A little motivation goes a long way in Need for Speed, a technically polished but narratively bloated and muddled adaptation of the bestselling videogame racing series of the same name, starring Aaron Paul and helmed by Scott Waugh, who previously co-directed 2012’s Act of Valor. Alternately slick and over-plotted, the movie has a couple isolated pockets of cathartic connection, but tries to awkwardly thread a too-fine needle of dumb-fun revenge and square-jawed memorialization. In its needy and needless reach for gravitas, the movie irreparably drains a lot of momentum from what could be an energizing, fun, diversionary romp. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Disney/DreamWorks, PG-13, 130 minutes)

Higher science and especially speculative physics dance beyond the reach of many ordinary folks, but the new documentary Particle Fever gives viewers a shotgun-seat to history that plays out on a very human, relatable plane. Director Mark Levinson’s movie — about the biggest experiment in the world, to recreate conditions immediately after the Big Bang — is a fascinating celebration of human curiosity and endeavor.

Despite being a physicist turned filmmaker, of maybe because of it, Levinson has an intuitive sense of where and how to selectively bear down and focus on scientific fact and theory. It would be quite easy for a film of this nature to get lost in the weeds, or, conversely, for it to be massaged into a sort of grand, scientific mystery and thriller, where the outcome of its research findings was the big reveal. This type of movie could be engaging, and even decently satisfying to those who’d either never heard of the Large Hadron Collider or had no notion of how its research unfolded.

Particle Fever is more nuanced than that, however; it aims for something with a higher degree of difficulty, flirting with viewers on intellectual, philosophical and, yes, even spiritual levels. Some of the material has a slightly geeky quality (Is there a physics-based rap performance at a professional conference? Yes, yes there is), but Levinson threads the emotional ups and downs of events (the film spans several years) through a number of personable and articulate subjects — aided immeasurably by legendary editor Walter Murch, who repeatedly locates small moments and pivot points amidst the academia.

Ultimately, Particle Fever is more than just a handy primer on physics and the Hadron Collider. It shows that the key to success in regards to the scientific method is in jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm. There’s a lesson for individual life there as well. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (BOND 360, unrated, 99 minutes)

Winner of both the Audience Award and Best Documentary prize at last year’s Fantastic Fest, Jodorowsky’s Dune tells the story of French-Chilean cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendarily ambitious but ultimately doomed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction novel Dune. Directed by Frank Pavich, this entertaining and well-polished movie connects as a slice of exploratory nonfiction portraiture, and serves as a reminder that, in significant ways, we can be defined or best remembered by efforts that don’t achieve success or even fruition — we can be celebrated for the manner in which we conduct ourselves in noble defeat.



A shamanistic cinematic surrealist who attained acclaim chiefly via a pair of early-1970s avant-garde films in which he also starred, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky initially set out to make Dune for seemingly no particular reason other than the expansive canvas it afforded. (Jodorowsky hadn’t even read the book, he just had the recommendation of a friend). He set out to assemble a group of like-minded “spiritual warriors” to craft a movie that would open the minds of those who saw it, and spark revolutionary thought, especially in a younger generation.

Jodorowsky’s Dune, then, unfolds as a curated trip through the filmmaker’s erstwhile tilting at windmills, with producer Michel Seydoux and the now 85-year-old Jodorowsky discussing in detail a pre-production process that included the commissioning of music from Pink Floyd and Magma, as well as Jodorowsky’s plans to cast Salvador Dali and Orson Welles as Emperor Shaddam Corrino and Baron Harkonnen, respectively, and David Carradine and Mick Jagger in supporting roles. (Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn also pops up, describing a post-dinner conversation in which Jodorowsky led him through his massive Dune pre-production book, with thousands of storyboards, character sketches and other concept art.) The result of course has more remove than Lost in La Mancha, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s more or less real-time 2002 documentary about Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated adaptation of Don Quixote, but Pavich makes use of his subject’s memory and extensive archives to provide a visually lively and compelling look at this alt-universe Dune that never was.

