Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

It’s possible that Michael Douglas is merely acting in “Solitary Man,” playing a womanizing smooth-talker facing his dire twilight years while the world seems to get younger and younger, perhaps out of spite. What clicks perfectly in the film is the underlying reality of Douglas’s performance, which shouldn’t be viewed as biographical, but let’s just say that I’m sure he found sections of the script uncomfortable. It’s a superb performance in a substantial drama of self-destruction, playing brilliantly off of Douglas’s bumpy life experience.

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On the plus side, Jennifer Lopez is the most appealing she’s been in quite some time in “The Back-Up Plan.” The negative side? Well, everything else about the film. Lacking any sort of engaging personality, the picture is a dreary, arduous romantic comedy that attempts to subvert the genre by positioning the payoff at the beginning of the tale. It’s a semi-clever move, but wasted on a dull, seriously humorless feature film.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

I found it extremely tiring to accurately deduce what the documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is attempting to communicate. Either it’s a statement of pure adulation for the street art movement, or it’s an overtly rascally commercial for the artists featured to further their need for self-promotion. It’s not a terribly enlightening film and much of it seems a touch on the staged side, interested more in idolmaking than direct questioning. Much like the art on display, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is fleeting, bratty, and mechanical, showing little interest in surveying the foundation of a so-called revolution, instead trying to brand something that’s already come and gone.

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Chasing a dose of speed with a shot of Sergio Leone, the South Korean western “The Good, The Bad, The Weird” is an exaggerated, highly charged valentine to the Spaghetti Western. It’s a frenzied action movie, strangely seriocomic piece, and large-scale theme park stunt show all rolled into one bizarre oater, riding a unexpectedly epic arc of heroism and villainy (with all those wonderful gray areas in between) through a steady routine of violence and six-gun betrayal.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

It’s ballsy to even attempt a workplace comedy after Mike Judge’s “Office Space” locked down the genre over a decade ago. To bring anything new or inviting to the subject, a screenplay would have to be ripe with ambition, sketching out brain-melting observations that do the monotony and grievance of cubical work proper justice. “Drones” has labored oddity. And that’s all it has, attempting to stretch out roughly 90 seconds of comedic ideas to over 90 minutes of film.

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“A Shine of Rainbows” is a film trapped in amber. An Irish-flavored family distraction, the picture resembles a live-action Disney artifact from the 1950s, with its boundless enthusiasm for gentle adventuring, warm domestic bonding, and tragic turns of fate. While far from the most convincing source of matinee entertainment, it’s pleasing to find something not backed by an aggressive marketing campaign, focused on the plague of modern youth, or weighed down by bathroom humor.

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At this point, there are as many oceanic documentaries as there are stars in the sky, or perhaps fish in the sea. “Oceans” is the latest entry in the big bottomless blue sweepstakes and while it doesn’t necessarily redefine the genre, this Disneynature release is more artful and considered than its competition, permitting audiences a far more meditative take on the mysteries of the deep than the average educational film would allow.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

The Walt Disney Animation Studio has such a storied history of screen classics, it’s nearly impossible to fully consider the artistic roller coaster ride the company has endured since Walt introduced the world to the miracle of feature-length animation back in 1937, with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The Mouse House has enjoyed great success and its share of humiliating failures, but somewhere in the mid-1980s, all hope was lost. Disney Animation was about to vanish for good.

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“Death at a Funeral” is a remake that updates the long-forgotten, lost-to-history, somebody-dust-this-one-off-please 2007 film of the same name. A whopping three years have passed since the original Frank Oz motion picture found a modicum of cult success, leaving this update a little too eager to redo what was already rather recently done.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

“Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky” commences with a moment of sensorial confusion. The picture greets the viewer with a series of kaleidoscopic patterns scored to a roll of orchestral waves, building what appears to be something of an overture to ease the film into a reflective mood, not necessarily a dramatic one. Sensual and lush, the feature has an unusual combination of heavy sexuality and creative obstruction, shaping something that’s not exactly reality, but far from fiction.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

Detached acts of tragedy don’t come more excruciatingly glacial than the Italian melodrama “I Am Love.” While the lavish attention to every last detail is valued, the tortoise pace of the picture is difficult to embrace, especially when director Luca Guadagnino seems more invested in his abstract visual fetishes than he is triumphantly communicating a thunderstruck tale of forbidden love. It’s undeniably gorgeous and perhaps the folds of the picture demand a thorough examination through years of study, but enduring the protracted pulse of this film is a grueling effort that doesn’t reward the concentration.

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Reviewed at the 2010 Florida Film Festival

We have the Jason Stathams and Channing Tatums of the screen world, but is there a more menacing image than Michael Caine bearing down on the baddies filled with bloodlust and brandishing a firearm? “Harry Brown” is the actor’s “Death Wish” fantasy, pitting the screen legend against England’s dreaded hoodie generation for control of the community underpasses.

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It’s difficult to tell exactly how “Kick-Ass” considers the comic book/superhero genre. On one hand, there’s a profusion of love offered to the subculture through a series of crafty inside jokes and tributes only a few knowing audience members will understand. On the other hand, “Kick-Ass” is a tone-deaf pantsing of the superman cause, creating an incredible ruckus as it breakdances on hallowed ground, preferring noise over wit when it comes to giving funny books a comprehensive noogie. Only vibrant in spurts, “Kick-Ass” is a distractingly frenzied picture lacking true satiric aim, making the oncoming mess of ultraviolence more bothersome than rousing.

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“The Joneses” contains an impressively timely premise that drills right into the heart of today’s financial crisis. It’s almost too sharp of a script, which is carried a surprising distance by writer/director Derrick Borte before it falls completely apart, but what works here works wonderfully, providing a painfully accurate depiction of materialism run amok.

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As much as I wanted “The Perfect Game” to be a fearless Mexican version of “The Bad News Bears,” the picture just wasn’t in a wish-granting mood. More of an inspirational tale compounded with a true story, “Game” is a feature of sheer earnestness, which tends to grate and persuade with equal determination. However, it’s easy to praise the film’s gushing heart, which might be enough to satisfy less demanding audience members in the mood for a few smiles and cheers; a sparkling tale of baseball triumph ideally issued for the first week of the season.

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