New Releases for the Week of March 1, 2013

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

(New Line) Nicholas Hoult, Eleanor Tomlinson, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, Bill Nighy, Ewan McGregor, Eddie Marsan, Ewen Bremner, Warwick Davis. Directed by Bryan Singer

Take a brave and handsome farmboy, a rebellious princess, a pompous knight, a slimy sycophant looking to oil his way into ruling a kingdom, a concerned father and a kingdom full of giants looking to right an ancient wrong and you have Bryan Singer’s latest extravaganza. Hopefully writer Christopher McQuarrie and Singer along with a solid cast will elevate this above the tepid fantasy fare we’ve suffered through of late.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard, 3D, IMAX 3D

Genre: Fantasy

Rating: PG-13 (for intense scenes of fantasy action violence, some frightening images and brief language)

21 and Over

(Relativity) Miles Teller, Justin Chon, Skylar Astin, Sarah Wright. A straight-edge college student turns 21 on the eve of an important med school interview. His hardass dad wants him to stay home and get some rest before the big day but his dumbass friends want to go out and par-tay. Guess which side is the most persuasive.

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Teen Coming of Age Comedy

Rating: R (for crude and sexual content, pervasive language, some graphic nudity, drugs and drinking)

The Attacks of 26/11

(Eros International) Nana Patekar, Atul Kulkarni, Sanjeev Jaiswal, Ganesh Yadav. The coordinated attacks in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 in which at 164 people were killed and more than 300 were wounded drew global condemnation. This movie shows how those attacks were carried out.

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: True Life Drama

Rating: NR

The Last Exorcism Part II

(CBS) Ashley Bell, Julia Garner, Spencer Treat Clark, Joe Chrest. A trio of childhood friends decide to unite to start their own business – a cricket training academy. In India where cricket is like hockey for Canadians, it seems like a slam dunk of an idea – but the hurdles facing them are large and not so easily surmounted.

See the trailer, a promo and a featurette here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Supernatural Horror

Rating: PG-13 (for horror violence, terror and brief language)

Phantom

(RCR) Ed Harris, David Duchovny, William Fichtner, Lance Henriksen. During the height of the Cold War, the captain of a Soviet nuclear submarine is rushed into a classified mission. He’s been hiding that he has been suffering seizures that have altered his perception of reality, leading him to hallucinate to the point where he’s never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. With a rogue group off KGB agents on the ship bent on gaining control of the missiles, there may be darker things happening aboard this vessel which might just precipitate nuclear annihilation.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Genre: Action Thriller

Rating: R (for violence)  

Things We Lost in the Fire

Halle Berry sleeps one off.

(2007) Drama (DreamWorks) Halle Berry, Benicio del Toro, David Duchovny, Alexis Llewellyn, Micah Berry, John Carroll Lynch, Alison Lohman, Robin Weigert, Omar Benson Miller, Paula Newsome, Sarah Dubrovsky, Maureen Thomas, VJ Foster, Patricia Harras. Directed by Susanne Bier

Loss is something we all deal with in our own way. Some of us turn inward and shut the world out. Some of us throw ourselves into work or family. Still others lash out in anger, frustration and/or grief. It’s a powerful emotion that all of us must face in one form or another sooner or later.

For Audrey Burke (Berry) that time is now. Her husband Brian (Duchovny) is dead, killed trying to get an abused woman from being beaten up. The day of the funeral she sends for Jerry Sunborne (del Toro), one of Brian’s closest friends. He had gone from being a promising lawyer to a junkie and the source of much contention between Audrey and Brian. Brian had continued to visit Jerry and support him – in many ways he was Jerry’s sole connection to the world. Audrey thought he was a hopeless cause who she wanted as far away from her family as possible.

Getting Jerry to the funeral proves to take some doing. He is homeless now, having lost everything to his addiction. However, once Jerry gets there Audrey impulsively and not without some reservations invites Jerry to stay in the family home. She realizes that Brian would have wanted that and convinces herself that’s why she’s doing it but truth be told she wants someone around the house; their son Dory (Berry) needs a strong father figure around the house, their daughter Harper (Llewellyn) needs some guidance and to be honest she herself needs someone to lean on.

Audrey isn’t an easy person to be around. Her grief makes her touchy and sometimes she lashes out for no real good reason. In the meantime, Jerry is flowering in this environment. He is finding a new sense of purpose and the drugs are, for the moment, receding. A family friend (Lynch) is even helping Jerry get a real estate license and back to being a productive member of society. However both grief and drugs can be mercurial and unpredictable and both Jerry and Audrey have yet to face a very dark night indeed in both of their souls.