It helps, too, that Jodorowsky is a figure of such enthusiasm and positivity; if there was bitterness surrounding the project’s dissolution, it’s long since dissipated. In keeping with this, Pavich’s film is mostly about art, and not commerce; as the title augurs, it serves as a platform for Jodorowsky’s ideas about Dune, and not so much a story of the particulars of its funding collapse and termination. (The realized big screen version of the film, by David Lynch, isn’t really mentioned until over 70 minutes into Pavich’s movie, and even then in generous fashion, with Jodorowsky assigning blame for its failure with producers, and not the Blue Velvet filmmaker.) For the most part this tack works, though one does on occasions ponder profligate pre-production spending and rights windows and all that.

Jodorowsky’s Dune does a good job of convincing viewers of its subject’s singular vision, and of the fact that the filmmaker’s adaptation of Herbert’s sprawling novel would have been a bold and imaginative work. Apart from its narrative and thematic adventurousness, some of the shots and special effects Jodorowsky describes as wanting to do are definitely of the groundbreaking variety, and it’s hard to know how (or if) he could have pulled them off at the time, on a technical level. It’s less settled whether Jodorowsky would have made it to the screen with his entire repertory company intact (while Dali and Welles weren’t necessarily known for saying yes to lots of projects, they were also capricious figures), and of course more speculative and even less settled still how this work would have been received commercially, no matter the name recognition of the book.

What can be established, however, is the talent of the behind-the-scenes creative team that Jodorowsky assembled, including Jean “Moebius” Girard, Chris Foss, Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger (the latter two of whom would famously reunite on Alien). That they would go on to make important contributions in many other films speaks to Jodorowsky’s eye for talent, certainly, as well as the notion that a lot of great art needs a touch of madness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 90 minutes)

The third and biggest-budgeted sword-and-sandal action movie to arrive this year, 300: Rise of an Empire unfolds in 480 B.C., but it might as well be “K.C.,” or Known Commodity. Such is the laid track that this punishingly brutal follow-up to Zack Snyder’s influential 300, which told the story of the battle of Thermopylae and a group of Spartan soldiers’ valiant but ultimately futile defense against a marauding army of Persian invaders, unfolds upon. With its low-angle shots, ominous thunderclaps, glistening pecs and bellowed celebrations of freedom, Rise of an Empire peddles a very particular, fetishized form of masculine hero worship in telling the story of a concurrent naval campaign, but all in service of little more than a state-of-the-art showcase for unremitting violence.

Snyder and Kurt Johnstad’s script, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller after the first film’s success, is a mélange of familiar bits and half-cooked motivations ladled over graphic bloodletting. There is absolutely a place for this sort of faux-historical entertainment — for bombastic films of representational value — but Rise of an Empire lacks the characterizations and intrigue to make it work. This film could be fun, or it could be grisly and of more consequence. Instead, it’s like watching someone else play a videogame. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 103 minutes)

Describing it as a cross between Misery, What Lies Beneath and Eve’s Bayou has the unfortunate side effect of making director Philippe Caland’s Repentance sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. A yawning, mopey thriller that unsuccessfully tries to blend psychological portraiture with pointless tension derived from torture, Caland’s film wastes a couple of invested performances that outstrip the material’s intelligence deficit.

Repentance unfolds in New Orleans, where author and life coach Tommy Carter (Anthony Mackie) lives with his yoga instructor wife Maggie (Sanaa Lathan), peddling positivity and a vague sort of synthesized religiosity. Dormant familial tensions get front-burnered when Tommy’s screw-up older brother Ben (Mike Epps) turns up out of the blue, needing money and a place to crash.

Trying to help out Ben, Tommy decides to take on an individual client who approached him at a book signing — Angel Sanchez (Forest Whitaker), a troubled handyman whose daughter Francesca (Ariana Neal) is also a student in one of Maggie’s children’s classes. Angel is fixated on the untimely death of his mother, and while Tommy’s work with him initially seems to have some benefit, he reacts violently when Tommy attempts to bring their professional relationship to an end. A confused Angel holds Tommy against his will, and begins to inflict his own brand of twisted therapy.

