns — including the movie’s big battle-to-save-their-drowned-son sequence — so artlessly that the contrivance of each bit is highlighted instead of being smoothly under-stitched. Rather than try to underplay things and get at the root of Michael and Sarah’s personal devastations, and how they overlap but are also different, Mitacek instead repeatedly comes up with ways to foist and inject puffed-up drama into the proceedings — grabs at audience attention that come across as needlessly showy. Loss and terrible pain visits all of us at certain times in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that all movies that try to merely hold up a mirror to that loss are created equal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (St. Andrews Films, unrated, 86 minutes)

When a film’s press notes or marketing efforts trumpet it as a “metaphysical thriller,” one knows they’re likely in for a bunch of art-school/Psych 101 posturing (read: horseshit) or something nervy, intellectual and oddly appealing, and director Eric Atlan’s arresting French import Mortem is maybe five percent the former but overwhelmingly the latter.

An in-competition title at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, where it just enjoyed its U.S. premiere, this engaging and strikingly photographed bauble centers on a woman, Jena (Daria Panchenko), who is in an accident and finds herself stuck in a strange motel room, where she becomes locked in a sort of existential game of cat-and-mouse with her soul (Russian-born model Diana Rudychenko). Jena’s one-time and lasting love, Aken (Stany Coppet), also pops up, but for the longest time he is neither able to see Jena’s soul nor help her find passage out of this confinement. As Jena pleads for another chance with Aken, her soul teases her with revelations about his other romantic liaisons, puts a few hot and heavy moves on Jena herself, and eventually dictates to her that her fortune be decided by a deck of cards.

Mortem is kind of desperately French or European in the best sense of that phrase — unabashedly arty and leaning toward the pretentious (“I came out of you,” says Jena’s soul, “and now I exist!”), additionally characterized by an acting style that toes the line between formalized and high emotion. After a brief period of adjustment, the absolute certitude with the film it is rendered and the technical skill and precision with which it is captured, however, make for an fascinating cinematic experience. Atlan, who has a background as a painter, works as his own cinematographer, and the rich, redone black-and-white CinemaScope frames of Mortem give it a sumptuous look that translates in heady, involving fashion into deeper feeling.

Thematically, we’re firmly in Ingmar Bergman territory here, as perhaps refracted through the lens of an Eraserhead-era David Lynch. Fear of death is the big subject, but all of the big life questions — as well as chiefly the friction between heart and head, desire and intellect — inform the sense of generalized anxiety that course through the movie. There’s an erotic, sapphic charge to the scenes in which Jena’s soul puts the moves on her, with Jena alternately succumbing to and recoiling from their abortive love-making. If some of its verbal parrying doesn’t quite match this level of response, resulting in a few scenes of re-tilled emotional ground, Mortem still locates abundant reservoirs of feeling untapped by many far more narratively forthright pictures. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Artistic Finances/New Distributors Association, unrated, 94 minutes)

Foreign cinema conjures up a collection of very specific stereotypes, even (perhaps especially) for seasoned film fans. After all, myriad cultural dictates play a huge role in not only what types of movies get made internationally, but which are lauded and/or positioned in a fashion to then penetrate the American cinematic market. Viva Riva!, a flamboyant and sprawling crime picture whose style and plotting recollects movies like City of God and (to a lesser extent) Shottas, is a foreign film that smashes some of these preconceptions of what an African movie is, can or should be.

Plot-wise, Viva Riva! is fairly simple and straightforward, charting the return of native son and small-time hood Riva (Patsha Pay Mukuna, exuding a raw charisma) to Kinshasa, Congo, where he turns a quick score by stealing truckloads of precious, in-demand fuel from his Angolan crime boss, Cesar (Hoji Fortuna). Out to spread some of that cheddar and have a good time at the city’s bars and strip clubs, Riva quickly goes Charlie Brown — which, in this case, is to say he falls under the sway of a red-haired girl, Nora (Manie Malone, above). Problem is, Nora is spoken for, the girlfriend of quasi-ineffectual local criminal kingpin Azor (Diplome Amekindra), a descendent of Congolese kings who keeps his woman under his thumb.

Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga — whose film justifiably scored six African Movie Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and two Supporting Actor prizes — has a confidence that comes through in virtually every pore of Viva Riva!. His film is marked by a sexual frankness certainly at odds with much of African cinema, but just as striking if not more so is the unfussy, matter-of-fact candor with which the filmmaker treats the insidious reality of sociopolitical corruption in his country, as well as the juxtaposition of impoverished shantytowns with bustling, pulsating nightclubs. Tonally, there’s a certain dispassionate detachment that serves this material surprisingly well, abetted by a top-to-bottom technical polish, including some gorgeous cinematography. For the full, original review, from Shockya, click here. (Music Box Films, R, 96 minutes)

Enough films — mostly horror, but inclusive of all sorts of reunion movies — unfold in and around secluded cabins in the woods that it would probably not at all be a stretch to program a festival comprised entirely of said offerings. A lot of times this setting is the result of writing to a single, accessible, low-budget location, and there isn’t a whole lot of imagination or quality of performance that then raises the material, and argues for either the talent or continued professional opportunity of those involved. Every once in a while, however, there’s a movie that completely punches through the clutter and any sighing downmarket expectations attached to said backdrop. That’s the case with The Corridor, a delightfully unnerving mind-fuck that satisfyingly blends character-rooted fraternal jockeying with elements of psychological horror. A gripping work from start to finish, the movie just enjoyed its west coast premiere as an in-competition title at the just-wrapped Dances With Films festival, and could easily find wider distribution in its future.

Written by Josh MacDonald and directed by Evan Kelly, The Corridor opens with a tense scene in which a rattled, nonsensical Tyler (Stephen Chambers, above) is found by his friends with the body of his mother, Pauline (Mary-Colin Chisholm). When they try to persuade him to drop a knife in his possession, he charges, wounding a couple of them before being subdued. Several months later, after some psychiatric treatment, Tyler and his friends have seemingly reached an uneasy peace, and they decide to accompany him out into the snowy Nova Scotian woods for a guys’ weekend, during which they will dispose of Pauline’s ashes.

The rest of the gang consists of Chris (David Patrick Flemming), who took a knife through the hand in Tyler’s attack; his lumbering cousin Bobcat (Matthew Amyotte, sporting a not entirely convincing skull cap to approximate pattern baldness), who is already married and with kids; book-smart Jim (Glen Matthews), struggling to conceive a baby with his wife; and Ev (James Gilbert, who could easily pass as Bradley Cooper’s younger brother), a would-be musician stuck in a dead-end job where he bangs his boss almost as a favor. The first act unfolds deliberately, with most of the guys keeping a cautious eye on Tyler — who’s still taking medication to suppress any mild schizophrenic tendencies — and old grudges being passively-aggressively raised, under the guise of kidding around.

When Tyler — certain that he’s seen some strange force-field — asks Chris to accompany him into the woods, things take a turn. The rest of the gang trails Chris, concerned for his safety, and everyone is more than a little surprised to discover that Tyler’s tale isn’t merely the product of a splintered mind or troubled imagination. The guys find an odd, shimmering patch of land seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and inside its permeable, barely visible walls a strange calm descends upon each of them. Certain that they can somehow financially exploit this finding, Ev wants to stay and “guard” the mysterious rectangular area. The others return to the cabin, with loose plans to eventually come back and spell Ev. Needless to say, things do not proceed in a smooth and orderly fashion.

Its snowy, holed-up setting and slow-spreading, almost viral madness recalls Dreamcatcher and any number of other movies in which mental unraveling slowly brings about bloodletting, and the exceedingly well stitched-together The Corridor is a movie that is very much about mental illness and the fallibility of moral certitude, whatever its supernatural trappings. Working with cinematographer Christopher Ball, director Kelly creates a compelling film whose smart framing choices and moderate, to-scale special effects work do a fantastic job of conveying its premise, but not tipping overboard into manic silliness. Gore can be great fun, but this is a little movie with an almost perfect balance of violence, tonal creepiness and more naturalized drama. The budgetary limitations obviously constrained certain choices on the part of filmmakers, and the result is bracing and fresh.

Aiding their cause is the fact that the performances here are uniformly superb. In something of a sad but true rarity for an independent work of this nature, each cast member evidences a discrete character with their own special and identifiable interests and motivations while also exhibiting a great and unforced ensemble rapport. The friendships in The Corridor are entirely believable, as are the uneasy reservations that linger in especially the movie’s early scenes. Only a bit, toward the end, does the film overreach, making a mannered play for a visual impression. Still, this a fabulously effective feature debut for Kelly, and a work that bodes well for all of the talent involved, both on screen and behind the camera. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Chronicle Pictures/Last Call Productions/Egg Films, unrated, 100
minutes)

Given the expansive size of the United States, road movies are of course a staple of American independent cinema. One supposes that at a certain time (in the days of Easy Rider, maybe, and certainly before) they were a great way to showcase the sprawling natural beauty of this country, and the wonderful, weird diversity of its citizenry. Now it seems they’re mainly a substitute for the comparative heavy lift of actual dramatic or comedic writing, or an excuse for shoddy, catch-as-catch-can production values. Both of the latter are certainly true of Here’s the Kicker, a messy and roundly unengaging dramedy that recently played as part of the 14th annual Dances With Films festival.

