The presence of a very recognizable ensemble cast can’t save The Big Bang, a colossally strange film noir misfire that plays like a TV pilot run amok, and is bound to go down in history — to the extent that it’s remembered at all — only as the stumper answer to the niche cinematic trivia question, “In what film does Antonio Banderas have a sex scene with a waitress who spews jibberish about particle physics, and also share two separate scenes with a robe-clad Snoop Dogg and a robe-clad James Van Der Beek?”

Far and away the most interesting and involving thing about the nonsensical The Big Bang is its cinematography, from Shelly Johnson, who also lensed Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and the recent remake of The Wolfman. Trading in big, canted angles and other imaginative framing, Johnson sketches a neon-lit urban hellscape that gives the material an electric charge otherwise lacking in its story proper. Even a score by ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, seemingly a big deal and nice fit, fails to connect. The Big Bang tries to inject the soupy moodiness of the noir genre with a surfeit of cool and edgy thrills, but, ironically, it’s actually just a big snooze. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

Those who’ve ever seen Punk’d can attest to the improvisational comedy skills of Dax Shepard, who put both himbo bewilderment and mock outrage to good use for Ashton Kutcher’s hidden-camera show, which eventually launched him into costarring roles in proper big screen entertainment like Without a Paddle, Employee of the Month and Idiocracy. Shepard’s latest film finds him chafed by the constraints of comedy, however, and working to try to break out of the box into which he feels he’s been put by Hollywood. A low-budget, long-on-the-shelf, industry-satirizing mockumentary in which Shepard recruits a pal to help him mount a self-financed, Chuck Norris-type martial arts flick, Brother’s Justice meets with some mixed early success before eventually crumbling due to a lack of focus.

With supporting appearances by Tom Arnold, Jon Favreau and Kutcher, Brother’s Justice has considerable heart, pluck and amiable, ambling chemistry, and to the degree that one grades on a curve and takes those qualities into account, they’ll find some reward herein. It also has some quite funny bits, too, both small and seeded throughout. The chief problem, though, is that the film doesn’t have a well-defined angle driving it. Lip service is paid to the idea of Shepard having a love of martial arts since childhood, but the movie doesn’t convincingly portray this, or invest the concept with enough manic, obsessed energy. Neither does Brother’s Justice tap into or define the wounded ego of a comedian seeking industry relevance via overseas box office clout — another motivating factor with which it briefly flirts.

While Shepard has a certain shaggy charm, he unfortunately plays “himself” here as a total idiot, absent any true sense or grasp of the film world business realities involved in such a wild, self-financed venture. Ergo, while often amusing from scene to scene, all of the satirical underpinnings feel flat and undercooked, unattached to a more grounded reality. Diverting, improvisational, flight-of-fancy comedy is fine, but the mockumentary format requires a stronger, more focused and honed conceit that Brother’s Justice just doesn’t possess, alas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 81 minutes)

A soupy, entirely unconvincing grab bag of unmotivated behaviors and unearned emotional payoffs, An Invisible Sign feels chiefly like part of some woebegone, misguided stab at indie credibility and image adjustment for star Jessica Alba, who sports infantalizing pigtails and playacts vaguely emotionally retarded throughout. A risible, nonsensical effort that tries to meld occupationally oriented coming-of-age drama with an emotionally stunted romance, the film collapses early on under the weight of yawning plotting and labored eccentricity. Several recent independent films, including Matthew Lillard’s Spooner and Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne’s Adam, have to varying degrees of success tried to mine this seam of wounded-soul/mentally askew romance, though none have particularly punched through in the commercial marketplace, and neither will this ill-considered entry. Receiving only a halfhearted theatrical release, An Invisible Sign will quickly and deservedly disappear from theaters, before baffling completist fans of its star when it hits home video and ancillary markets. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

A former high school teacher and novelist turned filmmaker, South Korean Lee Chang-dong has, with movies like Peppermint Candy, Oasis and Secret Sunshine, crafted a body of work ripe with mesmeric understatement, shining a light on quotidian pain and delight, and locating meaning as much in how his characters don’t react to certain situations as in any more active plotting. His latest film, Poetry, the Best Screenplay award winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on a sixtysomething grandmother, Mija (Yun Jung-hee), who, after learning two bits of potentially devastating news, tries to center herself and find release in a poetry class at a neighborhood cultural center.

