In the Loop

Meticulously crafted from its BBC television source series, "The Thick of It," "In the Loop" is the funniest and smartest political comedy to come along in ages. With an unusually clever cast, director Armando Iannucci delivers nonstop punch-and-tickle humor from Britain's corridors of power to the D.C. beltway where the rollicking movie hits its stride. Britain's Minister of International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) fumbles with mixed metaphors during a radio interview, and hints that Iraq war plans might be on the Prime Minister's agenda. Simon's dimwitted radio performance sends Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the Prime Minister's Director of Communications, into a spree of hilarious vulgarity spewing recriminations aimed at Simon and anyone within a twenty-five yard proximity. Simon, Malcolm, and newbie political adviser Toby (Chris Addison), head to D.C. to participate in slapdash caucus proceedings administered with a fourth grade level of strategy and execution. "In the Loop" works exceptionally well as a modern day political comedy because it doesn't get bogged down in specifics that might be construed as carrying any kind of agenda or message. The wonks that make British and American politics run are shown as little more than young adult brats, or middle-aged adult brats engaged in an ongoing pissing contest that will eventually be dumped on unsuspecting citizens of every community in the world. It just goes to show that politicians hate each other just as much as their citizenry hates them. Oh, and they hate you too.
Rated PG-13. 105 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

Salo (Classic Film Pick)

Pier Palo Pasolini's last film was the most ambitious of his career, and the most misunderstood. Still banned in several countries, "Saol" is an haunting journey into the depths of hell on earth, loosely stewarded by the literary underpinnings of the Marquis de Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" and the three descending levels of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." Shockingly graphic, and yet formally composed, it is a film that employs the full arsenal of Pasolini's polemic and satiric tools toward a poetic commentary on fascism disguised as consumerist capitalism enforced by a complicit group of bourgeoisie dignitaries. It is a film that expands in meaning in the years since its creation to encompass every degree of political and military corruption that history has acutely fulfilled--most recently in the atrocious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Pasolini set the story in the Italian town of Salo, where his brother was killed during WWII, and where Pasolini himself was arrested at one point by Nazi soldiers. Four wealthy Mussolini fascist libertines prepare for their certain demise before the end of the war by kidnapping nine boys and nine girls, for the purpose of living out their most outlandish sexual fantasies within the confines of a private villa. The men employ the assistance of four experienced courtesans to fire their debauched imaginations with ribald parlor stories that inform the humiliating and brutal sex acts that they will execute upon their naked nubile prisoners. Dramatically feral and artistically fertile, "Salo" is a rigorous movie that dares to use the metaphor of torture as a device of utter physical and psychological annihilation for both the victim and the torturer. It is significant that such an intellectual filmmaker could so dynamically condense thick layers of social commentary into an artistically skeletal form that is perfectly transparent upon reflection. There is nothing exploitative about "Salo." It is a film that demands to be studied with the same degree of scrutiny that corporate, religious, and governmental industries should be subjected to for their enslaving effect on the planet and humanity. This is work, and not play.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Perhaps better able to disguise of its lacking narrative cohesion when screened in its intended 3-D context, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" never properly invites the audience into its messy world of familial trust. A saving grace comes with a more plot inclusive role than the first two "Ice Age" installments for Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel whose obsession with obtaining an ever-elusive giant acorn is this time sidetracked by a frisky female member of his species. Vocal performances by Ray Romano and Queen Latifah leave much to be desired, and enable John Lequizamo to steal the picture with his pitch perfect execution of Sid the Sloth, whose theft of several dinosaur eggs sets the story in motion. Very pregnant woolly mammoth Ellie (voiced by Latifah) and hubby mammoth Manny (Romano) go on adventure with Denis Leary aging saber-toothed tiger Diego, deep into an underground world of prehistoric dinosaurs where a swashbuckling one-eyed weasel named Eddie (Simon Pegg) serves as a guide. Eddie's pirate personality clashes with the tone of the story which welcomes dinosaurs to the "Ice Age" that was, well, responsible for their species' demise. For a kids' movie with the potential to be at least somewhat historically accurate in the interest of informing children about landmark events in the Earth's history, "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" fails to do even that.     
Rated PG. 93 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Homecoming