Written by and starring Ian Michaels, the movie centers on Simon Matthews, a one-time football placekicker who’s now stuck working a series of dead-end jobs in Los Angeles. His girlfriend, Brittany Berry (Sarah Smick), is equally adrift, working as a make-up artist in the adult film industry. With little left tying them to the area, Simon and Brittany set out for Texas, with loose plans of visiting both Simon’s pal Teddy (Matthew Linhardt) and Brittany’s dad (Dan Lauria), and eventually opening up a combination saloon-and-salon, in which guys can drink and watch sports while their ladies get their hair done.

Teddy turns out to be a mess, and leaves his wife and daughter, hooking a ride out of town with Simon and Brittany. The trio then stops off at Simon’s parents, where his sister Lacey (Daniella Monet, displaying a bit of sly jailbait sass) is under house arrest and his father Al (Luce Rains) has fallen off the wagon, leaving mother Jeanette (Andrea Helene) frazzled and checked out. Unbeknownst to Brittany, however, Simon has finally gotten a football-related job offer as a college scout. The problem is that would put them back in L.A., so as Simon struggles with how to break this news to the girl whom he wants to wed, what might be charitably described as hijinks ensue.

Here’s the Kicker has so many problems that it’s hard to know where to begin. Simon is presented as an ex-NFL placekicker waylaid by a knee injury, but Michaels evinces neither the physique nor, more crucially, the mindset, countenance and presentation of an athlete. Michaels conveys his legacy in awkward ways, having some people ask Simon for an autograph but also making his alma mater a super-small school that still apparently has all of their games televised. Problematic production design and costume work don’t help, certainly, but that everything about the grander mooring of Simon’s past feels so immediately and viscerally false undercuts the movie right out of the gate, and makes entire sequences laughable for all the wrong reasons.

There are a small handful of amusing ideas or one-liners (Simon proposes “Hair and Balls” as a name for the establishment he and Brittany wish to open), and Michaels, a subpar performer, at least shares a nice chemistry with Smick. But the film’s screenplay is fairly uninspired, leaning heavily on wacky contrivance, and forcing its characters to do stupid things (stopped by a police officer for skipping out on a diner check, the van’s inhabitants decide to eat the contents of a bag of Al’s weed) that make no real sense.

Director Chris Harris, also taking cinematography and editing credits, doesn’t have a lot with which to work, but he doesn’t help matters by staging flat scenes that play out in awkward fashion. Nothing about Here’s the Kicker ever really connects, either comedically or certainly emotionally. Portions of the movie seem to augur a madcap farce, but that tone is never sustained for too long. Football kickers may get no respect as athletes, but watching this film it’s hard to argue that they, or those who portray them, should get any respect at all. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Padded Room Pictures, unrated, 84 minutes)

An in-competition west coast premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, writer-director Lovinder Gill’s Stalemate is an
unsophisticatedly sweet love triangle that unfolds in inoffensive
fashion, but ultimately just doesn’t have much of interest to say about
women, men or any of the mysterious and oftentimes necessary distance between them.

At the beginning of a particularly important and busy work week, advertising rep Kayleigh (Sheetal Sheth) tells long-time boyfriend Rich (Burgess Jenkins) that she wants a bit of a break, and doesn’t want to see him again until Friday, which is her birthday. Working up a promotional campaign for a minor league baseball team set to soon move into a new stadium, Kayleigh finds herself paired up with an outside contractor, the amiable Art (Josh Randall). He immediately loosens her up, dragging Kayleigh out of her (strangely deserted) office for a series of working lunches and dinners that slowly morph into something approaching dates. By the time Friday comes, and then that weekend, Kayleigh is on the verge of a full-blown existential crisis, torn between the two men in her life — one old and one new.