Laden with metaphor and seeded with a (culturally specific, some might say) passivity that is decidedly out of step and fashion with much American cinematic storytelling, Poetry isn’t explicitly a morality play, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is it even really a movie about the slide of dementia, like Ken Watanabe’s Memories of Tomorrow, since the onset of Mija’s condition is so minimal, as presented here. Still, the film has a lyrical delicateness that marks it as something special, different and thought-provoking. Poetry is beautiful, just not for everyone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino, unrated, 139 minutes)

A mélange of apocalyptic western, gothic horror and vampire action movie, Priest — decidedly not to be confused with the 1994 Miramax drama starring Linus
Roache — won’t win any awards for narrative originality, that much is certain. Based on TokyoPop’s popular graphic novel series written by Min-Woo Hying, the film nips liberally from everything from the Blade and Resident Evil franchises to The Searchers and Legion, director Scott Stewart and star Paul Bettany‘s previous collaboration. Still, while achingly familiar, Priest is streamlined and executed well enough to merit a pleased tip of the cap if not a rabid embrace from those comfortably within the movie’s demographic wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Screen Gems, PG-13, 87 minutes)

Everyone knows about the international muscle of Hollywood’s movies, but generally lost in all the talk about entertainment being the United States’ most dominant export is recognition of the somewhat amazing value and strength of transpositions of various American small screen hits, from Married… With Children to even, yes, The Nanny.

When Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal is tapped by Sony Pictures Television to help advise the producers of a Russian remake of his hit sitcom, he trips to Moscow, by way of a rabbit hole. Rosenthal arrives to find a rundown studio that looks vaguely like the dungeon from Saw, as well as writers and executives who seem unable or unwilling to culturally process the comedic opportunities or even the idea of a henpecked husband.

A charming and interesting real-life cultural mash-up, Exporting Raymond follows Rosenthal’s travails — from dealing with a costume designer who wants to use the show as a personal platform “to educate people about fashion,” the sensibility of characters’ costumes be damned, to casting hurdles that prove out the universality of several old showbiz maxims. With his owlish expressiveness and droll demeanor (advised to get kidnapping and ransom insurance, he’s freaked out that it apparently happens enough to go by the nickname “K&R”), Rosenthal is a warm and witty guide to this unusual travelogue, a sociocultural bauble which locates reserves of empathy where one might not expect. (Samuel Goldwyn, PG, 86 minutes)

If many modern actors frequently locate a personal commercial sweet spot and then mine that seam for all it’s worth, a lot of directors tend to do the same thing. Only a few filmmakers robustly embrace the sort of eclecticism that marked the careers of their early- and mid-20th century counterparts. After all, they want to continue working, and in an ever-competitive creative arena part of the dance of getting studios and/or financiers to keep giving you lots of money to make films is to have an identifiable “brand” or identity, be it as a peddler of comedy, action or hand-wringing dramas.

A notable exception to this line of thinking is Werner Herzog, whose intellectual curiosity and appetite for life drives him to follow up the award-winning nonfiction film Grizzly Man with something like the batshit-insane Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a series of small operatic shorts, and then the crime drama My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. Amassing almost five dozen combined long- and short-form credits behind the camera over the course of his incredible career, Herzog is at his best when, tangentially or directly, examining the complex relationship between man and animal, or humankind and the intractability of nature.

His latest film, the astounding documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, allows him the opportunity to do this. For over 20,000 years, Chauvet Cave, in France, was completely sealed off by a fallen rock structure, its football field-sized interior littered with the petrified remains of Ice Age mammals. In December, 1994, a group of three explorers stumbled across the perfectly preserved structure, sensing an extremely faint draft and loosening rubble to gain entrance. The fascinating cave paintings they discovered — dating back over 30,000 years, almost twice as old as previous finds — were so pristine that researchers at first doubted their authenticity, until they were later confirmed by carbon dating.

Maintaining the integrity of the cave and this astounding cultural discovery of course became of paramount importance to the French government, who strictly limited seasonal access, declared certain portions too unstable and unsafe to explore, and installed an exterior door to preserve the atmospheric conditions. Herzog’s engrossing film, then, provides a spellbinding public record of this space, unseen by human eyes for millennia. Filming only from narrow metal catwalks that span the cave, Herzog and his skeleton crew utilize 3-D to capture the artwork in all its contoured glory. The images and feelings they evoke are in and of themselves stirring, but the mystery and imaginative flights of fancy only deepen when it’s revealed that researchers are able to identify one artist individually, by the palm prints he left, and that several of the images were painted at least 5,000 years apart.

