The toxic effects of religious indoctrination have been dutifully exposed in eye-opening documentaries such as Jesus Camp, yet in the gritty and authentic drama Stop the Pounding Heart — the finale in Roberto Minervini‘s Texas trilogy — it gets a more pragmatic if still unnerving depiction. If only the director were to rein in his insistent style and streamline his narratives, this might have amounted to something more than a flaccid disappointment.

The drama unfolds largely within one family, the Carlsons, whose 14-year-old Sara (Sara Carlson) is the center of the piece, and finds herself gradually gravitating away from her strictly biblical upbringing towards Colby, a young local bull rider to who she, against the teachings of her parents, is undeniably attracted. The lustful frisson is slight but surely there; it is simply a case of whether Sara will decide to act upon it or not.

Minervini’s approach will above all else demand patience from viewers, as we’re first shown a day in Sara’s life milking cows and heading to the farmer’s market to sell cheese. Though these sequences generally comprise too much of the 101-minute picture, the director does capture a few quaint snapshots of this unassuming life, likely a million miles away from home for the overwhelming majority of audiences. One glimpse of a heavily pregnant woman firing a gun, for instance, will likely gain as many laughs as it does gasps.

The narrative through-line, meanwhile, of Sara coming to question the life of abstinence she has been taught and seemingly chosen is conveyed subtly through conversational scenes between her and Colby, to the point that it scarcely musters a pulse, though definitely does. The strapping lad signifies another life for Sara, one which involves breaking away from the church and simply having fun, something strongly advised against by her firm, religiously committed mother in what is easily the best scene of the film (though smartly, the mother character is far from a one-dimensional zealot).

The film’s pondering minimalism, however, eventually lurches from enigmatic towards patience-testing, as the numerous dialogue-free scenes give us only the most scant morsels of information, dragging the film out to what feels like a wholly excessive runtime. A surreal flourish does briefly raise some interest — in one scene, a resident’s child breaks the fourth wall, staring gleefully into the camera — but it’s sadly straight back to staid tedium soon thereafter.

Amid the long, dialogue-free takes and generally spare approach, viewers will have plenty of time to consider exactly why we should care about what is happening, though such pondering may prove fruitless. Though it is undeniably slice-of-life cinema and authentic arguably to a fault — some characters can often not be understood, at least to this English pair of ears and as a result of low-budget sound recording equipment — the crisis of faith narrative has simply been done too often and too well before to let this unambitious effort pass muster.

Though his latest film plunges deep into the heart of southern American parochialism, Minervini has crucially forgotten to engage us on an emotional level.

The Upside: Performances are, in their naturalism, largely inscrutable; the cinematography helps bring the setting to life

The Downside: A sure lack of narrative thrust keeps the potentially engaging spin on familiar material stuck in first gear; never does the film reach for emotional resonance

On the Side: The film was shot using only available light sources (as opposed to movie lights).

This is another edition of Short Starts, where we present a weekly short film(s) from the start of a filmmaker or actor’s career.

The new animated feature Epic doesn’t seem to be high on a lot of lists of anticipated summer movies, but it is sure to draw in the kids. While Fox’s Blue Sky Studios may only be the third most significant company making animated features in the U.S., that’s still very lucrative business (mostly for the Ice Age series). And director Chris Wedge, a founding member of Blue Sky who hasn’t taken the helm of a movie since 2005′s Robots, is a name you should know in the world of animation.

Even if Wedge wasn’t such a big wig, though (and even if we didn’t share a birthday, which I take very seriously), I always like devoting a Short Starts post to directors of animated works. More than most kinds of filmmakers, they tend to have begun with short subjects, and these shorts tend to be available to watch online. Both are true of Wedge’s early animated films, two of which are very crude, very short, very early examples of computer animation from the 1980s — Tuber’s Two Step and Balloon Guy — and then a later longer piece that won the Academy Award in 1999, titled Bunny.

Join us in watching and learning about all three films after the jump.

Tuber’s Two Step (1985)

Before even Pixar produced its first animated short (though after John Lasseter’s first for Lucasfilm’s The Graphics Group, which would become Pixar), Wedge made this one-minute (excluding credits) computer-generated film depicting a baby’s first steps. A baby what is the question, as this is such an early effort that the characters are mostly comprised of disconnected blobs. The baby, for instance, is just like a white diaper blob surrounded by fleshy extremity blobs. The animator had already been working in the business, having graduated from film school (where he was interested in stop-motion and puppet animation) and gone right into working on TRON, inputing data for that live-action feature’s computer-animated bits as part of a process he considered “tedious.”

Afterward he met computer animation pioneer Charles Csuri, who encouraged him to join him at Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design and get a master’s degree in computer graphics. This is his graduate thesis project, and according to animation veteran and historian Tom Sito, Tuber’s Two Step “was one of the first CG shorts to employ a full range of squash-and-stretch techniques, the kind of organic plasticity seen only in hand-drawn animated cartoons.” Indeed Wedge has noted that his approach was just to apply the principles of animation to computer graphics as opposed to the other way around.

Technically, while listed as Wedge’s directorial debut on IMDb, he apparently made something earlier called The Daymaker in 1982, though I can’t find much info on it other than the year and length (7:23). That may have been his final student project for SUNY Purchase.

Balloon Guy (1987)

There’s a lot less written about this second computer-animated short by Wedge, at least as far as I can find easily available. The minute-and-a-half-long film seems to have been another experimental exercise in advancing techniques while he continued his study and work at OSU, where he was an artist in residence and taught animation history. This film does appear to have been used in courses and conferences in the early days of computer animation by ACM SIGGRAPH, for its development of “physical simulation.”

According to a Prix ARS Electronica ’87 program, the tech specs for both Tuber’s Two Step and Balloon Guy are as follows: “The works were realized on a VAX 11/780 computer, a Mark 1I 32-bit frame buffer, Symbolics 3670 and/or Evans and Sutherland PS 300 and in-house software.”

Bunny (1999)

In the decade following Balloon Guy, Wedge went off to teach animation at NYC’s School of Visual Arts (one of my own non-degree alma maters) and worked at Blue Sky, which he founded in 1987 with a bunch of people from his TRON days (all had been employed by Mathematical Applications Group, Inc., aka MAGI/Synthavision). There they made hundreds of commercials and, after being acquired by Fox, produced effects for many of their movies including Alien Resurrection, A Simple Wish, Batman Forever, Titanic and Joe’s Apartment, the last of which had Wedge directing the animation of the cockroaches. Then finally, in 1999, Blue Sky put out the seven-minute Bunny, its first short film, which Wedge wrote (based on Lansing Campbell’s “Uncle Wiggly” books) and directed.

Like Pixar beforehand, they got an Oscar nomination right out of the gate. Of course, unlike Pixar, Wedge also won the award (albeit after Pixar did eventually win two Academy Awards for animated short in the time since its much earlier debut). As you can see below, regardless of the gap in time between the above shorts and this one, it’s incredibly leaps and bounds more advanced. There’s a real story — of an old bunny bothered by a moth while trying to bake a cake — and not only can you tell what everything is supposed to be, everything looks really wonderfully detailed. Also, there’s music by Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, which contributes to the bittersweet tone of what’s really a tale of the bunny dying and going to heaven.

Thanks to the success of Bunny, Fox and Blue Sky made their first feature together, the original Ice Age, which Wedge co-directed with his former SVA pupil Carlos Saldanha. That also was nominated for an Oscar. And its original two-disc DVD includes Bunny as a bonus feature. You can watch the short there or check it out in so-so quality on YouTube, though not in a version that allows embedding. I also recommend, if you’re interested in the short, reading about how it was made, via Catherine Winder and Zahra Dowlatabad’s book “Producing Animation.”

Like Father, Like Son is a film almost guaranteed to have gone down well with this year’s head of the In Competition jury, Steven Spielberg, what with its shared focus on riveting drama concerning an increasingly destabilising family unit. For all of the visual pizzazz of Spielberg’s blockbusters, his films almost always return to matters of the family, and as such, it’s easy to see how the latest offering from I Wish director Kore-ada Hirokazu would very much appeal to his sensibilities if not also those of the rest of the jury.

Nonoyima and Midori are a certifiably middle-upper class couple who have provided a life of privelige for their 6-year-old son, Keita. However, early on they are summoned to the hospital in which he was born and informed that, in fact, Keita is not their son; he was somehow switched with another at birth. They soon enough meet the parents of the other child, the Saikis, who have in effect been raising their biological son for the last 6 years. Inevitably, the question of what to do rears its head: maintain the status quo, or return the sons to their rightful parents?

While it pitches itself early on as an earnest drama, Like Father, Like Son in fact emerges to become something else entirely, a richly affecting, uproariously funny family film boasting just enough edge to distinguish itself in a usually crowded field (both in terms of genre and the In Competition line-up itself). Once the bombshell drops, Hirokazu leaps off to examine the importance we place almost universally in society upon blood ties, while broaching the fascinating nature vs. nurture debate.

Are the two boys the way they are by way of biological design, or how they were raised by their parents? Social circumstances, of course, are unavoidable; Keita was born — or rather, swapped — into a life where he wanted for nothing, whereas Ryusei was raised in a more humble, down-to-Earth blue collar environment, in which piano lessons and expensive, fresh meat dinners were not even a consideration.