Director Morgan J. Freeman takes a plodding approach to stirring up suspense in what can only be called an adolescent knock-off of Rob Reiner's far superior 1990 thriller "Misery." Matt Long plays former high school football prodigy Mike, who makes the mistake of returning to his Pennsylvania hometown for Christmas with his new college girlfriend Elizabeth (played by Jessica Stroup). Mike's ex-girlfriend Selby (Mischa Barton) refuses to accept that Mike is no longer interested in her, and sets out to sabotage Elizabeth by getting her drunk on tequila on the night before she's due to meet Mike's family. A happy car accident for Selby puts Elizabeth in her private care while she (Selby) tries to jumpstart romance with Mike, who is led to believe that Elizabeth dumped him. Every plot point is written out in block letters, and the only suspense comes from feeling every minute drag by like an eternity. The acting and filmmaking are so marginal that you wish a camera person would jump out and announce that it's all just a dumb prank. Instead, it's just a dumb movie.   
Not Yet Rated. 92 mins. (D) (One Star)

500 Days of Summer

As a post modern dissertation on a doomed lead-or-be-led relationship, director Marc Webb's romantic comedy suffers from script formatting that randomly jumps between specific days in the life of an affair between ego-hindered Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and commitment-phobe Summer (played by Zooey Deshanel). In spite of its overworked structure, the movie captures a believable romance between Tom and Summer, who work together at a greeting card company. Insecure Tom lets Summer make the first move, and pays dearly for it as she lays the ground rules for what will be an emotionally bumpy ride for Tom. Summer insists that she doesn't believe in "love," while their coziness turns would-be architect Tom into a veritable song-and-dance man. The lopsided romance goes repeatedly off and on until a dramatic change of heart creates a climax that makes one of them a better person, and reveals hypocrisy in the other. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great as a hopeless romantic, and Zooey Deshanel embodies a cold-fish charmer whose mod girl styling is but a clever disguise for a person looking for a better deal.
(Fox Searchlight) Rated PG-13. 96 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Teen desire and romance hits Hogwarts in the sixth Harry Potter film, and goes a long way to providing contrast to the skullduggery being perpetrated by Severus Snape, Draco Malfoy, and three Death Eaters that swirl around the story like exterminating angels. The actors have all aged well into their familiar roles, with Daniel Radcliffe showing evermore confidence in playing the "Chosen One" with a reserve of humor and restrained emotion. Hermione's amorous preoccupation with Ron gets lift during a couple of very well executed Quidditch sequences that lend harmless excitement to some of the film's otherwise darker set pieces. The ever-perfect Michael Gambon is a delight as Dumbledore, whose objective of undermining the evil Lord Voldemort with Harry's prodigious help sets the film's tempo. David Yates returns after directing the last Potter film with a determinedly Gothic vision that allows emotional and visual color to emanate from JK Rowling's collection of lively protagonists. Jim Broadbent adds particular energy as Professor Horace Slughorn, who Dumbledore convinces to return to teaching magic potions at Hogwarts. Slughorn's repressed memories of a student named Tom Riddle--later to become Lord Voldemort--provide essential insight into the nature of the beast that Harry must face in the next installment. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the most balanced Harry Potter film to come along, perhaps because the right combination of screenwriter (Steve Kloves) and director has been established, along with the appropriate team of special effects wizards and talented production crew. Of course it's the actors that make the magic happen and every one, from Alan Rickman and Robbie Coltrane to Emma Watson and Bonnie Wright, cast a memorable spell.
(Warner Brothers) Rated PG. 153 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

Pixote (Classic Film Pick)

Long before Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund made "City of God" in 2002, about Rio de Janeiro's youth-centric atmosphere of organized crime, director Hector Babenco set the bar for such explosive cinema with his brilliant 1981 film "Pixote." The film's full title , "Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco" translates as "Pixote: The Law of the Weakest," and was based on José Louzeiro's book "A infância dos mortos" ("The Childhood of the Dead Ones") in a screenplay adaptation by Babenco and his script collaborator Jorge Duran, about a young boy named Pixote (pronounced Pee-jo-che). Fernando Ramos Da Silva was the expressive young non-actor chosen to play his life as a ghetto child for Babenco's evocative subjective camera. The boy is sent to a cruel juvenile reformatory where he sniffs glue and learns the ways of prison survival that inform his life after he and two of his friends escape the jail. Pixote desperately seeks the attention a mother figure even as he falls deeper into an inevitable vortex of crime and violence. "Pixote" is Hector Babenco's masterwork. The film is a distressed and powerful cry for social change in a Brazilian society that feeds on its on children. It is a deeply affecting and haunting film that penetrates the skin of its viewer through the personal commitment to its subject that comes through in every frame. That Fernandos Ramos Da Silva was eventually murdered at 19 by police in Sao Paulo only emphasizes the sad fate of so many more Brazilian children just like him. "Pixote" is an amazing cinematic social document made with fury and passion by an uncompromising director. There has never been another film that approaches its depiction of Brazil's condemned youth, not even "City of God."