Set and filmed on location in Winston Salem, North Carolina, Stalemate wrings a bit of production value out of the (real) construction site of a local baseball stadium, but is otherwise flatly staged and shot. Most of its problems, however, relate directly to the material. Screen romances and love triangles need not be hopelessly complicated, or littered with ridiculous, unrealistic and over-the-top problems keeping boy and girl apart; witness the simple beauty of something like the heartrending Once, from a few years back. But Gill’s movie is thinly drawn (Kayleigh is stuffy and uptight because she has a Mercedes, nice furniture in her office, and works inside; Art is an appealing free spirit because he drives a Jeep, eats hot dogs, likes the outdoors and also plays guitar), and, while admirably adding some much-needed three-dimensionality to Rich as the film wears on, lacking in much insight or quality drama about what’s driven a wedge between the couple to begin with.

It also strikes an overall false chord by having Art object in pouty fashion to Kayleigh’s eventually stated desire to date both men for a while. Rich’s opposition is understandable, given their three-year history, but if there’s anything that the history of humankind has taught us, it’s that guys are cool with the potential for no-strings-attached sex, if that’s what a lady is offering. So when the men get together and talk, and then decide to jointly put an ultimatum to Kayleigh, it’s one of those bullshit cinematic fantasies, in which (predominantly) guys exorcise some demons about how they were romantically strung along in their formative years. Compounding all the falsity and awkwardness is the completely needless compression of time. Art’s a nice guy, yes, but four (chaste, part-time) days does not a grand love affair make.

Stalemate may not ultimately work, but what it does have going for it is Sheth, a knockout beauty whose eyes could and probably should be classified as weapons of mass distraction. Jenkins comes across as pretty shallow, an Abercrombie & Fitch himbo model, while Randall at least conveys a loose-limbed charisma that makes his scenes passably engaging. Sheth, however, gives Stalemate a soul, because even if she’s not given much with which to work, she both communicates romantic ambivalence and reminds viewers of that libidinal surge attached to flirtation and blooming attraction. In another era, she would have been a great silent film superstar; as is, head shots of her could likely be used as a major time-saver in therapy, to hypnotize patients. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Stalemate Productions, unrated, 89 minutes)

One of the common pitfalls of independent film comes by way of the navel-gazing that, perhaps somewhat understandably, a hard-grinding life of either on-the-fringe or upwardly mobile artistic endeavor engenders and encourages. Movies about would-be filmmakers or struggling actors and other artists are of course neither automatically good nor bad, but do often lose themselves in a thicket of puffed-up self-importance, mistaking their impediments and human efforts as somehow automatically more interesting than that of the so-called common man, and thus requiring of less dramatic lift.

Philadelphia-based filmmaker Jose Cruz, Jr.’s Close-Up falls victim to this problem, blending together the story of a couple of wayward, aspirant actors with an even more pedestrian drama about recovery, since the film’s main characters also happen to be recently on-the-wagon recuperating alcoholics. Shaun Paul Costello plays a guy hanging onto his three months of sobriety by the thinnest of margins; his wife (Jacqueline Schneider) is in the process of divorcing him and threatening to move off with their young daughter, no matter that he’s landed a job as a mechanic with a pal (Brian Gallagher), and is also consistently in touch with his sponsor (Brian Anthony Wilson). The audition circuit is tough, but this lonely guy finally lands a friend in the chirpy, flirty cousin of his sponsor, a girl he dubs “Free Bird” (Valentina Mohle). She calls him “Straggler,” meanwhile, and since this is something that characters in movies do, these nicknames stick — the only monikers of affiliation the audience is afforded for the leads.

An in-competition entry and west coast premiere at the recent Dances With Films festival, Close-Up has a certain technical proficience, or at least a solid scheme — comprised of handheld camerawork, and a lack of precious staging — that feeds its tone, and meandering narrative aims. But as a writer, Cruz seems to just be throwing bits and pieces of every sort of dramatic scenario at a wall, and hoping it somehow sticks in compelling fashion. Straggler’s desperate desire to reconnect with his daughter goes out the window after he gives her a Christmas gift, and Free Bird’s imminent departure is so undiscussed that one could be forgiven for forgetting it completely. The movie also only fitfully engages with the themes of addiction and recovery. Inclusive of its very on-the-nose dialogue, everything about Close-Up‘s dramatic conflict is perfunctory and uninspired, and there are false little details too (people drinking in the background at a party at the home of a recovering addict?) that become distracting, and derail certain scenes.

The performances here are functional — think of Costello as a sort of poor man’s Channing Tatum, early in his career — but far from gripping or involving, and Mohle in particular begins to grate after a short while. Sadly, no one in Close-Up (apart from Alan Ruck and Ryan Dunn, who pop up in small cameos) is really ready for their own close-up. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cruz Control Pictures, unrated, 85 minutes)