A companion piece of a sort with Herzog’s recent Encounters at the End of the World, in which he tripped to Antarctica, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is — at once quite simply, and also in a fashion most complicated — a movie about human imagination, desire and possibility. It is about all the things that are deepest inside of us, as a species. Herzog’s thick accent — which vaguely sounds like what one imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a Christopher Walken impression might sound like, or perhaps vice versa — gives the movie’s narration a fine gloss of bemusement that nicely counterbalances his more ruminative, intellectual musings. Yet Herzog also has a canny knack for pulling back, eliciting wonderment through silences, and allowing an audience to trip headlong into the images, losing themselves in their primitive beauty.

In his documentaries Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog worked as a kind of conjurer of elemental dread and awe, delving into modern man’s relationship with his surroundings, and what he views as the unforgiving harshness of the world. This film, which ranks among his crowning achievements, shows that that same sense of questioning has existed for all of humankind, and is innately within us, not merely a product of modernity. (IFC Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

For those attuned to such things, yard sales often carry their own metaphorical moroseness, silently weighted down as they are with the broken dreams of a busted-up family, unwanted move or failed business venture. It’s against this backdrop that the dramedy Everything Must Go unfolds, telling the story of an alcoholic businessman, Frank Porter (Will Ferrell), who loses his job and finds himself locked out of his house by his fed-up, filing-for-divorce wife, with all his possessions stacked on the lawn. Instead of moving on, Frank just sort of hangs out and starts drinking, waiting for a life epiphany and killing time with Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace, son of the late Notorious B.I.G.), a neighborhood kid, and Samantha (Rebecca Hall), a pregnant newcomer to the neighborhood.

Taking a break from more conventionally ribald comedies, Ferrell gives a solid performance here, and in his feature film debut, writer-director Dan Rush strikes a nice balance between quiet, inwardly-reflected comedy and something melancholic, tinged with an unarticulated desperation. The film isn’t really all that serious about Nick’s alcoholism, but one doesn’t mind terribly — at least until a putative catharsis in the final act, which arrives falsely, hinging on a narrative pivot with Nick’s sponsor, Frank (Michael Peña), that is simply not believable. If life, as John Lennon said, is what happens while you’re busy making plans, it’s also, in its simplest terms, the sheer accumulation of stuff. Pleasantly offbeat but not aggressively so, Everything Must Go showcases that axiom, in both the material and figurative senses. (Roadside Attractions, R, 96 minutes)

Wiry and kind of owlish at the same time, looking a bit like the physical model for the animated character of Scrat from the Ice Age films, John Hawkes is a bonafide character actor — someone whose face a lot of filmgoers might recognize, but not quite be able to place. That’s in the process of changing.

Hawkes has had success and glowing media notices before (Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know was the darling of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival), but achieved a whole new level of breakout attention last year with his turn in Winter’s Bone, for which he was eventually nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Another small festival film, shot in 2008 but only now winding its way to theaters, the stirring Earthwork affords Hawkes the opportunity to showcase his talents front and center, as a leading man. If there’s justice, this unfussy drama will entice a sizeable arthouse audience, and perhaps as a result help pave the way for more lead roles for Hawkes.

Based on a true story, and set mostly in the 1990s, the film focuses on Kansas “crop artist” Stan Heard (Hawkes, above), whose unique, living canvases can sometimes encompass hundreds of acres. Despite being costly, the other major dilemma such temporary art presents is that it almost always requires aerial assistance to be seen properly, meaning that the only way Stan can monetize his work is through photographs. Struggling to support his wife Jan (Laura Kirk) and seven-year-old son, Stan decides to take one last roll of the dice, hoping that a no-cost bid to clean and beautify a property owned by Donald Trump in New York City will bring him the sort of national publicity that could put he and his family on financial terra firma. He wins the contract.

Taking out a second mortgage on his home, Stan relocates for a couple months to his new work site, an abandoned lot on the Upper West Side. There, he discovers a group of homeless squatters, inclusive of a troubled schizophrenic known only as Lone Wolf (James McDaniel). They regard him with squirelly confusion at first, but eventually their curiosity gets the better of them, and they join Stan, helping in his work of art. Even with their occasional assistance, though, Stan’s success is far from guaranteed. Financial setbacks, home pressures and the uncertainty of any wider recognition funnel towards a finale that is at once heartrending and uplifting.