Humpday

Writer/director Lynn Shelton's lo-fidelity indie effort is a disarmingly goofy yet dramatic yarn built around two straight Generation Z buddies who incite the other to have sex together in the interest of entering a local Seattle amateur porn video contest called "Humpday." Mark Duplass plays Ben, a working class guy with a loving domestic wife named Anna (played by Alycia Delmore). Ben's and Anna's cozy home life is disrupted when Ben's bohemian man/boy friend-from-his-past Andrew (played by Joshua Leonard) shows up unannounced at the couple's doorstep in the middle of the night. The pals' friendship of oneupsmanship takes a dodgy turn at a party of young metrosexual hipsters when the duo hatch the idea of making a sex video that is "beyond gay," wherein they will film themselves preparing to, and having sex, in a hotel room. The guys never bother to hash out which one will be doing the poking, and the film's broiling subtext of 21st century American zeitgeist of stupidity via mumblecore's can't-get-started value system comes to a head with a surprising amount of humor and honesty. Alycia Delmore gives a nuanced performance as Anna, but it's the dumb-as-stumps performances from Duplass and Leonard that make "Humpday" a movie that you can laugh at as much as you laugh with it.
Seashel Pictures R. 94 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

Soul Power

"Soul Power" is a vital documentary about "Zaire '74," a  three-day concert, preceding the famous Ali/Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" boxing match in Kinsasha, Zaire, where great musical acts like Celia Cruz, the Fania-All Stars, James Brown, The Spinners, and B.B. King performed under a banner intended to popularize Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko. Culled from rare concert footage, director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte--editor on the Oscar-winning "When We Were Kings"--leaves out the politics of the day while retaining some of the cultural significance of the sweat-drenched event with fly-on-the-wall footage of interaction between the musicians, concert crew managers, and the filmmaker himself. Scenes of Ali speaking eloquently about his connection to Africa resonates with James Brown's captivating performance of songs like "Cold Sweat" and "Say it Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)." "Soul Power" is an imperfect social document of a time when anything seemed possible. Here's proof that Michael Jackson never had a thing on James Brown.   
(Celluloid Dreams) Not Rated.  93 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Michael Bay's soul-sucking extravaganza of metal machine warfare is remarkable for the lethargy with which the clunky story drags from one silly sequence to another. Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky, now a college freshman distracted by his oh-so-hot long distance girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox) when it becomes clear that he holds the key to defeating the Decepticons. What little there is of a story teeters between frothy sexed-up humor, ghost-in-the-machine narration from Autobot leader Optimus Prime, and souped-up CGI of giant robots. The filmmakers give an elderly robot a cane to signify his elderly state--hello, he's a robot--while having a couple of Autobots talk in ghetto speak. The script's desperate grab for any kind of attention--negative or otherwise--is sure to leave intelligent audience members feeling insulted and cheated. The spectacle on display isn't even all that impressive. You might make it out of the movie with your soul barely intact, but the actors in the film don't fare so well. 
Rated PG-13. 144 mins. (D) (One Star)

My Sister's Keeper

Nick Cassavetes' three-hankie weepy lurches during moments of music-video sequences, and gratuitous voice-over narration from members of the Fitzgerald family as they struggle with their terminally ill daughter Kate (well played by Sofia Vassilieva). Parents Sara (Cameron Diaz in the best performance of her career to date) and Brian (played by the ever-dependable Jason Patric) made an ethically challenging decision when they chose to conceive a second daughter, Anna (Abigail Breslin), as a genetically engineered resource to physically help keep leukemia-stricken Kate alive. At eleven, Anna decides that she wants to be legally exonerated from her bodily responsibilities to Kate, and seeks medical emancipation with the aid of Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin), a successful ambulance-chasing attorney. A court battle, overseen by an especially perceptive Judge De Salvo (Joan Cusack), looms while Kate pursues romance with a cancer-suffering patient named Taylor (Thomas Dekker). The crux of the drama comes down to Sara's ability as a mother to see beyond her involuntary urge to fight like a martyr for the life of a daughter whose pain and suffering must eventually come to an end. In spite of some of its less than elegant editorial decisions, "My Sister's Keeper" is full of terrific performances all around. Joan Cusack is phenomenal as a judge recovering from the loss of her own daughter, and Abigail Breslin confirms her status as one of the most gifted young actors in the business.