One of the film’s more potent observations is in terms of class mobility, and how Keita finds it relatively easy to adjust to a less-blessed life, whereas Ryusei struggles with the provisios that an uncharacteristically highfalutin lifestyle entails. Ryusei’s parents take Keita under their wing with relative ease, whereas Keita’s parents struggle with Ryusei’s sloppy eating habits, video game obsession and apathy towards playing the piano.

While the contrast between the cold, independence-promoting disconnect of Keita’s parents and the familial warmth of Ryuesei’s might at first seem a little too simplistic, Hirokazu captures the complexity of the central issue supremely well. It is Keita’s father who struggles with the scenario most, torn between the six years he has spent with Keita and the inevitable biological ties that bind him to Ryusei. As he has to be reminded at one point, it is who raises you that appears to matter most to most people.

The director also captures the humble essence of Japanese culture, as the mothers are taken to task for failing to recognise that the children were not their own, before an unexpected twist blindsides audiences and introduces another fascinating plot strand. While it might stray from the cutesy familial drama for a time as a result, what remains constant throughout the film is its innate sweetness. We care about the characters, not just the children but the adults too, and when the issue impinges upon their marriages, it is devastating to behold.

The resolution is never in doubt and clearly telegraphed early on, though this is not to the film’s detriment when the journey getting there is so full of joy, humor and dramatic potency. Hirokazu has an ear for scripting youth-orientated dialogue in a way that makes it feel improvised, and as for the kids themselves, they are simply delightful, cute yet also insightful in a way that only children ever are.

Like Father Like Son manages a deeply felt engagement with a thorny problem, and with the right marketing could be one of the year’s big art house hits. With a broadly entertaining appeal, who’s to say that this one couldn’t go all the way to the Academy Awards’ Foreign Film quintet? As for the Palme, with a jury president whose work is so attuned to notions of the family, consider its chances very strong indeed.

The Upside: Hirokazu directs a difficult scenario with sensitivity, but also plenty of mirth, emotional warmth and dramatic aplomb. As a result, it is likely to appeal to broader cinema audiences as well as cineastes.

The Downside: Some may find that the predictability holds back any emotional engagement, and if you’re not a fan of children, the cuteness will probably seem rather cloying.

On the Side: Hirokazu has admitted that his 2008 film, Still Walking, was based on his own family.

After four years of waiting and anticipation, geek honcho J.J. Abrams has finally given us the sequel to his 2009 box office and critical hit. And it is … serviceable. Abrams’ new movie is as sleek and shiny as his first Star Trek picture but lacking much of its charm. The novelty of seeing these characters coming together is gone, the villain is lackluster in bizarre ways, and the high-flying pacing is absent, making many of the film’s logic gaps even more head-scratching.

And there are indeed some real head-scratchers. Choosing emotion and spectacle over logic can work, and it does in the last Trek outing and the first half of Star Trek Into Darkness, but this time around Abrams and his screenwriting team can’t gloss over all the leaps in logic and other narrative problems. What starts off as another thrilling Abrams movie ends up turning into a mess by the end.

Here are some (spoiler-y) questions which arise out of that mess:

1. What’s the Vulcan Word for “Hypocrite” Again?

Spock (Zachary Quinto) takes issue with Kirk (Chris Pine) dismissing their Prime Directive. The cocky captain was not supposed to let that ship be seen by the natives (and I’m sure none of them saw it while they landed that gigantic monstrosity underwater), but Kirk decides to save his friend anyway after he steals that holy scroll for some unexplained (or probably cut out) reason. Then Spock, of course, reports him for his actions. Did Spock report himself, too? Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) mentions that their mission was to observe, not to stop that volcano. And yet, from the start of this mission, we see Spock doing just that. He apparently has no problem whatsoever going against the Prime Directive himself.

Also, since when is the Enterprise a submarine?

2. Why Can’t I See Alice Eve’s Face?

It’s no secret by now that J.J. Abrams likes entertaining his audience with the assistance of lens flares. For the most part they work, sometimes to beautiful results. It adds an immersive quality to the bridge, but there is one moment where Abrams lets those shiny lights to undercut him. When Carol (Alive Eve) pleads with her father to not blow up the enterprise it’s her defining dramatic moment. So why are we looking at a giant lens flare and not Eve’s emoting? Was Abrams not pleased with her performance there or something? Hard to believe since Eve does a commendable job with a thin role, but why would a director almost entirely cover up an actor’s face during such a dramatic moment?

3. Why Trust Khan?

For a character who consistently talks about going with his gut, Kirk’s first thought shouldn’t have been to bring Khan along on a mission. Sure, Khan could help Kirk get around Marcus’s ship, but in the first movie Kirk didn’t have a problem going in blind on Nero’s ship. Kirk is reckless, but does that mean he’s idiotic? It’s difficult to pin down what exactly the movie is saying about “going with your gut.” For the most part it leads to disastrous results. Kirk helping Khan get aboard the Vengeance winds up being a stupid decision that leads to Khan taking control of the ship, which then leads to a dead Kirk. That means his death is kind of his own fault.

But don’t worry, you can get plenty of your unnamed crew killed with barely a mournful mention and even risk the ones you care about and you’ll still be okay after you yourself die.

4. Why Even Bother with Khan?

When John Harrison reveals himself to be Khan, my theater erupted with scattered scoffs but mostly silence. That indifferent reaction begs the question, “Will general audiences give a crap about the reveal?” It’s played as such a big deal, but without knowledge of Khan he’s just another generic “superhuman” villain who punches slightly harder than our heroes. Although Spock takes a moment to phone his older self for a piece of exposition (which the movie itself cracks a joke about how silly that is), what Old Spock tells us about Khan is never truly shown. His manipulation and skills have been seen previously in superior villains, and this Khan doesn’t raise the bar or stakes in any way. When your movie says he is one of those most powerful enemies around, show it. If Khan got his crew back, what could they accomplish? If you don’t know who Khan is, then you probably won’t have a clue.

And considering Khan’s state at the end, Wrath of Khan does not take place in that timeline’s future. I’m sure he’ll escape in a sequel to make that story happen, but with Khan currently locked up, the much better Trek adventure is now gone or altered.

5. Do We Know This Crew Well Enough?

For movies that are made for non-Trekkies, both of Abrams’ movies rely heavily on an audience’s knowledge of both the Trek universe and these characters. When Kirk and Spock say goodbye to each other, it doesn’t have half the impact of the original goodbye scene in Wrath of Khan. That era’s Kirk and Spock went through many highs and lows together. This Kirk and Spock haven’t known each other for very long. You get the sense they like each other but not love each other in the way we saw with Shatner and Nimoy. This scene should’ve been saved for another installment further down the line.

That death scene doesn’t work for another reason…

6. Why Not Use the Blood of One of Khan’s Goons?

It is imperative Spock does not kill Khan at the end. We see Bones realize what his blood can do — even though we the audience already know what it can do from an earlier scene — so they must keep him alive. Why, though? Why can’t Bones take a sample from one of Khan’s colleagues? They all share that same power. And since there is that super blood, where are the stakes now? If a character dies in this universe, they can simply take a pint of blood from Khan. Also, since we know what his blood can do before Kirk dies, does anyone in the audience buy the weight of Kirk’s death scene?

7. Where Are The Klingons?

Early on in the movie Kirk, Spock, and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) pay a visit to the Klingon planet, which does not go according to plan at all. They, along with Khan, kill plenty of Klingons. Word is they were already heading towards war, but this action for sure would spark the real thing. Abrams doesn’t need to show Starfleet and the Kingons going to battle in this movie, but wouldn’t the Klingons retaliate, maybe catch up with the broken down USS Enterprise and join in on the fight? They may save all this Klingon war mumbo jumbo for the third film, but as of right now this subplot goes nowhere. And wouldn’t Kirk, Spock and the rest of the crew face some trouble for invading the Klingon planet? I guess Starfleet doesn’t care that Kirk got plenty of his crew killed and may have sparked a war.

Side question: Why is the Klingon planet, Qo’noS, spelled incorrectly as “Kronos” in the film?

Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke delivers the first verifiable dud of the Cannes Film Festival’s In Competition banner this year with A Touch of Sin, a four-part tableau examining the rife inequality cutting throughout the country’s society and how it so frequently bursts into violence. Despite the occasional moment of visceral outlandishness, this is largely an airy, low energy slog that likely sees low odds at scooping the esteemed Palme d’Or.

The four stories range from a beleaguered drifter meting out bloody revenge within his small mining town to a migrant worker who similarly discovers the liberating qualities of firearms, a cute receptionist pushed over the edge by her male clients and finally a young factory worker trying to improve his situation. The linking motif is, ostensibly, the violent resolutions that befall either the central characters of each segment or are enacted by them, a statement on the fraught status of China’s social infrastructure.

While these stories have reportedly been cobbled together from real-life events for the most part, there’s a disappointing lack of emotional engagement throughout, a result of Jia’s scant, spare approach. Cruising along at a glacial pace, almost all of the points of interest occur during the fitful bursts of grand guignol, some of which feel tonally opposed; one moment this is a quiet, sombre meditation on the state of the country and the next it shape-shifts into a Tarantino-esque gorefest. If the graphic violence is at odds with the film’s social concerns, that can only be the fault of the director.