This started life as a screenplay by Allan Loeb, appearing on the inaugural “Black List” of unproduced screenplays (the Black List is a survey of 250 producers of the best screenplays they’d seen that year that were as yet unproduced). It was picked up by DreamWorks and acclaimed Danish director Bier (who had directed the acclaimed Open Hearts up to that point and later won an Oscar for In a Better World since) was attached to it.

They also put together a pretty powerful cast in Oscar winner Berry who once again gives a powerful performance as a woman who is lost and hurting. Audrey isn’t always likable and she doesn’t always act the way we’d like her to act. That’s a credit to Loeb who creates a character who is flesh and blood rather than an ideal. She has good days but she also has some bad ones. Berry fleshes Audrey out, turns her into a person you’d find walking around the mall or sitting in the movie theater next to you. Of course, if someone who looked as good as Halle Berry were sitting in the theater next to me I’d notice it pretty quickly.

Del Toro is no less impressive. Jerry is as wounded in his own way as Audrey is and like Audrey, Jerry doesn’t always act the way we’d like him to. He is trying, however and is basically a good man deep down – he’s just also a weak man when it comes to narcotics. These two performances drive the movie and are the main reason to see it.

Bier has a thing about eyes and there are a lot of close-ups of the eyes throughout the movie which can be disconcerting. While I agree that the eyes are the window to the soul, they are also kind of boring when you keep seeing them over and over again. As an old-time Hollywood producer might have put it, Susanne baby, lose the eyes.

The movie has a European sensibility to it so the pacing might not be to the liking of an American audience; that is to say, it takes it’s time and gets to where it’s going at its own pace. There are some moments when the movie veers into soap opera territory but thankfully those moments are few and far between.

This is a movie that didn’t get a whole lot of fanfare when it was released and the general attitude of critics and moviegoers alike was a resounding “who cares” but the truth is that you should. This is a very strong and powerful film on taking control of your own life and learning to deal with pain. The performances of Berry and del Toro are worthy of your time alone, but for my money this is one of those gems that didn’t get the love it should have.

WHY RENT THIS: Marvelous performances from del Toro and Berry; Duchovny, Lynch and Lohman excellent in supporting roles.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Too many extreme close-ups. Maudlin in places.

FAMILY VALUES:  There’s a good deal of drug use and a fair amount of bad language.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: This is Bier’s sole English-language film to date.

NOTABLE HOME VIDEO EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $8.6M on a $16M production budget; the movie is considered a financial failure.

COMPARISON SHOPPING: Monster’s Ball

FINAL RATING: 8/10

NEXT: Chasing Ice

New Releases for the Week of April 16, 2010

A little girl with a BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG gun!!!!

KICK-ASS

(Lionsgate) Aaron Johnson, Nicolas Cage, Chloe Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Lyndsy Fonseca, Elizabeth McGovern, Craig Ferguson. Directed by Matthew Vaughn

A young suburban high school student and comic book geek decides that he, too, can be a superhero. The lack of super powers is no deterrent; he just wants to do good, fight crime and maybe get some respect. However, when he becomes famous and inspires others to take up cowl and cape, he finds himself drawn into a war between a local Mafioso and a real-life crime-fighting duo. This is not your standard superhero movie!

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for strong brutal violence throughout, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and some drug use – some involving children)

Death at a Funeral

(Screen Gems) Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Danny Glover. An African-American family is just trying to lay their patriarch to rest. However, nothing goes according to plan in this remake of a 2007 British comedy with a misplaced corpse, a case of a hallucinogenic mistaken for a tranquilizer, a little person with a taste for blackmail, a cranky old uncle and a libidinous son all conspiring to make this a funeral to remember.

See the trailer and clips here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for language, drug content and some sexual humor)

The Jonses

(Roadside Attractions) David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard, Glenne Headly. They appear to be the perfect family, living in a nice home in a gated community with possessions that are all the envy of their neighbors. But the truth is that they’re not a family at all; they’re all employees of a marketing firm whose aim is to get people to want what they’ve got.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for language, some sexual content, teen drinking and drug use)

The Perfect Game

(Slowhand Releasing) Clifton Collins Jr., Louis Gossett Jr., Cheech Marin, Emilie de Ravin. The true story of the first non-American team to win the Little League World Series, a team from Monterrey, Mexico that battle poverty and prejudice to eventually triumph.

See the trailer here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: PG (for some thematic elements)

The Runaways

(Apparition) Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon, Scout Taylor-Compton. The Runaways took the music world by storm back in the late 1970s with their fusion of punk and hard rock, all with a taste of girl power attitude. There had never been an all-girl band like this before – or since. While their career was brief, it influenced rock and roll to this day, and while internal pressures tore them part, their union with impresario Kim Fowley made them legends. This is their story.

See the trailer and featurettes here.

For more on the movie this is the website.

Release formats: Standard

Rating: R (for language, drug use and sexual content – all involving teens)