(New Line/Warner Bros) PG-13. 106 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

Blast!

Anyone with the slightest twinge of celestial curiosity in them will enjoy Paul Devlin's earnest documentary about the efforts of his astrophysicist PhD brother Mark and a team of adventurous young scientists as they launch BLAST--"Balloon-borne, Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope, to take thousands of intoxicating pictures of deep space. The movie is as much about the attitudes and work ethics of the crew, that consists largely of students getting hands-on experience, as it is about the team's tribulations invloved with exectuing such an ambitious and complex project. After an imperfect attempt at capturing the histories of ancient galaxies, that takes the balloon-tethered telescope from Artic Sweeden to coldest Canada, the team returns to launch a much improved version of BLAST in a circular pattern around Antartica. The payoff is a fascinating lesson in the Earth's microscopic place within the vast reaches of space. It's a history class like no other.
Not Rated. 74 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

The Stoning of Soraya M.

In fulfilling its blatantly exploitative title, director Cyrus Nowrasteh crafts a prosaic telling of the brutal 1986 murder of an Iranian family woman, as orchestrated by her own husband in the interest of avoiding divorce payments and running off with a teenaged girl. Shohreh Aghdashloo plays Zahra, the caring aunt to Soraya (Mozhan Marno), a wife and mother to four children. Zahra catches the attention of Sahebjam (well played by Jim Caviezel), a French-Iranian journalist passing through her dusty village on the day after the public stoning of Soraya by nearly every friend, neighbor, and family member. Zahra retells the events into Sahebjam's tape recorder as the film switches to flashbacks leading up to, and including, the promised sequence wherein Soraya is buried up to her waist and stoned to death like a bad animal. Based on Freidoune Sahebjam's best-selling book, "The Stoning of Soraya M." overreaches with maudlin slow-motion shots to dramatize the gruesome violence of the terrible event to ostensibly bring global attention to the primitive practice of honor killings in the Middle East. But there is something condescending and shoddy in the filmmaker's subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike. With American police beating, tasing, and shooting women, children, and men to death every week, the film could have been made with a more honest approach, as a more inclusive indictment of any form of capital punishment and authority-endorsed violence. The disjointed shift from a flat soap opera approach to a slo-mo ballet of violence announces the film's unjustifiable grab for shock value and backfires as a fetishized celebration of the violent act that the title predicts. Here is an example of on-the-nose exploitation filmmaking at its most unsophisticated level. Anyone with a BS detector will know it when you see it. It's one thing to illustrate social injustice, and quite a different thing to reward it.  
Rated R. 116 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

The Hurt Locker

Director Kathryn Bigelow's powerful Iraq war drama begins with the premise that "war is a drug," and proves that postulate with a thoughtful character study of Staff Sergeant William James, a bomb specialist played by Jeremy Renner. As part of a U.S. military Explosive Ordinance Disposal team stationed in Bagdad, Sergeant Williams takes a cavalier approach to diffusing roadside, and otherwise installed, explosives. He's not quite suicidal, but Williams' unconventional fearlessness severely worries other members of his team, to the point that they imagine it might be better if he weren't around. Former embedded journalist Mark Boal's script takes an episodic form to transmit the heightened degree of stress that these type of soldiers endure on a moment-by-moment basis. The film supports the idea that extended exposure to certain kinds of experiences have the effect of either galvanizing a participant or breaking them, if they are fortunate enough to survive. In WWII, war was hell, in Viet Nam it was numbed by drugs, but in today's version of extreme conflict, war is the drug. Supporting the troops is not what you think.  
Rated R. 130 mins. (A) (Five Stars)

The Girl From Monaco

A clever genre-blender from Anne Fontaine, "The Girl From Monaco" is a romantic satire that achieves a delicate balance of motivation and risk reward or punishment on the social stage of its French Riviera town. Fabrice Luchini is Bertrand Beauvois, a nearly over-the-hill French attorney soaking up Monaco's local atmosphere while defending Edith Lasalle (played by Stephane Audran), a wealthy murderess in a high profile trial. Bertrand is surprised to find that his client's son has hired bodyguard Christophe (played by Roschdy Zem), to protect him from any outside interference during the trial. But it's when a sexy local television weather girl named Audrey (played by Louise Bourgoin) insinuates herself into Bertrand's otherwise well-ordered world that clouds of jealousy and pending doom creep across the sunny Monaco skies. Bertrand finds out the hard way about Christophe and Audrey, two lower class Monaco residents attempting to fast-track their way into the town's impossibly rich milieu. This is a shrewd film that maintains a subtle layer of suspense before releasing its narrative trap.
Rated R. 94 mins. (B) (Three Stars)