Caland, a French-Lebanese immigrant, has led one of those fantastically weird and charmed lives touching upon all sorts of entrepreneurial endeavors. He was a producer on Boxing Helena and the founder of JuntoBox Films, which provides a crowd-sourcing vehicle for independent filmmakers. A number of his previous directorial efforts have been of the “inside Hollywood” variety, about a filmmaker nobly struggling to make their movie, and Repentance itself is apparently a remake of a film with the same narrative, in which Caland directed himself in the role Whitaker plays here. The basic takeaway of all this is the polite suggestion that perhaps moviemaking is not the occupation for which Caland is best suited — at least on a creative level. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 95 minutes)

Non-Stop, starring Liam Neeson as an air marshal who during a trans-Atlantic flight has a Very Bad Day of the decidedly action movie variety, starts off fairly intriguingly. Its protagonist is brusque and distracted; before boarding his flight he takes a swig of booze to let us know he’s an alcoholic and help signify his tragic past, true, but then he smokes a cigarette after a few spritzes of breath spray, indicating a different pathology. Eventually, though, Non-Stop runs out of interesting little character quirks and recognizable names and faces stuffed into supporting roles to pump up the guessing-game as to its guilty party/parties, succumbing to less interesting, jerry-rigged thrills and payoffs that will play fine with a popcorn and soda but immediately dissipate upon exiting a theater, and leave one feeling a bit empty.

It’s easy, on a theoretical level, to imagine 59-year-old Kevin Costner looking at the post-Taken action flick paydays of Liam Neeson, two years his elder, and saying, “Hey, why not me?” It’s less easy to understand anything else about the mishmash that is 3 Days To Kill, an incredibly inane shoot-’em-up from director McG that mistakes self-satisfaction for vicarious entertainment. Co-written by Luc Besson, 3 Days To Kill is much more of an action-comedy than its advertising lets on — though that may be a smart bait-and-switch given that tonal clumsiness and a stunning lack of attention to detail are the film’s two most consistent traits. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Relativity Media, PG-13, 117 minutes)

The best thing one can realistically say about Pompeii, the new and utterly ridiculous, CGI-addled love-story-cum-disaster-porn offering from Resident Evil filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson, is that it elicits a genuine curiosity to learn more about the first-century Roman city felled by volcanic eruption, since one has so much free time to ponder the narrative’s legitimate historical underpinnings whilst letting waves of inanity wash over them. Borrowing liberally (and not that imaginatively) from Gladiator, Titanic and Volcano, this empty, air-quote epic embodies the worst instincts of disposable Hollywood storytelling, reducing mass-scale tragedy to nothing more than a backdrop for cheap, boilerplate villainy and romance.



Pompeii unfolds in 79 AD, where Celtic Briton Milo (Kit Harington) is a slave, and has been since he was orphaned as a child. His horse-whispering ways catch the attention of Cassia (Emily Browning), the well-off daughter of an upper-crust merchant couple, Severus and Aurelia (Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss). Cassia has recently returned to her coastal hometown, disenchanted, from a trip to Rome, where she inadvertently picked up an unwanted suitor in the form of Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland), a sleazy and corrupt senator who, wouldn’t you know it, murdered Milo’s family in front of him so many years ago.

Milo and Cassia making eyes at one another does not at all please Corvus, who seems really focused on putting a ring on it (it being Cassia). Placed on the gladiator track, Milo is slated for a lethal showdown with Atticus (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the reigning champion of local deathsport-entertainment. Before they can have a go at the whole mortal-stabby thing, though, they fall under the spell of manly begrudging respect. Oh, and then the gurgling volcano overlooking Pompeii, Mount Vesuvius, erupts, meaning Milo has to fight his way out of the public arena and through a city raining down hellfire, in order to save Cassia and settle his emotional tab with Corvus.

Taken of a piece and by itself, a sequence like the one in which Milo and Atticus band together with other slave-fighters to fend off an ordained gladiatorial execution has a certain cathartic charge. And advances in technology allow for an engaging and detailed aerial portrait of Pompeii, which Anderson further indulges with some high-angle, 3-D representations of city life.