At the film’s first screening for press, responses were largely muted to the film’s ill-placed attempts at humor, which neither satirize China’s economic chasm nor deliver much else of worth in lieu. While the skittish tone may keep audiences on their toes, it is largely at the expense of narrative consistency. The stories vary wildly in terms of pacing, from the more palatable rhythm of the opening killing spree to the more methodical heft later on. While the acting is universally strong, as are plenty of the images — though Jia’s digital look is unquestionably garish — the meandering, seemingly unfussed narrative does them few favors.

It is a most wearisome film precisely because it insists itself on the audiences for so long. The wildly uneven tales of murder, animal torture and sexual harassment might have been a little easier to stomach with a less-torturous runtime, but when unspooled over two-plus hours the result is a positively exhausting, frequently infuriating experience. Though the relentless grimness of Jia’s work here should be an angry, potent statement about the dire circumstances of his homeland, it is instead rendered fecklessly inert by way of the director’s style.

Those going into Jia’s film blind may find themselves riveted by the opening segment, only to be perplexed by what follows. There’s the overarching feeling that the director would have better spent his time developing one of the stories as a full feature, though again it’s difficult to imagine which would have been able to sustain even 100 minutes on screen. For a film that needs to make us care in order to succeed — and frankly shouldn’t have had to try hard — this is an almost completely unengaging film on an emotional level.

While likely to find a few supporters on the strength of its bracing visceral impact alone, the few rewards are simply too sparsely placed to make A Touch of Sin anything more than a dispiriting uphill climb destined to disappear into obscurity once its day at the Croisette is done.

The Upside: Jia’s film pops visually, offering memorable glimpses of the Chinese landscape; the performances across the board are rock-solid; brief bursts of violence are also well-handled, with grisly gore effects bringing the point home.

The Downside: The director fails to tie his stories together into a convincing or interesting thematic whole; the experience feels emotionally empty and disconnected; the disparity between the quiet drama and violent action also proves tonally jarring.

On the Side: Jia Zhang-ke is considered a leading figure of the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese directors.

You probably missed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comeback. Most people did. The Last Stand was supposed to be the former Governor’s mighty return to movies, but instead it grossed a paltry $12 million domestically and now marks Schwarzenegger’s lowest grossing movie ever (factoring inflation). It’s a shame, because those who (really should) take the opportunity to give The Last Stand the second chance it deserves on video will discover that it’s not just an enjoyable burst of Golden Age action cinema filmmaking, but a meta narrative that makes it far more intriguing than it appears.

Most comeback movies dutifully pander to fans’ nostalgic expectations by just giving them more of what ain’t broke. Exhibit A: The Expendables series, which recreates for its actors (including Schwarzenegger) the roles they’ve always inhabited while exhibiting an “Oorah! We still got it!” enthusiasm about bringing back its aging heroes. The Last Stand, however, isn’t interested in simply rebooting its star into his old plot and character archetypes. Instead, it offers Schwarzenegger a comeback movie with a character — Sheriff Ray Owens — with a comeback narrative of his own. What’s more, because it biographically grafts Ray to Arnold, The Last Stand turns its fictional character’s journey from former to restored hero into one that parallels the very re-ascension Schwarzenegger is undergoing with this film.

The Last Stand eagerly fashions Ray into Schwarzenegger’s biographical reflection. They’re both men who gave up action-packed careers defined by assault guns and shootouts (respectively LAPD officer and action star) for the lives of public servants (small town Sheriff and California Governor) defined by parking violations and politics. They’re both men who place greater value in their alternate careers; Ray admits to regretting his time being “part of the action” in Los Angeles, and Arnold has said his public service “was the most gratifying … thing that I’ve ever done.” Ray left the LAPD in 1993 because a shootout left him with five bullet wounds. Schwarzenegger sustained the worst (metaphorical) wounds of his career in 1993, compliments of The Last Action Hero. And for many, True Lies, which was in production at that time, marked the end of the Golden Age of Arnold. The Last Stand even has Ray, in a rare exception for a Schwarzenegger character, acknowledge his status as an immigrant.

The film lays out these synchronous backstories so that in The Last Stand Ray and Schwarzenegger are starting their respective returning acts in the same place, facing the prospect of having to return to the kind of action that was once their status quo. Except Ray is an atypical Schwarzenegger character. He has no interest in being an eager agent of violence anymore.  His first words speak of an obligation to “keep the peace,” and when the film introduces early entry points into the action plot, Ray delegates to his deputies instead of acting himself, in order to preserve his day off. He’s happy to have left his old world behind and eager to sustain his current one.

When his younger colleague, Jerry (Zach Gilford), questions how he could ever have given up his formerly exciting life to “come to this place,” a place of quiet living, the sheriff explains that while he was younger he “wanted to be part of the action … but now, thinking back, I feel differently.” The audience of The Last Stand is put in a curious position of watching an Arnold Schwarzenegger comeback movie where his character doesn’t actually want to come back to facilitate Arnold Schwarzenegger being able to do what he does best: action.

Ray’s inaction isn’t as out of place as it would seem, because it isn’t just his own. The biographical similarities the sheriff shares with his portrayer make his words reverberate past his own fictional life and into Schwarznegger’s real one. His admission of feeling differently about his previous career recalls a sentiment the star expressed while promoting The Last Stand: “I really didn’t miss anything about acting when I was Governor.” In that scene between Ray and Jerry an additional link between opens up, and the sheriff’s reluctance to be forced into the action film machine gearing up around him suddenly also becomes Schwarzenegger’s. Their shared parallel histories become a current predicament.

It’s a predicament The Last Stand is unwilling to indulge as Ray — and Schwarzenegger — are increasingly pushed to engage in the action a comeback movie and audience demands. But while the film adopts an “if they won’t come to the action, the action will come to them” strategy and stacks the decks against them, it doesn’t do so maliciously. It does so to make a point about what it actually means for an aging star like Arnold Schwarzenegger to return and force himself back into a world of genre violence. And it makes that point a melancholic one.

That’s never more effectively laid out than it is after one character is killed and Ray is finally compelled to engage, because in a Schwarzenegger movie when a comrade dies, something must be done. But while usually this would beget angry vengeance, here it begets reluctant duty. The sheriff is told to let it go and he resignedly sighs, “I can’t.” He says the line like he’s trapped, and the point The Last Stand is making is that he is. For Schwarzenegger to return, it means subjecting himself to restrictive narrative plot points, tropes and narrative obligations like this. His “I can’t” plays like a moment that broadcasts a sad realization of this — he and Ray know what movie they’re in, know that they’ve hit the point of no return, know the role they now have to play and that they can no longer escape.

That’s why what should be the moment in a typical Schwarzenegger movie where an audience gets excited about the coming violence is turned into something else: a moment of defeated acceptance and the resulting fear. Ray admits he’s scared. He confesses, “I’ve seen enough blood and death. I know what’s coming.” It’s the most tragic and subversive moment in the film, made all the more so by the fact that as Arnold delivers the line his face is in extreme close up, the eyeline such that it feels like the fourth wall is breaking and his resigned face is looking right at us, his heart-broken tone speaking directly to us. That moment plays as if he’s had enough, but he knows what he’s agreed to give us. He knows what’s coming: years after giving up action movies he’s right back here again, with potentially years more of “blood and death” ahead.

It’s no accident that after that moment of resigned acceptance of the course laid out before him, Ray’s reluctance dissipates. He returns to his former self and becomes proactive in facing his coming crisis. And by association, so does Schwarzenegger. As Rodrigo Santoro’s character says, “muscle memory lasts a long time,” and so Schwarzenegger engages in shootouts, car chases and mano-y-mano final fights while regaining his one-liners and his on-screen invulnerability. There’s certainly a rusty quality to it all, but he emerges victorious in typical Schwarzenegger movie fashion. Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, and there seems to be a budding ownership of his return to his old role and genre when FBI Agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) says, “You don’t give up easy,” and the sheriff responds, “This is my home.”

The question remains whether Schwarzenegger’s return home will be worth it. At a press conference promoting The Last Stand the actor confessed that “when you have left the movie business for seven years, it’s kind of a scary thing to come back because you don’t know if you’re going to be accepted or not.” The box office results of the film seem to cast doubts on whether he has been accepted. The Terminator star does have several movies in production still, so time will tell how they do.

If they fail, it’ll be hard not to think about our first introduction to the town of Somerton in The Last Stand. A memorial statue reads: “Dedicated to the Fallen Heroes of Somerton County Sheriff Department.” If Schwarzenegger can’t find renewed career success, then that tragic fourth-wall breaking moment of resignation in The Last Stand will have been for naught, and that memorial’s fictional commemoration will have proven to be a prescient real one foreshadowing Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Fallen Action Hero.

The Last Stand hits DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, May 21. 

The eighth In Competition banner for the Coen Brothers at the Cannes Film Festival is their first in six years, since their eventual Best Picture Oscar winner No Country for Old Men. Though there isn’t a chance for the intrepid filmmaking duo to repeat the same success here, the feeling coming out of Inside Llewyn Davis is that the brothers would not have it any other way. Indeed, while terming their latest work the worst thing they’ve put out since The Ladykillers might send alarm bells ringing, when you consider their body of work since – No Country, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man and True Grit – it begins to seem not quite so bitter a pill to swallow.

Tackling the New York folk music scene of the 1960s, the Coens’ latest sees the titular character (Oscar Isaac) stumbling through the city by the seat of his pants, trying to make it as a musician in an ostensibly difficult niche. Hopping from sofa to sofa, LLewyn drifts through life, propelled almost singularly by a desire to meet music maestro Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) while his personal life, namely a surprise pregnancy by way of occasional partner Jean (Carey Mulligan), crumbles around him.