Cheri

Stephen Frears's adaptation of two combined Colette novels, never takes hold due to a myopic screenplay by Christopher Hampton, and from a severely misjudged performance from Kathy Bates that threatens to sink the film whenever her distinctly non-British "Baroness" appears. Set in the Belle Epoque era of the late 1800s, Michelle Pfeiffer plays Lea, an aging high society courtesan whose romantic dabblings with a young stud named Cheri (played by Rupert Friend), lead to a certain ennui of requited lust for the aged Lea whose life plan was not as thoroughly conceived as she imagined. Pfeiffer momentarily teases the oh-so-droll drama from its dull-witted eroticism from time to time, but the overall effect is that of stale chocolate.   
Rated R. 92 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

The Beaches of Agnes

At 80, French New Wave legend Agnes Varda creates a lucid and passionate cinematic memoir that is transformative in its effortless ability to connect the director's life story to her ever-present artistic impulses that are just as strong today as when she made "Chloe From 5 to 7." The film starts out with Varda and her crew placing a collection of mirrors on a sunny Belgian beach where she describes viewing landscapes in the internal natures of others, but timeless beaches within her own internal make-up. As she articulates her childhood, spent in the small port town of Sete, France where she learned to repair fishing nets, Varda's keen artistic awareness begins to seep from the screen with randomness, humor, and telling associational qualities. The film is an anti-documentary where the director/subject allows a scrapbook formlessness to imbue even carefully staged atmospheres that function as breathing artistic instillations. Full of clips from her famous, and lesser known films, "The Beaches of Agnes" is an imaginative reverie through a period of French cinema where filmmakers like Alain Renais, Jean Luc Godard, and Chris Marker found themselves in the company of a filmmaking force of nature called Agnes Varda. This is a self-reflexive character study that's too good to miss.
Not Rated. 110 mins. (A-) (Four Stars)

Dead Snow

Upstart Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola goes for gory glory in a Nazi zombie slasher pic that steals liberally from the Sam Raimi cannon of horror. Trouble comes when a group of medical students go for a snowmobile vacation in a remote mountain cabin that happens to be located on the grave site of hundreds of Nazi soldiers waiting for an opportunity to awaken and take back the gold trinkets they stole from local villagers more than a half century ago. There's plenty of toilet humor and gross-out visuals as our doomed group of victims do battle with an unending stream of zombies whose, make-up is the best thing in the movie. For young gore-hungry audiences who haven't seen "The Evil Dead" (one and two), "Dead Snow" could work as a stomach-churning thrill ride, but for more experienced viewers, you're much better off sticking with a master of the genre like Sam Raimi, whose "Drag Me to Hell" achieves everything the "Dead Snow" filmmakers attempted to do, and more. 
Rated R. 90 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

$9.99

An urban Australian apartment building is the alternately public and private forum for a disparate collection of humanity represented as animated clay people in Tatia Rosenthal's quirky yet unsatisfying animated drama. Geoffrey Rush is the voice of a suicidal homeless man who comes back as a winged angel to converse with an aged tenant after having offed himself in the presence of Jim (voiced by Anthony La Paglia), a widowed father to a couple of grown boys busy searching for the meaning of life in all the wrong places. Surreal elements blend with a prosaic narrative that refuses to ever come to life in a filmic sense of the word. The film is significant if only as a first co-production between Tel Aviv and Australian film companies. Intriguing as a flawed experiment in animation, "nine dollars ninety-nine" suffers from a lack of thematic continuity that leaves the audience wanting both more and less--more story and less metaphor. 
Rated R. 78 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Seraphine

In writer/director Martin Provost's patiently restrained biopic about the self-trained French painter Seraphine Louis, the audience is brought increasingly closer into the heart and mind of a genius whose turbulent inner life eventually envelops her conscious being. Yolande Moreau ("Les plages d' Agnes") gives an earthy and compelling performance, measured by her character's direct connection to the natural world around her. The film's achievement lies in connecting Seraphine's '20s era working class life, from freelance house maid to a successful artist, under the inestimable patronage of Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German art critic and collector who champions Seraphine for her scintillating artistic ability. That the filmmaker does so, while delicately sketching in the underlying influences of World War I and the Great Depression, adds to the film's overall effect as a fully formed narrative of immense social breadth and artistic fulfillment.
(Music Box Films) Not Rated. 128 mins. (B+) (Four Stars)