Earthwork is somewhat of a piece with the early films of David Gordon Green, George Washington and All The Real Girls. (It also recalls the criminally underseen topiary documentary A Man Named Pearl.) It’s not quite as steeped in ephemeral arthouse postures, but it’s gorgeously photographed, by Bruce Francis Cole, and its unhurried yet confident rhythms indicate a powerful and fortifying belief in the material, and the universality of its emotional connection. Using a cast peppered with a few non-professional and/or neophyte actors, writer-director Chris Ordal does something a lot of young filmmakers either can’t do, or consciously try to avoid — tell a simple story, simply, and without overindulging in stylistic gimmicks or emotional manipulation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Shadow Distribution, PG, 93 minutes)

A sort of poison pill for arthouse enjoyers of square-jawed foreign film literalism, Italian import The Double Hour, which scored three top prizes at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is a woozy and engaging romantic mystery loosely in the vein of Wicker Park, Swimming Pool or even Jacob’s Ladder. It’s not for all tastes, but the movie’s superlative lead performances give it an undeniable hold.

The film starts out as a seemingly fairly straightforward drama of lonely hearts disengagement. At a speed-dating event, mousey, unhappy hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport, above left) meets the mysterious Guido (Filippo Timi, above right), who turns out to be a widower and former cop turned security guard. They circle each other cautiously, seemingly still marked by past hurts. Guido eventually makes a move, but it’s at his place of business, where a group of robbers burst in and menacingly hold them at gunpoint. After a gunshot, we jump forward a couple of weeks, and follow Sonia as she tries to put her life back together following Guido’s death.

Soon, however, strange things start happening. A picture of the two of them that Sonia can’t recall ever being taken surfaces, and she starts hearing unusual noises, and then seeing Guido. When her friend and coworker (Antonia Truppo) commits suicide, it seems to hearken back, in bizarre fashion, to a similar horrific incident she earlier witnessed. Is she going insane? Is Guido actually alive? Is a cop pressing for more answers regarding the incident trying to ensnare her in a lie, or merely confuse her?

The Double Hour‘s lead performances make it an involving head trip — a thought-provoking movie at its core (arguably) about the corrosive effects of guilt. Timi, best known to American arthouse audiences for his portrayal of Benito Mussolini in Marco Bellochio’s Vincere, here gets to sort of play both lion and lamb, as his arc takes him from a mysterious (and potentially dangerous) character into more reactive territory. Rappoport, meanwhile, has a face that haunts, not easily yielding answers or giving comfort. The uncertainty, romantic and otherwise, that the film evokes will be queasily familiar to anyone who’s looked upon a lover and wondered, “Who is this person?” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 95 minutes)

It’s not just about the free, high-end swag for celebrities, although that’s certainly nice. Of the many perks and privileges they are afforded, one of the more precious ones that can’t be entirely quantified is the professional line-jump pass that actors receive to jump behind the camera and into the director’s chair. Trading on their name-recognition value, they have instant credibility with an assortment of potential financiers, easily landing the sort of important creative meetings for which hundreds of would-be auteurs would punch out their own mothers.



Their efforts are typically small, independent-minded passion projects. This can result in some strange and pretentious trainwrecks (Nicolas Cage‘s Sonny comes to mind), but also all sorts of worthwhile little curios, from arresting character pieces like Joey Lauren Adams‘ Come Early Morning to deeply affecting dramas, like Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth and Tim Roth’s The War Zone. Toeing the line somewhere between these two poles is Sympathy For Delicious, Mark Ruffalo’s unusual feature film directorial debut, and the winner of a special directing prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Well acted but more dawdling and frustrating than dizzily engaging, this seriocomic entry is an arthouse effort through and through.

The story centers around an up-and-coming Los Angeles deejay, Dean O’Dwyer (Christopher Thornton, who also wrote the script), who is paralyzed from the legs down in a motorcycle accident, sinks into a deep depression, ends up on skid row, is revealed to have faith-healing powers, and then joins a punk-revivalist band. (So, yeah… another one of those stories, in other words.) While there are a few touches of dark comedy here and there, those expecting a more sharpened religious satire, a la something like Saved!, will come away disappointed. Tonally, Sympathy For Delicious is more than a bit of a mess. The movie presents its supernatural premise in a somewhat intriguingly unprepossessing way, but abandons early on any deeper exploration of its crisis of faith or, indeed, just human existence, in order to dive down the rock-n-roll rabbit hole — all to occasionally entertaining but in the end hopelessly middling effect. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Maya Entertainment, R, 96 minutes)