This is without question the most atypical Coen Brothers film of the last decade — certainly their least funny and for a time their most sentimental. To give the directors their due, they have committed solely to immerising us in the Greenwhich Village folk scene, opening with an uninterrupted rendition from Llewyn, ahead of several more musical interludes that feature throughout. While these lengthy asides give the film less to say over its 105-minute runtime, they lend it an undeniable soulfulness, and the performance by Isaac — an actor until now best known for playing Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive — is in this stead a remarkable star-maker.

From start to finish, there’s a lack of narrative focus that feels somewhat appropriate to the meandering nature of Llewyn’s life, as he thinks only in the present — at one point turning down a royalties contract for a quick payday — and ultimately comes to envision nothing but failure for himself. Smartly, the Coens do not make a picaresque hero out of Llewyn. They pragmatically depict him in all of his complexity, at times a pompous, insufferable artisan, and at other times a likeable young man clearly still shaken by the suicide of his singing partner and brother, who threw himself from the George Washington Bridge at some time prior.

This is only exacerbated by some unexpected news that in most movies would cause the protagonist to rethink his station in life and probably end up reconciling that issue. In typical Coen form, though, that is not the case here; while hints are dropped throughout that Llewyn might finally face up to his responsibilities, another typically open-ended, inconclusive climax leaves audiences to decide much for themselves. In as much as the film is sentimental, it avoids a cloying close that would have compromised the water-tight character development up to that point.

Much of the joy of Inside Llewyn Davis is the array of colourful characters he meets during his travels; we begin with Jean, a cantankerous, perhaps hormonal young woman who blames LLewyn alone for her pregnancy, infuriated by the prospect of having to terminate the baby when it theoretically could also belong to her more robust lover and singing partner, Jim (Justin Timberlake). As we’ve come to expect from the actress, her American accent is virtually faultless, and she knocks the role out of the park.

When Llewyn hits the road, he comes across two like-minded Jazz musicians played by Garrett Hedlund and John Goodman, the former of whose acting stock continues to rise (albeit in a near-wordless performance here) while the latter, a Coen regular, breathes plenty of life into the film even if this is arguably its most worthless segment. Indeed, at this point Llewyn Davis transitions into a full-on road movie for a time — though the vehicle of travel is not always car — losing its way somewhat. Yet this section does easily boast the film’s best visuals, courtesy of Director of Photography Bruno Delbonnel, teaming with the directors for the first time.

Inevitably, it all comes down to Llewyn finally meeting with Grossman, played superbly by Abraham, a respected character actor in a brief but stirring role — though, typically, this is not an A-to-B story of success. Right to the end, Llewyn is a troubled, even at times obnoxious figure, frustrated as so many of us are at the brick wall standing in the way of success, and perhaps no truer is it than in the artistic fields that talent (of which LLewyn undeniably has plenty) can only take you so far. There’s no uproarious catharsis, and although this is a rare Coen brothers film that might have actually suited a neat and tidy ending, it’s likely you’ll be thinking about the final images long after the credits roll.

If something of a chamber piece compared to their recent work, Inside Llewyn Davis will surely find a comfortable following, even if by its sheer nature and virtues it is less about something. There’s never any doubt that the project came off as any diffrent than the brothers envisioned it, and the musical interludes throughout, any of which could scoop Oscar nominations next year, are simply delightful. While it might be their most slight and unfocused effort in almost ten years, given their corpus of work therein, it’s difficult to feel too short-changed about that.

This is very much the film directors get to make once they’ve won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and few will argue that Ethan and Joel haven’t earned it.

The Upside: Wonderful musical numbers propel a compelling character study driven by an array of superb performances — most of all Isaac, who should see big offers come rolling in as a result.

The Downside: It’s their most vague and unassuming film in years, which coming off the back of big-hitters like No Country and A Serious Man is almost certainly going to cause some to be disappointed.

On the Side: The film’s soundtrack was composed by T-Bone Burnett, Justin Timberlake, Marcus Mumford and Oscar Isaac himself.

It’s hard to watch Star Trek Into Darkness and not think about Star Wars. Yes, J.J. Abrams is directing Episode VII and so we have that knowledge on the brain going into this. Maybe we’re even on the lookout for clues hinting at what we should expect from his take on that galaxy. This isn’t the first time the Trek franchise has had to try and prove itself in the shadow of George Lucas’s own series. Even though it originated with a TV show in the 1960s, Trek‘s cinematic resurrection a decade later was in part allowed by and somewhat influenced by the success and quality of the first Star Wars. But even regardless of the fact that Abrams is following the latest Trek with the next Wars, I often otherwise felt like I was watching one of the latter while sitting through Into Darkness.

Before getting into the evidence that Abrams is a clear fan of Lucasfilm works (and not just Star Wars) and likes to sample from them, let’s take a moment to think about what all his call back references and allusions to both Wars and Trek might mean for Episode VII. Will there be too much winking and fan-service, unhidden Easter eggs and inside jokes and maybe even outright recycling the way Into Darkness is with certain prior Trek installments? Could Episode VII have a number of allusions to Trek the way Into Darkness pays obvious homage to Wars? Rather than creating new worlds of his own, will he be resting on the hard work of his many predecessors. Sure, he’ll be working from a script by Michael Arnt, but his own Toy Story 3 script also had too much pop culture referencing, including that one major nod to Return of the Jedi.

There are sure to be some Into Darkness SPOILERS in the following list, so beware if you haven’t seen it yet or don’t plan to because maybe you’re exclusively Wars devoted. 

1. Sideways Elusion Allusion

This cliche “we’re not gonna fit” bit has been talked about as reminding fans of Star Wars since the (second?) Into Darkness trailer was released. I don’t think we saw it before Abrams was announced as Episode VII director, but it wouldn’t matter if that was the case. It’s impossible not to think of the part of The Empire Strikes Back when the Millenium Falcon eludes a couple Tie Fighters by turning sideways and barely slipping through a narrow canyon while also trying to safely avoid the danger of an asteroid field.

2. Scotty-3PO and R2-Keenser

The relationship between Scotty and little Keenser wasn’t so obviously modeled after that of C-3PO and R2-D2 in the first Abrams Star Trek movie, but their similarity to the droid buddies really comes through in this sequel in two key scenes. The first is when Scotty is forced to resign from the Enterprise and makes Keenser come with him, as if he’s the dominant half of their special relationship, a la C-3PO to R2D2. Then it’s also clear in their semi-quibbling tone towards one another in the bar scene. And of course Keenser doesn’t speak English while Scotty does all the talking, much like their Star Wars counterparts.

3. Mister Spockwalker and Kirk Solo — or James T. Kirkwalker and Spock Solo

There’s not much use in comparing the dynamics of Kirk and Spock and Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. The former precedes the latter. But Kirk is a lot more of a bad boy in the rebooted Star Trek series, and yet he also at times reminds me of young cocky Luke. Meanwhile Spock is the goody two-shoes of the duo, sort of like Skywalker early on in the Star Wars trilogy, but he’s also colder and lives by a strict code without concern for others, like Han early on. The parallels are neither intentional nor finely tuned (call it a stretch), but the relationships are interesting to consider as we look ahead to the return of Luke and Han in Episode VII. Thinking about it also leads to the next couple items.

4. Death of Kirk’s Obi-Wan

Christopher Pike is to James T. Kirk as Obi-Wan Kenobi is to Luke Skywalker. He is a mentor and encourages the young man on his path — a path in which he follows in the footsteps of his late father. And in this movie Kirk witnesses the death of his Obi-Wan at the hands of the enemy. It’s odd that soon afterward, Kirk teams up with his mentor’s killer, yet Luke also does that with Obi-Wan’s murderer, Darth Vader, once he learns the truth about him as well.

5. The Old Wise Sage Who Is Also Sort Of a Ghost

If Pike is Kirk’s Obi-Wan, Spock needs one too. Because they’re both kind of the Luke of this movie. And indeed Spock has one: himself. That is, Spock Prime, the older, other timeline version of Spock still portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. He’s a bit of an expositional cheat in Star Trek Into Darkness, but he’s also a necessary Obi-Wan/Yoda figure who comes in and gives us some back story (which for Star Trek is just reminder of old series info and for Star Wars was eventually all prequel info).

6. The girl Kirk originally likes winds up with Spock

For this item we shall think of Uhura as the Leia of the Abrams Star Trek series. She’s not a princess, but especially in Into Darkness she comes third in line as far as the main muscle and mind of the Enterprise and franchise. We were introduced to her in the previous film being hit on by Kirk at a bar. She wasn’t into him. Later he fouls up his chances with her even more by sleeping with her roommate. In a way, at this point he’s both crushing Skywalker and playboy Solo. And then she winds up with the other guy (rival/bud Spock) by the end of that movie, and in this new movie she and Spock are a full-on bickering couple. The only thing missing is Uhura professing her love for Spock only to have him very logically reply with “I know.” Yeah, that would have been too much.

7. The bad guy’s daughter is a good guy

Admiral Marcus isn’t the main baddie of Star Trek Into Darkness — though for a moment he’s sold as such. He’s hardly the film’s Darth Vader. But nobody is the film’s Darth Vader. Still, when the character was revealed to be a villain and Carol the stowaway was revealed to be his daughter, the Vader/Leia connection just popped into my head. Hopefully this means Alice Eve shows up in a metal bikini in Star Trek 3. Not that the above image wasn’t enough.