Lorna’s Silence

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne craft an evocative story about Lorna, a young Albanian woman (played flawlessly in the 2008 Cannes festival’s most impressive break-out performance by Kosovo-born Arta Dobroshi) in cahoots with Fabio, a Belgian mobster, to make money so she can open a snack bar with her boyfriend. Lorna suffers through a fraud marriage to Claudy (well played by Jeremie Renier), a loser junkie that Fabio plans to kill in order to put Lorna in another sham marriage, this time to a rich Russian. If the plot sounds convoluted, it doesn’t impede an inevitable flood of surprising physical and emotional responses from the poker-faced Lorna. This is one powerful film that stays with you.
Rated R. 95 mins. (A-) (Four Stars)

Surveillance

From the looks of her latest cinematic abomination, it seems Jennifer Lynch is doomed to forever be regarded as David Lynch’s untalented daughter. Her first film in 15 years, after the unwatchable “Boxing Helena,” is the kind of slapdash gore-fest you’d expect from Rob Zombie, although even he might take offense at the comparison. A violent serial-killer-murder-sequence shifts to a pair of overly affectionate FBI agents (played by Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) arriving at a desert town police station to interview impudent local cops about a highway massacre that left one cop wounded and his partner dead. Alternating flashbacks show an abusive pair of cops (played by French Stewart and co-writer Kent Harper) shooting out tires on passing cars before playing good-cop-bad-cop with their prey, that necessarily includes a vacationing family with a little girl and a pair of drug addicts. There’s a big twist at the end, but not a bit of competent writing or filmmaking to be had. If you ever wondered how one movie could discredit a film festival’s programmer, “Surveillance” is it.
Rated R. 97 mins. (D-) (Zero Stars)

Land of the Lost

Will Ferrell is a buzz kill to this innuendo-laced comedy that's unrelated to the television series it's ostensibly based on. Notorious for repeating his same shtick rather than creating characters, Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, a quantum paleontologist who bumbles into inventing a time-travel device that takes him and his assistant Holly (a squandered Anna Friel), along with slacker Will Stanton (Danny McBride) to a surreal place where lizard-type aliens clash with monkey people represented by Chaka (Jorma Taccone). Doomed from its faulty inception, "Land of the Lost" lives up to its title as a movie with no comic bearing save for Will Ferrell's tired humor that works fine on David Letterman, but not so much on larger screens. This movie doesn't even rate as a guilty pleasure. It's a guilty pain.
Rated PG-13. 96 mins. (D) (One Star)

Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love

Audiences unfamiliar with charismatic and gifted Senegalese singer Youssou Ndour will likely be struck by his magnificent voice, but still kept at a distance from the preachy nature of his songs' religious rhetoric. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's passion for her devout Sufi Muslim subject blinds her to a need for shaping a coherent story in a puffy documentary that goes slack with gooey adulation more often than not. A quick tour through Youssou's early steps to becoming a singer of the "Griot" tradition, against his father's wishes, gives way to sequences of harmonically rich concert performances throughout Europe and at New York's Carnegie Hall. The thematic thrust of the film comes through in the Senegalese people's disapproval of Youssou's 2004 concept album "Egypt," released during Ramadan, because they resented their musical hero's use of religious subjects in his songs. The complaint is not without merit even if Youssou's winning of a Grammy award for the album eventually overshadowed the issue, at least in the Western world.
Not Rated. 102 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

Moon

Duncan Jones' "Moon" is the best sci-fi movie to come along in a generation or two. Sam Rockwell gives an unadulterated tour de force performance as Sam Bell, an isolated astronaut working a three-year corporate contract mining job on the moon in this must-see sci-fi thriller. Concept is everything is good science fiction, and screenwriter Nathan Parker, working from a story by Jones, discreetly teases conventions of the genre, and flips stereotypes, while playing with suspense in wholly unexpected ways. Drawing liberally on a collection of references from "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris," the filmmakers take a refreshingly retro approach to special effects and allow the story's inherent drama and political satire to well up from its internal sense of conflict. Two-week's away from finally returning to Earth, Sam is a one-man harvester of Helium 3, an energy producing gas that he frequently shoots back in canister rockets to Earth. However, the arrival of Sam's replacement worker presents a crisis of identity and reality that is more than a little surprising.
Rated R. 97 mins. (A-) (Four Stars)