A deliberate end credits crawl extends Hoodwinked Too! to 87 minutes, but nothing else about this manically pitched animated sequel seems near as calculated or particularly well thought out. An annoying, exceptionally unengaging ball of noise that lampoons broadly and poorly, Hoodwinked Too! is an even more dispiriting entry into the marketplace than its narrative failings render it, insofar as it seems to evince no real reason of existence beyond its connection to a predecessor that turned a tidy profit. Director Mike Disa exacerbates the movie’s yawning emotional disconnect by staging breathless action bits that favor movement above all else. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG, 87 minutes)

The fact that actual personal experience informs a movie’s narrative flavor doesn’t, of course, guarantee its quality in any way, shape or form — a fact yet again reaffirmed by writer-director Mike Pavone’s That’s What I Am, an awkward mish-mash of observational coming-of-age cliches and half-baked moralizing that feels like a bloated, not particularly well sketched episode of The Wonder Years.

Set in California during the 1960s, the film centers on 12-year-old Andy (Chase Ellison), a bright but small eighth-grade kid whose favorite teacher, Mr. Simon (Ed Harris), pairs him with the school outcast, red-haired and freakishly tall Stanley (Alexander Walters), for a class project. After a dramatic schoolyard incident, Principal Kelner (Amy Madigan) suspends a student for bullying a female classmate, and the vindictive kid feeds his father a malicious rumor about Mr. Simon’s sexuality, causing problems for all involved.

That’s What I Am means to be an earnest, uplifting family film, which is all well and good, but the movie evinces a fitful attention span, and Pavone never comes up with a way to successfully stitch together all the disparate, capital-I issues — from bullying, hormonal bloom, sexual preference and the effects of overbearing parents to wan stabs at race relations and tolerance more broadly — with which he peppers his narrative. He tries via adult narration, but this tack succeeds as neither funny and wistful nor nostalgic and knowing. Furthermore, it’s never paid off with any present day bookend, apart from lame “where are they now” character updates that roll under the end credits. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, WWE Studios, PG, 101 minutes)

A grand historical epic that evinces some impressive costume design and much natural scenic beauty, but never locates a particularly persuasive or enrapturing tone, director Jin Chen’s The Warring States tells the story of two historical Chinese figures whose head games and obstinance threaten to bring ruin to competing kingdoms. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 125 minutes)

If you see only one film this year about a psychokinetic tire that roams the dusty American southwest exploding the heads of those get in his way, it should definitely be Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber. An audacious horror comedy that is at once a wildly recast send-up of trashy B-movie slasher flicks (the killer tire lurks ominously, like a squat, polyisoprene cousin of Jason Voorhees) and a didactic, philosophical commentary on storytelling tropes, the film, love it or loathe it, is a one-of-a-kind must-see for fans of outré filmmaking.

When it starts out, Rubber seems at once more comedic and more expressly a cinematic exercise. Dupieux conceives of a framing device whereby a policeman (Stephen Spinella) lectures a collected (surrogate) group of folks on the intrinsic lack of reason in film narratives, and then passes out pairs of binoculars. As this bickering audience (Rubber‘s own Greek chorus) watches and develops their own opinions on the skulking tire, their analysis magnifies the powers of their subject, and helps lend the movie itself a certain sheen and added pop-academic significance.

The tire, meanwhile (tabbed Robert in the credits), rises from its desert slumber and, like a surly teenager, begins to test the limits of its power, rolling over and crushing a plastic bottle and scorpion before momentarily meeting its match in a glass beer bottle. Soon it’s stalking a girl (Roxane Mesquida), and doing worse.

There isn’t much doubt that its ending, a pseudo-intellectual sop, sputters out with far less grace and cleverness than its makers imagine. And other amusing tidbits — like the aftermath of a killing spree when Robert witnesses the rubber Holocaust-equivalent of a tire bonfire on television — are sort of half-formed. But Rubber is bold, and engaging throughout, which is more than one can say about much Hollywood product. (Magnet, unrated, 82 minutes)

A heady blend of spy thriller, period piece political drama and martial arts action flick, Chinese import Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen reaffirms star Donnie Yen’s quiet, universal charisma, while also tossing more sand on the tired, erroneous notion that more densely plotted films from the Orient can’t emotionally engage Western audiences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 106 minutes)