8. Awkward, campy, emotional exclamation!

Obviously when Spock cornily shouts “Khaaaaaaaaaaan!” after the radiation “death” of Kirk it’s an inverse reference to when Kirk similarly yells the villain’s name in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan after Spock “dies” from radiation. What else did it sound like? How about when Anakin/Vader yells “Noooooooooooo!” upon hearing of Padme’s death at the end of Revenge of the Sith?

9. Climactic fight atop a moving vehicle

Hat tip goes out to film critic Calum Marsh for this one, as I’d forgotten much of Revenge of the Sith. He reminded me of Anakin and Obi-Wan’s final duel on Mustafar (which many viewers admit to have thought of during Into Darkness’s opening volcano sequence), which eventually has them battling atop moving platforms that are just above a river of lava. I can see where that’s similar to the final duel in Into Darkness atop vehicles flying through San Francisco. The only thing missing in this instance was Khan left barely holding onto life as Spock shouted, “You were the chosen one” to him.

Bonus: Two Ways Star Trek Into Darkness Alludes to Raiders of the Lost Ark

As if the Star Wars references, both conscious and subconscious, weren’t enough, Star Trek Into Darkness has two very blatant allusions to the Lucas-penned Raiders of the Lost Ark, and interestingly enough they bookend the movie and are equally references to the opening and closing of the Indiana Jones film. First there’s the pre-credits sequence with Kirk and Bones running from primitive indigenous aliens, reminiscent of Indy being chased by the “Hovito” people in Peru. Then there’s the shot at the end of Khan back in his cryogenic coffin with his fellow stasis-bound pals that is surely meant to evoke the closing Raiders shot of the Ark of the Covenant being hidden in a massive warehouse.

Divorce is rarely a scenario in which anyone wins, least of all the children, as A Separation director Asghar Faradi reminds us once again in his latest feature, The Past, which has been widely touted as one of the Cannes Film Festival’s hottest tickets and a sure-fire Palme d’Or frontrunner. While failing to quite live up to the heart-wrenching moral dilemmas of the director’s previous film, The Past offers up plenty of provocative notions about the state of the contemporary family unit, wrapped around a thoroughly engrossing central mystery.

The story begins as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) is summoned to France by his estranged wife of four years, Marie (Berenice Bejo), to finalize their long-gestating divorce. However, Ahmad soon enough uncovers quite the familial powder keg once he realizes that Marie’s current partner, Samir (Tahir Rahim), has near-enough set up shop with her despite the fact that he has a wife in an eight-month-long coma following a suicide attempt. It is the character of Samir’s wife who, though seen on screen for roughly just a minute in total, forms the crux of the film’s dramatic tension.

Though initially the passive-aggressive quibbling between the unconventional family configuration, which sees Ahmad staying at Marie’s home with her and Samir’s combined three children, as well as the new beau himself, might suggest a toothed examination of middle-class mores is on the cards, Farhadi has something else very different lined up. This is another reliably well-mounted close-up look at a family in crisis, irreparably splintered off and now preoccupied with their respective pasts — a divorce and a coma — despite the effort previously made to move past them.

Through and through, it all comes back to Samir’s wife and the impact her situation has on damn-near every character in the film, be it indirectly or not. The various questions surrounding her episode form much of The Past‘s intrigue, and suitably, Farhadi unfurls the answers like a finely-preened suspense thriller. Key to it all is perhaps the film’s most fascinating character, Marie’s 16-year-old daughter Lucie (Pauline Burlet), who has become increasingly withdrawn from the family dynamic, and as we learn later, with good reason.

To say anymore would be to ruin the winding quality of Farhadi’s deliberate drama, which revels in dark secrets though rarely deigns to credulity-stretching melodrama. What can be said is that each, new, startling beat is propelled forward by the bang-up performances across the board. While Mosaffa gets the seemingly lighter load as our guide through this labyrinth of familial disarray, he delivers a potent everyman and arguably the only truly relatable character throughout the film. Bejo, meanwhile, sizzles in a role miles away from her plucky turn in The Artist, this time a rather unsavory, ill-tempered sort who earns much of our ire and little of our sympathy (though, quite fairly, there are no monochrome villains here). The main gripe here is that Bejo’s turn does occasionally saunter into off-putting histrionics.

It would meanwhile be remiss not to applaud the fine work of the young Burlet, who without which the film’s narrative drive might not have operated quite so effectively. The one actor likely to be passed over for praise above all others, however, is Rahim; though resigned to the anguished periphery for much of the film, his understated performance paints a character trapped painfully in limbo between one love and another. If the film hinges largely on one decision he is faced with making, the actor conveys that dilemma with startling yet subtle aplomb.

On the other hand, the formal style of the picture is a tad off-putting at times, in that the evidently strong lensing from Mahmoud Kalari feels like it could have been put to more robust use with additional location shooting (though this may not have been conducive to the home-spun family narrative). Also, some audiences are liable to feel a tad uneasy with the script’s constant references to Samir’s wife committing suicide, while peculiarly glossing over the fact that, in spite of her state, she is still very much alive (though this could be an error down to poor subtitling).

Any director would have struggled to follow-up such a dramatically rich work as A Separation, though Farhadi ably acquits himself with a somewhat overlong but largely absorbing depiction of family turmoil. The desire to see Farhadi shoot for another theme and up his scope, however, is undeniable.

The Upside: Farhadi tells a worthy story that children of divorce will instantly identify with; performances are universally strong, lending added gravitas to a narrative already front-loaded with it

The Downside: Berenice Bejo occasionally resorts to overplaying her hand in the explosive argument scenes; the glacial pace dictates that the film could easily have been trimmed by half an hour without losing a morsel of good content

On the Side: Marion Cotillard was originally cast in Berenice Bejo’s role but had to drop out before production began.

Opening with scenes of graphic full-frontal male nudity and proceeding towards seemingly unsimulated depictions of sexual acts on occasion, Alan Guiraudie‘s Stranger by the Lake certainly begins as it means to continue. If the initial glimpses of naked men on a makeshift French nude beach act as an opening statement for the film, over the course of the runtime this frank imagery serves to remind that nudity for nudity’s sake does not necessarily constitute good cinema in of itself, in spite of the film’s many other qualities.

Our protagonist, Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) finds himself quite literally flirting with danger when a trip to his local gay hookup place, a secluded beach area next to a lake, sees him meet and take a liking to the moustachioed Michel (Christophe Paou). It all seems cutesy and (relatively) innocent until late one night Franck catches Michel drowning one of his sexual partners, yet in the throes of passion nevertheless still finds himself irrevocably drawn to him. Soon enough, the cops come a-calling, and Franck and Michel’s burgeoning, uneasy romance becomes a whole lot more complicated.

To say one thing about Stranger by the Lake, it is certain that you will have likely never seen anything quite like it. This is surely the most explicit film to flush down the Croisette in some time, and its controversial nature is liable to make it a hot ticket at the festival, at least before audiences become aware of quite how affected the rather self-ingratiating explicitness is. Full-frontal male nudity aside, the various liaisons between the film’s characters are depicted in sub-pornographic style, with shots of ejaculation and seemingly real oral sex adding little to the narrative while appearing to exist solely to shock (though they do cement a sense of place rather aptly).

In fact, the film seems far more preoccupied with layering on the nudity that it, to a point, forgets about the serial killer shtick. After the initial murder scene around the end of act one, it’s almost act three before this thread announces itself fully once again. Indeed, you’ve not seen anything like this, though whether that is a good thing or not will be up to audiences to decide for themselves. The picture is a pleasant enough provocation, though feels unquestionably calculated in its pursuit to cause outrage.

What perhaps surprises most, then, is how funny Stranger by the Lake is; campy gay humor runs rife throughout, from the sheer lasciviousness of the set-up itself to the incredulity of the characters stumbling around the beach in search of some action (most notably raising laughs is a serial masturbator, who nevertheless wears his presence thin through repeated appearances).

Strongest of all the film’s elements is Franck’s friendship with an overweight, sad sack Gerard Depardieu-lookalike named Henri (Patrick D’Assumcao), a lonely married man who begins to fall for the lad though seems unable to commit himself to any homosexual acts. Instead, he sits on the beach, watching the waves, and this time he spends thinking — rather than rutting — makes him one of the few wise to the apparent identity of the murderer.

While act three veers off into more familiar slasher film territory, there’s still a pleasurable effort made to shirk stereotype — or in one hilarious instance, thoroughly mock it — leading to an intense, haunting finale that should go down well with an audience open-minded enough to rise to director Guiraudie’s challenge. At this stage, it becomes easy to forget about the excessive nudity, which is employed almost entirely for its own sake, and focus on the characters — or at least, those who are still alive.

Though set entirely in one location, there’s a firm contrast here between the sunny optimism of the afternoon scenes and the sinister oppressiveness of the night-kissed ones. That’s nothing to be surprised at, given the film’s constant flavor not of a seedy crime thriller but instead a kinky neo-noir. It’s almost Hitchcockian in the most lurid sense of the word. What’s clear above all else is that Stranger by the Lake will exasperate as many as it entertains.

The Upside: Performances are solid across the board, and there’s absolutely nothing out there like it.