Tetro

Francis Ford Coppola's first self-penned film since "The Conversation" (1974) is hampered by lack of forward momentum in a narrative of familial betrayal and rivalry. Filmed in lush black-and-white by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. ("Youth Without Youth"), the story consists of a contentious reunion of brothers in Buenos Aires' artists filled La Boca district where would-be writer Tetro (Vincent Gallo) took up residence ten years ago after abandoning his family. Tetro's 18-year-old brother Bennie (well played by newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) unexpectedly arrives at Tetro's apartment dressed like a Naval cadet--he's fresh off a visiting cruise ship where he works as a waiter. Tetro has changed his name from Angelo to an abbreviated version of his last name Tertocelli after a falling out with his famous symphony conductor father Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Now living with his dancer girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu), Tetro hobbles around on crutches recovering from being hit by a bus, and his condition adds to his character's metaphysical kinship to similar thematic material like Tennessee Williams "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Bennie's idealized vision of his brother quickly evaporates as he discovers buried truths revealed in Tetro's code-written manuscript that Bennie furtively deciphers. Coppola brings in flashes of color with flash back and musical sequences that give the film an operatic flare that tips the scales too much in a direction of self-aware commentary. Nonetheless, there is a communal joy in performances from the film's vibrant female cast members, that include Leticia Bredice and Sofia Castiglione. Stylistically, "Tetro" has its strengths, but it fails to connect with an emotional core before its overwrought third act comes crashing down.
Not Rated. 127 mins. (C) (Two Stars)

Easy Virtue

Stephan Eliott's Noel Coward adaptation hits a lilting comic gallop in '20s era England. Jessica Biel plays Larita, a race car-driving American interloper to Kristen Scott Thomas' snooty matriarch Mrs. Whitaker, whose son John (Ben Barnes) Larita is engaged to marry. Colin Firth lends the film an undercurrent of disillusionment as Mr. Whittaker, a layabout aristocrat who refuses to ignore the dire social conditions surrounding his lovely but crumbling estate. Although the filmmaker fumbles with connecting Noel Coward and Cole Porter tunes to the film's narrative fabric, Elliott wisely plays to the seething conflict between Larita and Mrs. Whitaker. Restrained in its execution, "Easy Virtue" is a nearly bawdy take on women's liberation in post Victorian England, preceeding the Great Depression.
Rated PG-13. 89 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

The Hangover

To its credit, "The Hangover" transfers to the audience the smelly, still inebriated state that the title promises. Director Todd Phillips ("Old School") is nothing if not relentless in his pursuit of a full, mixed sack of masculine stupidity at the hand of drink, drugs, and the dubious charms of Las Vegas. In the interest of their soon-to-be-wedded pal Doug (Justin Bartha), best friends Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms), let future brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis) come along for the ride to Vegas where the circumstances of their bachelor party celebrations spiral out of control. A drunken night of childish carousing leaves the group missing their prime member Doug and sends the absentminded trio on a humor-riddled mission to reconstruct the night's events and locate Doug in time to get him to his wedding on time. A kidnapped tiger belonging to Mike Tyson, brushes with the police and criminals alike, and a missing tooth for Phil are just some of the painful humiliations that our motley group endure on their way to a clearer understanding of their  transgressions. Gratuitous sex, pratfalls, and goofy violence come with the territory in this over-the-top guys' comedy. A word to the wise, stay for the closing credit sequence to see a droll photo collage of outtake events from the lost hours of darkness.    
Rated R. 99 mins. (B-) (Three Stars)

Downloading Nancy

Ponderously morbid in its visual execution, director Johan Renck takes an already problematic story about Nancy (Maria Bello), a suicidal housewife, and grinds all narrative dramatic lifeblood into a fine gray dust. Renck's production crew do no favors with perpetually florescent-lit scenes, and drab costumes, that make the film look like a zombie board meeting in Iceland. It's hard to imagine a more colorless film. Nancy's troubled marriage to Albert Stockwell (Rufus Sewell), a passionless businessman who thinks only of his golf game, becomes the excuse for her to go web surfing for a dom to exact a severe amount of satisfaction from her already scared body--she's a cutter--before "wiping her slate clean." A time-folding narrative device sets up tension between Albert and Louis Farley (Jason Patric)--the man Nancy chooses for the uncompromising task of taking her life--as they hash out the problems of Albert's marriage at his empty home like something out of William Mastrosimone's "Extremities." The rest of the film is spent in sessions with Nancy and her therapist (Amy Brenneman), and in various stages of cruel S&M arousal between Nancy and Louis as she edges him toward her final goal in spite of his growing love for her. Maria Bello's fearless performance is the stuff of legend, but it doesn't compensate for a poorly thought-out script delivered with a production style so dry that it's surprising the celluloid doesn't crack while you're watching it.
Not Rated. 102 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)   

