“This is a true story” reads the opening card of “In Her Skin,” throwing down a bold promise of truth to a film of shifting perspectives and hearsay. Though it opens as a routine missing person drama, the feature soon heads down some unspeakably grim areas of murder and psychological disease, hoping to emphasize the shock of the offense being recounted. It’s an intense picture that boils over too easily, but the purity of horror on display here is extraordinary.
Like any dependable Mike Leigh picture, “Another Year” leisurely reveals its secrets. It’s a glacial feature representing the passage of time, observing a single year in the life of a dangerously functional couple and their troubled friends and family. It’s not a film of direct conflict or suspense, but one that nurtures a sinking feeling of unease and sadness, watching as some of these characters fall deeper into hopelessness, almost to spite the happiness around them.
“Battle: Los Angeles” isn’t an alien invasion film, it’s a military picture with the occasional alien appearance. The marketing trumpets a global perspective on trespassing extraterrestrials, but the picture actually takes place almost entirely in Santa Monica, boiling down a sense of massive widescreen scope to a few city miles, placing the audience into the driver’s seat as a besieged platoon attempts to defend themselves against an unknown enemy. “Independence Day” this picture is most certainly not.
One would think that a simple spelunking disaster scenario would be enough to fill the running time of “Sanctum.” After all, the inherent danger of caves and raging waters is a compelling cinematic obstacle course on its own, supplying vital chills and spills needed to mount a successful thriller. “Sanctum” isn’t satisfied with the visceral basics, instead looking to engage the audience through dramatic cliché, leaving a nifty premise to wither while lifeless actors spout rotten dialogue and an unimaginative director stages substandard action set pieces. While teeming with promise and the marquee value of James Cameron as an executive producer, “Sanctum” is a deathly dull, criminally obvious feature film.
I sat down with “American: The Bill Hicks Story” holding only a slight awareness of the comedian, who died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. I never found the man funny, but retained a curiosity about the “bad boy” comedian who commands such reverence in stand-up comedy circles, anticipating an extraordinary education from this documentary. Unfortunately, “American” doesn’t impart much in the way of hard facts about Hicks, preferring an affectionate route of celebration, blindly fawning over this mystery man in a way that would likely make Hicks himself retch.
Here’s a motion picture that completely unravels in its second half, but that initial rush of sinful obsession and frayed communication makes an immense impression. “Monogamy” approaches the delicate subject of fidelity, yet turns a common discussion of intimacy into a bizarre psychological study, losing its grip on potent topics to play with indie film clichés. I walked away from the film disappointed, but there are some powerful ideas and performances buried somewhere in here, underneath the performance art itches.
“The Company Men” is not a comfortable film to sit through. It is most certainly not escapism. Dealing with the disturbing subject matter of unemployment, the picture summarizes a national reality in a blunt matter, carrying the woe and aggravation to a dramatic stage for a more fulfilling consideration, using the extraordinarily gifted ensemble to explore a shared fear. Finding catharsis in bleak matters, the picture satisfies with its sincerity, allowing viewers to sympathize and reflect on the nature of job loss through this efficiently directed eulogy for American industry.
“The Unloved” endeavors to tell a very important story, but often does so with its shoelaces tied together. It’s a searing film at times, exposing raw truths about the children’s home care system in the U.K., but as an overall representation of horrors, neglect, and personal solace, it’s frustratingly static, often preferring the cool waters of esoteric cinema to something more charged and insightful.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. With “I Am Number Four,” Hollywood attempts to branch out to other genres to find a new “Twilight” — something with heavy romantic and superhuman overtones that could be massaged into a brand new franchise to take over the hearts and wallets of teens when the sparkly vampires take a bow in 2012. Though dealing with intergalactic invasion, corporeal powers, and laser guns, “I Am Number Four” is a relatively tame creation, lacking a thunderous, textured cinematic quality that would separate it from the average ABC Family movie.
Recalling the more sickening edges of “Seven,” the Korean horror film, “I Saw the Devil,” is not an easy sit. Overflowing with rage and acts of torture and ultraviolence, the picture is a vicious concoction, making it a specialized viewing experience, not just a brisk serial killer thriller where good battles evil within a diseased world. Here, good is evil in a certain light, conjuring a disquieting tone of heroism and vigilante justice to brew along with the movie’s substantial hostility.