The Downside: Totally inaccessible to multiplex audiences — not always a bad thing, mind you — due to the insistently graphic nudity and sex scenes, which feel superfluous, simply to beef-up an already engrossing enough premise.

On the Side: This is Guiraudie’s fourth film to debut at Cannes but only the first in the Un Certain Regard section.

The debut feature from Ryan Coogler has been the year’s Cinderella story ever since it bowed at Sundance and scooped the Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Audience Award, for U.S. dramatic film. Received in similarly rapturous terms by critics at this week’s Cannes screening, it would not be surprising to many if Fruitvale Station had the chutzpah to carry itself, or at least some of its esteemed performers, all the way to Hollywood’s awards season.

It opens with seemingly authentic camera phone footage — perhaps the very same footage that, as we learn at the film’s end titles, incriminated those involved — of 22-year-old Oscar Grant being accosted by two police officers. We know, even if we remain unaware of the resolution, that things are not going to end well.

While in many ways Coogler’s film feels very much like the same redemptive gangster drama we’ve seen so many times, the difference here, ostensibly, is that it’s real. Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) wants to stop slinging dope and get a proper job so that he can support his girlfriend and his daughter, but of course he faces professional hurdles that then impinge on his personal life. In fact, it is really only a familiar drama in as much as it features a character trying to extricate himself from less-than-desirable circumstances. It is Coogler’s riveting approach and the spellbinding performances that make it feel so fresh.

In many scenes it’s the relaxed chemistry between the performers, many of them unknown or non-professional, that takes them all the way — notably a charming exchange between Oscar and a local white girl shopping for raw fish at the local supermarket Oscar used to work at. It is here that we observe the erratic and explosive nature of Oscar, as he ends up grovelling to get his old job back and is ostensibly rebuffed, much to his frustration. Like Oscar himself, the tone of this film can shift in an insant, yet avoids feeling particularly jarring because Oscar’s life is, in one way or another, almost always in peril.

However, despite his misgivings, including a previous stint in the clink depicted through flashback, Oscar is a kind soul, demonstrated by a brief scene in which he tends to a dog injured by a hit-and-run driver. As such, the film is more about defining Oscar’s thoughts in his final day than what happened to him in his final moments. On a personal level he is a liar and a cheat, but he is trying to better himself, and on a basic humanist level it’s difficult not to identify with that.

Coogler thankfully doesn’t ladle out the minor details up close. A communal dinner scene says plenty without needing to speak, and the chemistry between Oscar and his daughter as they simply brush their teeth only rachets up our interest, well aware that father and daughter are soon to be separated.

There are a few foibles, though, specifically the feeling that Oscar’s constant preoccupation with the possibilities of tomorrow might be a tad manufactured or at least exaggerated for dramatic effect. One late-day conversation between Oscar and his daughter, in which he promises her he will come back home, seems particularly telegraphed for emotional purposes. This attempt to signpost the ending appears to be a vague effort to imbue the already heart-wrenching story with needless cosmic significance. Without question, the story of Grant’s wrongful death stands strong on its own terms.

The third act, however, does generate palpable tension as audiences begin to wonder when the fatal bullet will discharge. Kevin Durand and Chad Michael Murray are functionally effective in two glorified cameos as the officers involved in the shooting, and though it might be easy to question the veracity of these events, given how weighted they seem against the BART Police Department, their documentation can, as the credits state, be found in video-based fact.

Incredulously remaining trip-wire tense despite a known outcome, Fruitvale Station is an exceptional dramatic feature propelled by superb performances across the board, specifically Jordan (best known to audiences for his work on Chronicle) and Octavia Spencer, who, playing Oscar’s mother, surmises the emotional turmoil of this torrid situation. If the film can survive on the same level of goodwill as Beasts of the Southern Wild (another Sundance darling), expect Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations, as well as a good deal of love at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The Upside: Coogler’s debut is a dramatically rich, superbly drawn drama which balances notions of family with the regrettable end to its tale. Performances across the board are uniformly excellent.

The Downside: The narrative occasionally feels affected for dramatic potency in places, and ironically feels less effective and convincing as a result.

On the Side: When it debuted at Sundance, Fruitvale Station had the shorter title of Fruitvale.

Please note, this piece is to be read by those who have either seen Star Trek Into Darkness or who don’t mind having its various plot points spoiled for them. It is a frank discussion of what works and what doesn’t work in the film and will include descriptions of all the major beats, including the ending.

Let me start by saying that I quite like Star Trek Into Darkness. I have now seen the film three times and while I don’t quite love it like I love the 2009 Star Trek – director J.J. Abrams‘ first attempt at boldly going and so on — I did enjoy it. The first film certainly has problems of its own, but several things keep you from stopping to think about the film’s issues, mainly the breakneck pace, the incredibly charismatic cast, Michael Giacchino’s fantastic score and, yes, even Abrams’ direction. In fact, it’s most of those same things that help keep Star Trek In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida afloat. But the cracks in the hull are far more apparent this time around, and the whole thing could have easily been a disaster.

After the jump I review the downsides and then move past them to highlight the upsides.

The Flaws

In the first sequence on a fledgling planet we discover that the Enterprise is hiding at the bottom of the ocean. How it got down there without being seen isn’t addressed, nor is why the decision was made to turn a starship into a submarine in the first place. Even Scotty (Simon Pegg) recognizes this by commenting that they’ve been underwater for two days now and it’s “ridiculous.”

Spock (Zachary Quinto) is planning to head into a volatile volcano and detonate a cold fusion device which will freeze the volcano and save the planet. But of course things go wrong, and with no other way to save Spock’s life, Kirk (Chris Pine) violates the Prime Directive by allowing the planet’s inhabitants to see the Enterprise as it rises out of the ocean to save Spock by beaming him back to the ship.

There seems to be no reason why they couldn’t have armed the cold fusion device and just dropped it into the volcano on their way out of town, but that wouldn’t allow the rest of the plot to progress, so instead we get Spock in mortal danger in the first ten minutes of the film. Anyone who actually thinks they’re going to kill Spock in the first ten minutes hasn’t seen very many films. And that’s all without mentioning how this first sequence is basically the same first sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And yet it works, mostly because it’s thrilling in spite of the problems and beautiful to look at as well.

And then there’s John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), Star Trek Infallible Detergent‘s villain of sorts. Turns out he’s actually Khan. Yes, that one from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. And while Trek fans may have wanted to see a new spin on the best bad guy in Starfleet history, I doubt this is what they had in mind. We don’t even know he’s Khan for half the movie and by the time he reveals himself there’s not much time to develop the character before we have to start the business of defeating him. Cumberbatch doesn’t help much either. Fantastic though the Brit may be, particularly on the BBC Sherlock series, here he’s bland and dry as a piece of toast.

In the same role, Ricardo Montalban went famously over the top, crafting an iconic performance. Gone is Khan’s energy and emotion and the feeling that he’s teetering on the edge of Crazytown and may launch a full scale invasion of that place at any time. We’re left with Cumberbatch over-enunciating every word as if to assure us that his mouth works just fine. There’s really nothing about Khan that works, save for the fact that we get a villain that needs to be defeated. And yet the film itself works in spite of this. 

To wrap all this up, we fast forward about a year and Kirk is giving a speech about the events of the film and he specifically talks about how the natural instinct is to seek vengeance but that that’s not who we are. The only slight problem with Kirk’s words is that we’ve just spent the last two hours DOING EXACTLY THAT THING. The entire film is a revenge film, every beat. Kirk wanting revenge for Pike, Khan wanting revenge for his crew, Spock wanting revenge for Kirk. In fact, our good friend Erik Davis over at Movies.com wrote about how the film was almost called Star Trek: Vengeance and how that is in fact the title for the film in Russia. So, whether that’s “who we are” or not, the entire film is about vengeance. And yet the film works…

There are other, smaller nitpicks, like the ridiculous title and how warping from one end of the universe to the other is now done in just a few minutes and how Marcus is able to beam Carol from the Enterprise to his ship despite the fact that the Enterprise HAD to have their shields up since they were just being fired upon and how Spock Prime shows up because the plot hasn’t done a decent job of showing Khan to be a dangerous villain so Spock Prime needs to remind us all that the guy is definitely a bad guy whom we should fear. But really, Spock Prime is there because we all love Leonard Nimoy and we want to see him in this new film no matter how much shoehorning it took.

And yet, the film still works…

At least for me it does. I totally understand if some combination of the above issues or ones I didn’t mention that you might have noticed made the film less than enjoyable for you. I get that. And if that’s the case, I’m sorry. I think most of us go into new movies hoping to like them and to go into something as big as Star Trek and be disappointed just plain sucks. But for me it’s still an enjoyable film, and here’s why:

First and foremost, the cast is what makes this movie work. Cumberbatch notwithstanding, the cast is phenomenal. This is the same cast that made the first film work and it’s their relationships and the way they so effortlessly play off each other that makes both films fun to watch despite their flaws. Pine’s Kirk may not be the Kirk from the series, but he’s so damn charismatic and likable, and he plays so well off Quinto’s Spock. Quinto gives a calculated and measured portrayal in the role of the famous Vulcan and the banter between Spock and Kirk is fantastic.

They’re the main ones, but Bruce Greenwood is great as Pike despite his brief screen time. Pegg’s Scotty is hilarious, and given more to do this time around Karl Urban’s Bones is spot on. Sulu (John Cho)and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) are underused but awesome in their moments, and Peter Weller deserves special mention for his no-bullshit performance as Admiral Marcus. It’s an outstanding cast and that’s why it’s able to overcome so many flaws. It’s rare to see so many great actors doing great work.