But Pompeii overall exhibits such a staggering misappropriation of time and focus as to almost defy belief. The characters here are all tissue-paper-thin, and the dialogue hammy and tone-deaf; screenwriters Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler and Michael Robert Johnson seem hell-bent on concentrating solely on the least interesting and most ridiculous aspects of their hodgepodge. (Watching Pompeii, one would think that Milo and Atticus’ uneasy friendship spelled the end of any and all racial tensions for all of humankind.) The wrong-side-of-the-tracks love story? A snooze. Generic political intrigue? Boring. The sociopathic need on the part of Corvus to get very specifically up in the garments of a young woman not interested in him? Even more yawn-inducing.

And yet that, along with the overly familiar sword-and-sandal slave stuff, accounts for around 70 minutes of Pompeii. In history books there’s a volcano that unleashed rivers of lava and destroyed an entire vibrant city of around 20,000, but here it’s reduced to just one big concluding set piece to underscore Corvus’ assholishness, and rendered to boot in overly slick tones that neuters any sense of gobsmacked doom. There’s a posed quality to almost of its scenes, so that even the nightmares that plague Milo don’t cling or leave a mark.

It’s arguable as to whether this story would have by default been better served with a R rating, but one thing is absolutely certain — Pompeii is a preposterous movie whose self-seriousness and time spent dawdling on irrelevant diversions makes it a dreary, wearying experience. Viewers know the ending already (or should, at least), and the way that Anderson orchestrates things, it can’t come soon enough in this misbegotten mishmash. For the movie’s trailer, click here. (TriStar/FilmDistrict, PG-13, 98 minutes)

A movie about a nobly principled con artist and courier of contraband invites skepticism if not outright ridicule, but that’s just what writer-director Zak Forsman’s Down and Dangerous is — an indie genre production, poised somewhere between self-seriousness and loose-limbed character study, that gets its ya-yas out and wins over viewers by virtue of its continued ability to surprise.

Los Angeleno Paul Boxer (John T. Woods) is said honorable smuggler, and he’s so good at his scams that he doesn’t need to carry a gun. When he loses leverage in a situation, however, Paul is forced by more violent, less genteel traffickers into concocting a scheme to bring a couple kilos of blow across the Mexican border. Naturally, there’s also a gal (Paulie Rojas) with whom Paul has a complicated past.

Down and Dangerous gets your attention early on, when Paul runs an end-around on a cruise giveaway on a tampon box contest in order to lure a woman into unwittingly serving as his mule. It tests that interest at times, but never lets it go. It may sound weird, but there are echoes of Michael Mann’s Thief here; Forsman’s tale apparently takes its inspiration from his father’s career in the independent cocaine-smuggling trade, but he’s interested in honor and uprightness in an interesting guise. When we meet him, Paul isn’t atoning for past sins or looking for “one big last score,” he’s happily working outside the law but with his own moral compass.

If the talk of integrity is at times a bit marble-mouthed or awkward, it’s certainly not notional — it’s interwoven throughout. This may make Down and Dangerous seem and feel a bit ridiculous at times, but it definitely also livens things up, and makes it different from so many like-minded movies. The film is also abetted by a polished technical package that belies its Kickstarter-assisted low-budget funding.

As for the performances, Woods has a withholding demeanor that doesn’t tip or bleed over into too-cool-for-school affectedness; he charms enough to get by, and likewise intimidates, but also operates with the knowledge that sometimes less is more. The attractive Rojas, meanwhile, has a chirpy cadence that summons aural memories of Penelope Cruz.

Forsman’s movie has a pinch of batshit-craziness (the idea of a freelance smuggling mentor, played by Judd Nelson, is risible) and I’m still not entirely convinced that its narrative unfolds in a way that makes complete sense, regardless of the material’s nonfiction roots. (There’s truth and “based on true events,” after all, and sometimes movies lean too heavily on the former, in efforts to bolster credibility that actually end up undermining dramatic engagement.) Still, there’s a weirdly dirty charm to this curio, which has more going for it than not. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Down and Dangerous is also available across VOD and digital platforms. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Artis Entertainment/The Sabi Company, unrated, 95 minutes)