Whatever Works

Evidence that Woody Allen's return to making films in America--it's his first since 2004 ("Melinda and Melinda")--comes with the loss of his mind. Adapted from a script Allen wrote 30 years ago, "Whatever Works" is a desperate attempt at comedy that only relaxes its death grip whenever Allen's alter ego Boris Yellnikoff (grossly played by Larry David) is absent from the screen. The movie starts off with a fourth-wall-breaking rant by Boris, doing a bad Woody Allen impersonation, about what a joke life is and how its everyone's duty to "filtch" whatever amount of joy they can from this cruel world. Then Boris, a suicidal retired college professor, has the good fortune to share his downtown Manhattan apartment with Melody (Evan Rachel Wood) a newly arrived runaway (she's 17) from the South whose sublime ignorance provides an empty vessel for Boris to fill with his grumpy ideas and poisonous opinions. At first Boris deflects the randy nymph's advances with a stream of hostility-fuelled barbs, but eventually enters into a doomed marriage with the girl who is roughly a fourth of his age. Boris' and Melody's quaint domestic life is upset when her religious-right mother Marietta (well played by Patricia Clarkson) shows up at the door in several month's advance of her ex-husband (Ed Begley). Old men and young girls sharing romance is a card that Woody Allen has overplayed throughout his career, and it's a trope that has run out of steam. Here's a movie that feels thrown together as if Allen is attempting to purge as many films as he can before he leaves the earthbound world. His legacy is going in an emotionally threadbare direction.
Rated PG-13. 92 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

Away We Go

Co-writer Dave Eggers' holier-than-thou, slacker road story of negative wish fulfillment proves toxic source material to director Sam Mendes ("Revolutionary Road"). Even Maya Rudolph's amiable performance as a pregnant domestic partner named Verona barely registers in a movie that comes off as an apogee of mumblecore influence. Burt (John Krasinski) is an obnoxious man-boy with terrible parents who goes on a quest with Verona to find a suitable place to raise their family. Visits to old friends in places like Arizona, Montreal, and Florida play out regrettably as each exponentially worse encounter reflects poorly on Burt's and Verona's judgment of character. The movie almost works as a cautionary tale about global overpopulation by imbecile parents, but even that would be a bridge too far for this pathetic navel rub that comes with the same sense of entitlement that it pretends to skewer. Although, the movie could win a prize for worst poster of the decade.  
Rated R. 97 mins. (D) (One Star)

Pontypool

Hemmed in by theatrically bound staging, "Pontypool" is an overly inflated zombie flick that makes overtures to a weighty theme of social consciousness that the screenwriters are ill-prepared to fulfill. The talky action takes place within the cinderblock walls of a lonely AM radio station, in the snowy town of Pontypool, Ontario, where Stephen McHattie's grizzled radio announcer Grant Mazzy employs every baiting trick to keep listeners tuned in. Panicked reports of violent mob attacks around the epicenter of town instill fear in Grant, his show's producer Sydney (Lisa Houle), and her assistant Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) as they attempt to unravel the mystery closing in on them. The tone goes all horror camp when the viral implications of certain repeated words seem to point to the cause of the zombie infestation. What might have worked as an Off-Broadway play flails as a movie.     
Rated R. 96 mins. (C-) (Two Stars)

Departures

Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Picture, "Departures" is director Yojiro Takita's emotionally rich story about Daigo Kobayashi (played by Masahiro Motoki), a world-class cellist who moves with his wife to his northern Japanese hometown when the symphony he plays for goes bankrupt. Intent on finding quick employment Daigo takes an unconventional job in "departures," in which he assists with a regional mourning practice called "encoffinments," wherein a body is discreetly cleaned, groomed, and casketed for cremation in a stylized ceremony before the family of the deceased. Daigo keeps his new occupation a secret from his wife for as long as possible, until the inevitable revelation threatens to undo the couple's marriage. "Departures" is a brilliantly written and performed story that transcends its themes of ritualized catharsis to bring the audience to a fresh understanding of man's need to make peace with the deceased.
(Regent Releasing) Rated PG-13. 131 mins. (A) (Five Stars)