The cast is even good enough to overcome a very specific issue. While copying the end of Wrath of Khan, STID pulls a reversal and has Kirk go into the radiation core to fix the warp drive, rather than Spock. And then, despite the fact that the audience knows about the healing power of Khan’s blood from the little girl at the beginning of the film, we get a full tearful goodbye as Kirk dies. People are upset because they know the movie’s just going to bring him back to life. I get it. And they’re right, it should feel hollow. Even if you missed it the first time, you know the next time you see the film that he’s going to be alive in about ten minutes. So how could that scene matter at all? How could it have any emotion? Because of Pine and Quinto.

Keep in mind that while we as the audience know that Kirk isn’t really going to die, at this point in the story neither of those characters has any reason to suspect that a miracle cure may save him. They’re saying goodbye as if it’s actually goodbye. Their performance is what makes that scene work when it shouldn’t. I’ll admit it, I teared up the first time I saw it. Giacchino is smart and lets the silence build while Spock takes in the scene and realizes what’s about to happen. And as Kirk and Spock exchange their “final” words, Giacchino brings in a simple, subtle piano that highlights the emotionality of the scene. It’s the perfect compliment to the performances on screen and it makes that scene hold up, even to second and third viewings.

Giacchino gets credit for helping that scene work, as well as countless others throughout the film, as a result of his masterful score. He knows when to push it and when to pull back, when to let silence fill the void and when to crescendo triumphantly to highlight victory, like the moment the Enterprise peeks back through the clouds after having regained power. His score helps to make the movie work even when it shouldn’t.

And then there’s Abrams himself. While Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof may have botched the script, Abrams took it and shot it with style. The scenes don’t seem quite as well-shot or framed or blocked as the scenes in his first Trek outing, but he still makes a few in particular sing, like the opening sequence with Bones and Kirk running through the forest. The shot with the camera in front of Bones showing the spears of the indigenous inhabitants coming right at the screen is not only a great shot but a great use of 3D, and the overhead shot tracking Kirk and Bones as they run out of the forest and jump off the cliff’s edge is fantastic. It’s done at a breakneck pace and starts the film off on the right foot, setting you right down in the middle of things and not giving you a chance to catch your breath before literally hitting the ground running. It may not have the grandeur or the epic nature of the opening of the first film, but it’s still a damn good way to open a movie.

Ultimately, these elements make the movie work. They are able to overcome the films numerous faults and they turn the film into a fun and enjoyable experience even on multiple viewings. I can certainly understand if it doesn’t work for some people. The flaws are legion. But for me, the cast, the score and Abrams all worked together to make a film that I liked. And I’m excited to see what they do next.

We’ve got another half year before our eyes, ears and funny bones get ahold of Anchorman: The Legend Continues. The highly anticipated sequel is not even finished filming — though it is close to wrapping up, with shooting moved from Atlanta to New York City this week. To further whet our appetites, and probably to give official supplement to all the set photos of cameo appearances being regularly leaked, Paramount has unveiled a new trailer for the movie. You still won’t find any footage from The Legend Continues, however. Like the teasers we got a whole year ago, this is a simple promo  featuring our four favorite newsmen saying “something fun about the movie.”

Well, except for Brick, of course, who doesn’t understand what to do. Again. He gives us some advice on how to avoid being mistaken for a pedophile and wishes us a belated happy Easter. The holiday greeting is kind of fitting, though, we’ll give him that. Narrator “Bill Lawson” introduces the latest teaser talking about returned figures such as Jesus and Jay-Z. Easter pertains to the former, obviously. See, Brick isn’t dumb after all. But Ron Burgandy sure is mean. He calls us fat face. And he thinks we’re going to come see his movie after such an insult? Okay, we will. We can’t wait to hear him call us names and for Champ and Brian to intoxicate us with their alcohol breath and snake venom cologne, respectively.

Anchorman: The Legend Continues opens in theaters December 20, 2013.

François Ozon arguably let audiences off a little easy with his last two films, the amiably light Potiche and the wryly witty yet discursive In The House. But the director, known for piercing deep into the nature of sexual mores, is back with a doozy in the form of Young & Beautiful. It’s part coming-of-age drama, part thigh-slapping family satire and part morality fable. Fans of the director craving another toothed, bracing effort will find themselves very much at home here.

Isabelle (Marine Vacth) is a 17-year-old girl who has developed a natural curiosity about sex and soon enough endures an awkward encounter in which she loses her virgnity (when are they not?) to a local boy. Soon enough Isabelle decides, of her own volition, to become a prostitute. How this will affect both her clients and her family, she is oblivious to until her wild new life eventually — and some might say inevitably — comes suddenly crashing down.

It is certainly a provocative mission statement with which to confront the viewer, the notion of a middle-class woman turning to prostitution not out of necessity but as a means of asserting her own agency. Early images of Isabelle sunbathing topless and masturbating with a pillow — both of which are spied upon by her younger brother — prove provocative and seductive, yet this is a perception that changes gradually over the course of the film.

This isn’t to discount Ms. Vacth’s obvious sex appeal. Rather, it is all the more credit to Ozon that he is able to de-sexualise her somewhat. There is an unerring sexual frankness about proceedings, and an overtly comfortable relationship between brother and sister particularly generates a strange undercurrent that will keep viewers on edge in that classic Ozon way.

Isabelle has her notions of sex upended early on by her first encounter, and the subsequently blunt parting of ways with the young man involved. It is up to viewers to decide if the flippancy of this liaison is what drives her to become a sex worker; Ozon smartly doesn’t ladel out the answers and instead challenges us to seek our own. This, along with some dubious role models in Isabelle’s life, including a mother who may or may not be having an affair with a family friend, no doubt do not dissuade her from this uneasy road to sexual awakening and female emancipation (or, as viewers will find themselves wondering, is it subjugation?).

Though Vacth is a major find, a confident performer with a striking look — not to mention, as the title suggests, stunningly beautiful — the film is rarely titilating by virtue of the subject matter alone, which takes a grim, and also grimly funny, left turn at the film’s halfway point. The ironies of Isabelle’s adventure at this point begin to unfurl; her beauty is unquestionably a tool and also a weapon, one turned inadventantly inward against the self. Thus, while a third act romance might at first seem rushed, that’s precisely the point. Isabelle has her lurid encounters as a prime romantic frame of reference, and when presented with a viable mate, is at a loss as to how she should comport herself.

There’s the inevitable temptation arc arriving late on, in which Isabelle is teased back down the dark rabbit-hole, one boasting a brief but startling appearance from Charlotte Rampling, though Ozon does well not to commit stringently to any one outcome. After all, Isabelle is like any other 17-year-old girl, impulsive and erratic. To resign her to a concrete future would be disingenuous, and to treat her as any differently from what she is by nature would be a massive cheat. Thankfully, the director comes out all guns blazing with this pleasantly irreverent feature that leaves much lingering in the mind.

The Upside: Ozon delivers a dark, thought-provoking coming-of-age story that’s also peppered with well-placed bouts of uproarious humor. The central performance from Marine Vacth will be sure to point plenty of attention her way. Ozon fans, I suspect, will meanwhile love it.

The Downside: It may not be about enough for some audiences, and the patent lack of a definitive ending may disappoint.

On the Side: This is Ozon’s fourth film to feature Charlotte Rampling, following Under the Sand, Swimming Pool and Angel.

No, those kids aren’t watching Star Trek Into Darkness or Oblivion. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was being marketed to children by Howard Johnson’s!

Welcome back to another Reject Recap, where I highlight the best movie news and feature stories of the past week as posted on FSR (and sometimes other sites). Think of it more as a curation with which to review recent film history as opposed to a set of reruns (we have enough of those starting around this time — on the big screen as well as on TV). It’s not just about catching up with what you missed but also catching on to where we are in movie culture. Also in television culture, as you’ll see in the bonus 11th slot below (spoiler: Landon likens The Office to a Michael Haneke film!). Also, I’ve included the full trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at the end. Enjoy.

This week’s theme, if there should be one, seems to be a mix of agelessness and timelessness. Words that may pertain to debates on remakes, reboots and reworking old cult classics so they’re more kid-friendly. Also to what Baz Luhrman does with retro-placement of modern music. Doesn’t it all make you want to get inside a human time capsule in the form of deep sleep stasis and wake up in a century to see what’s lasted, what’s been redone and what history and culture has been retroactively rewritten? Something to think about.

Start your weekend right after the jump.