Even by animated filmmaking standards, “Gnomeo & Juliet” is a strange picture. Imagine William Shakespeare’s immortal classic of love and death acted out by a society of garden gnomes, scored to the music of Elton John. And the voice cast includes Hulk Hogan, Dolly Parton, Ozzy Osbourne, and Maggie Smith. Feeling a bit dizzy? While thoroughly bizarre, “Gnomeo” is a vibrant bit of cheeky entertainment, a beautifully animated romp that plays better cute than clever, offering miniature merriment and cheerful blasts of classic rock while pantsing the Bard.
Creating suspense from the creep of shadows takes a special filmmaker, and director Brad Anderson is certainly capable of pulling out chills from nothingness. While flawed and perhaps a bit too elusive, “Vanishing on 7th Street” is an interesting little sci-fi/horror hybrid that urges the viewer to fear the dark, skillfully executed with a healthy amount of scares and inviting confusion.
“The Hit List” opens with a repellent, but admittedly tantalizing concept: What if someone offered an opportunity to knock off five people causing you great distress? A sinister chance to permanently remove ugliness from your life? Frustratingly, “The Hit List” doesn’t toy with the viewer using this theme of revenge, instead working tired DTV action tropes in an effort to appeal to the genre’s worst habits. However, through the smoke and cheese lies a dark premise that deserved a far more immoral examination.
Pain flows like a river in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s “Biutiful.” Actually, a river is too shallow and narrow to accurately convey the level of misery on display here, which plunges to abyssal depths at certain intervals of the film. Why so sad? “Biutiful” doesn’t retain much meaning beside expected explorations of spiritual and personal consequence. Instead, it’s an intermittently striking film with a few immensely effecting moments of catharsis, stretched out over an unnecessarily long running time desperate to hammer home every last twitch of agony.
Red-hot noir meets a college lecture in “The Big Bang,” a distinctive spin on detective dealings that bravely assumes audiences might be more interested in the nuances of physics than any sort of narrative momentum. Energetically acted and scripted with faint pizzazz, the feature simply runs too hot and cold to convince. The movie’s originality is stimulating, but it often cuts into the basic necessities of the mystery genre, pausing the action to tend to monologues concerning time and space. Dames, diamonds, and science — they don’t exactly form an exhilarating motion picture.
Stepping away from serious business (and the lucrative world of Robert Langdon) for a spell, Ron Howard mounts his first comedy in over a decade with “The Dilemma.” True to form, it’s really not much of a comedy at all. Though crudely marketed as a slapstick bonanza to sell some discs, the picture is a far more peculiar machine of anxiety, flavored with only a light dusting of the funny stuff. Howard’s not drilling to the root of infidelity here, but he touches on delicate relationship issues, providing a fascinating, unexpected personality to the picture.
The nauseatingly titled “Cougars, Inc.” comes across like an unfinished movie, with viewers often dropped into scenes already in progress. It’s a mess of characterizations and romantic connections that also wants to register as a raunchy sex comedy, spinning itself dizzy for 79 minutes. I’m not exactly sure what type of film writer/director K. Asher Levin was looking to make, but he’s made all of them, uncomfortably stuffed into a doomed comedy where every character is either suffering from an undiagnosed mental impairment or registers as flat-out repulsive.
It appears writer/director Michael Goldbach really enjoyed Richard Kelly’s 2001 mind-bender, “Donnie Darko.” In fact, he liked it so much, he went out and made a copy for himself, dialing down the sci-fi complexity, but retaining the apocalyptic teen angst routine, performed by a cast of frantic actors who always look bewildered. I can’t blame them, for “Daydream Nation” is an impenetrable, seemingly unfinished saga of love, rage, drugs, and sinister activities, thrown up on the screen all at once. “Donnie Darko” it’s most certainly not, though it finds a few appealing moments underneath the deflating sense of chaos Goldbach is incapable of aiming.
“Jolene” is chunk of old-fashioned American storytelling, adapted from a short story by E.L. Doctorow. Crossing the country detailing the swelling woe of a redhead and her failure to find uncontaminated love in the world, the film attempts to spread the feeling of a life lived across a widescreen environment, working out the complex mechanics of a tragedy in two hours, deploying a supporting cast of familiar faces to help make the violations stick. Cruelly, the display of sorrow never takes command, with most of the film an unsatisfactory soap opera that never seizes an illuminating essence.
BRIAN ORNDORF 