Everything You Need to Know About Cannes 2013

“There are a ton of great movies playing at Cannes 2013, but you can’t be there. We feel your pain. I specifically feel your pain because I’m not technically allowed back in the city (parking tickets), so I can’t partake in all the grandeur of The Croisette. We’re lucky to have the fantastic Shaun Munro reviewing for us from the sandy beaches (and watching a few films), but it’s still a bit sad to think that we have to experience the festival from the couchly confines of our home in a town whose name we actually know how to pronounce. To help bring the festival experience just one inch closer to reality, let’s all dive deep into the cold, Mediterranean-like sea of synopses, pics, clips and trailers for the films that are playing at Cannes 2013. It’s just like watching a highlight reel!” – Scott Beggs

All Our Cannes 2013 Coverage:
Cannes Film Festival Reviews

How the Gremlins Reboot Moving Forward Could Be Good News

“Is it possible that starting the Gremlins franchise over and utilizing all of its familiar production design, but not being beholden to the stories that have already been told is actually the right move here, despite what our emotions might be telling us? And, more importantly than that, is it possible that Joe Dante Himself might be onboard for a reboot as well, and could eventually be the director who [Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg] hire to bring this thing to the screen? Now there’s something that would eliminate any ill-will projected toward this project pretty damned quick. Dante getting the chance to make another big budget horror comedy is the stuff nightmares are made of. You know, nightmares in a good way.” – Nathan Adams

2001: A Space Odyssey Was… Y’know, For Kids

“According to a 1968 Howard Johnson’s children’s menu… Once you stop throwing up, this kind of thing really makes you wonder if Kubrick ever saw this glorious monstrosity or whether he was carefully guarded from the more commercial grotesqueries that came with studio filmmaking. Obviously he swallowed the product placement while presenting it in a believable way (after all, brands aren’t simply going to disappear in the future), but this connect-the-dots delivery method may have been a bridge too far. The obvious question is why they’d market a slow-burn, existential mind-shredder to children in the first place. The better question is why they’d market a slow-burn, existential mind-shredder to children without turning HAL into a cheerful, cartoon robot pal.” – Scott Beggs

Why the Great Gatsby Soundtrack Is Better On Its Own Than In the Film

“On its own, the soundtrack is a fantastic combination of different musical styles from hip hop to rock to ballads, but the soundtrack’s at times sparse use within the film made it feel as though you were listening to a great song that was cut short before it reached its climactic chorus. Jack White’s “Love Is Blindness” (which drove the film’s trailer) made only a brief appearance rather than letting it play to the rafters like the track begs for. There are moments within The Great Gatsby where the soundtrack sings, but those moments ended up being rarer than one would expect when listening to a soundtrack full of music that not only reflects the themes of the film, but one full of lyrics saying what its characters cannot (or will not).” – Allison Loring

Why You Should Give Cloud Atlas a Chance Now That It’s Out On Blu-ray

“Six stories separated by time and space but joined by the common themes of humanity, this is the rare epic that didn’t come out of Hollywood…Of course, there’s no way in hell this movie would or could have come out of Hollywood anyway. It’s ambitious to a fault, and while that alone isn’t enough to watch a near three hour movie, the film offers plenty of other reasons as well. There’s action, sci-fi, romance, drama, comedy and more, and it’s all held together by a sense of wonder and an ethereal score. Sure there’s also some goofiness, but the good and great far outweighs the broadly ridiculous.” – Rob Hunter

More on Cloud Atlas:
The Unfilmable Cloud Atlas Drinking Game

Arnold Schwarzenegger to Give The Toxic Avenger More Mass Appeal

“This is all truly conflicting. Despite the bizarre lose/lose nature of trying to remake a cult movie, there may be a glimmer of a fun film here. Pink, who wrote and will direct, has got some great chops. Unfortunately, the project is being described as “an action adventure geared toward mainstream audiences.” Toxic Avenger geared toward mainstream audiences? The last we heard, they were even trying to make it PG-13. Because if you’re trying to remake a niche film, the main thing you want to do is make it digestible enough for a broader audience by cutting out all the things that made it interesting. It’s a great way to alienate fans of the original while making the general audience scratch their heads. So, yeah, even if Schwarzenegger signs on, this all sounds unbelievably stupid.” – Scott Beggs

Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park FX Artist on the Uniqueness of Ray Harryhausen

“There were knock-offs to be sure, but what prevented a flood of stop-motion creature movies, was that it took time for Ray to make his films and in Hollywood (like elsewhere), time = money. His films were an enigma – too expensive to be copied quickly, but too inexpensive to receive big-budget releases unlike other high end family fantasy films of the time like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Ray, under the protection of his producer Charles Schneer, worked in a certain amount of obscurity, quietly producing mere frames of animation per day for complicated sequences. And much of the time he was working either alone or with limited help.” – Shannon Shea

More On Practical Special Effects Movies:
Fund This Film: ‘Harbinger Down’ is Sci-Fi/Horror for Fans of Practical Effects by Masters of Practical Effects

Who Else Still Isn’t Sold on Pacific Rim?

“I’d like to see more of the character stuff. Or something else besides big creatures and the kind of action that could just as easily sell a Michael Bay movie…I need more assurance, especially after the “fun” but dumb summer movies we’ve gotten as of yet this year in only a matter of weeks. I’m just not sold yet and maybe I won’t be until I just see it, because I’ve never been a member of the Del Toro fanbase and to me this just looks like dark, mindless fluff no better than Robot Jox meets Battleship.” – Christopher Campbell

How Digital Distribution is Moving Forward By Taking a Step Back

“Warner Archive Instant…signals a possible return to pre-1948 practices of vertical integration, especially if studios like MGM and Universal decide to follow Warners’ digital exhibition model. In effect, this framework for digital exhibition turns 21st century moviegoers into pre-1948 theater owners subject to practices of block-booking –- if you’d like to watch a dozen or so titles available exclusively through the Warner Archive Instant, then you’ll have to take all their other titles as well. If you’d like to see Universal films, well, then subscribe to their streaming archive to do the same if they develop one. How do subscription services like Netflix compete with studios that own a vault of original material? By making their own exclusive content in turn. Want to see the upcoming season of Arrested Development? Stick with the red envelope, and you can see every season of Comedy Bang Bang as well.” – Landon Palmer

Which Actor Did the Most Harm to His Body for a Role?

“Matt Damon for Courage Under Fire. Seriously, you always hear these actors talk about how hard it was but also how worth it the experience was – but Damon flat out regrets it. When you read why – it’s pretty obvious. The dumbass completely winged it and almost gave himself permanent heart problems because of it. He drank egg whites for breakfast, and had one plain potato and one chicken breast a day. He also drank shit loads of coffee and ran six and a half miles every morning. Like a dumbass. Afterward he was under a doctor’s care for several months taking meds because he screwed up his adrenal glands and also risked permanent heart shrinkage.” – David Christopher Bell

The Office Turned Into a Commentary on Reality TV Fame

“Because the show’s cringe comedy oscillates so fluidly between laughing at and laughing with its characters, this final season seems to be retroactively implicating the show’s actual audience in illustrating the potential repercussions of the characters’ unwanted fame via the very footage we’ve watched for eight years. It’s easily become the most positively Haneke-esque of all of NBC’s sitcoms…The Office has managed in its waning hours to accomplish something risky, bizarre, and unique for a sitcom that has an almost-universal means of access, even if the end result is a bit uneven and ambivalent. The show seems to exercise fitting cynicism about a superficial TV-based fame cycle that has turned everyday life into a spectacle of fools and, in the process, has allowed other networks to continually knock NBC out of the park.” – Landon Palmer

More TV Coverage:
Agent Coulson Is Back in Action-Packed Trailer for ‘The Avengers’ Spin-Off TV Series ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
NBC’s New TV Shows Are the Same As FOX’s New TV Shows
‘Arrested Development’ Netflix Trailer is Gonna Get Some Hop-Ons
Mad Men: Fifty Shades of Draper
Blog of Thrones: And Off They Went, The Bear! ‘The Bear and the Maiden Fair’

Miele is directed by Valeria Golino, best known to English-speaking audiences as Topper Harley’s sexy, exotic girlfriend in the popular Hot Shots duology. That description, however, might be a reductive summation of her talents, because two decades later, she demonstrates what must be a higher calling as a director of challenging, thought-provoking drama in a film that should surely have landed In Competition — instead appearing in the still-esteemed Un Certain Regard cachet — and is presently the film to beat of not just the festival but the entire year.

Going by the pseudonym Miele, Irene (Jasmine Trinca) is an angel of death, helping to give the terminally ill a peaceful means to leave this world, usually with the assistance of a loved one. To perform these euthanisations, she typically travels from Italy to Mexico to procure a barbiturate used to put dogs down and then implores said patient to drink it with vodka. However, one patient, who wishes to die but is not terminally ill, tests the mettle of Irene’s resolve, causing her to confront the very nature of her work.

Miele is a rare film that avoids all the typical hallmarks of an untrained, first-time feature director. Not only is the picture water-tight from a thematic perspective, but it also boasts a sharp melding of visuals and sound. The inarguable master-stroke, however, is in casting Trinca as the lead. She is undeniably beautiful while displaying a slightly weathered countenance that fits her character extremely well. When we observe Irene talking her patients through the fatal procedure in the most clinical details (in order to ensure that the decision to die is theirs alone), it soon enough becomes clear why that is.

It’s a wholly unnerving concept, one executed with respectful grace but visceral honesty also, no better than when Irene meets Carlo (Carlo Cecchi), the old man who is not terminally ill but in fact chronically depressed. While Irene is then forced to confront her personal code of ethics — and the sloppiness that caused her to not even ask about his terminal illness in the first place — their chemistry invites a strong bent of dark humor that compliments the piece perfectly, preventing it from descending into mere misery porn.

It is along this tangent that the film discovers its most probing thematic engagement, holding a mirror up to society’s relationship with terminal illness against an invisible, mental one. Irene finds herself awe-struck by this conundrum, and it’s fascinating to observe how strictly both her and we as audience members might draw the line. Euthanasia is by 2013 no longer the strong taboo it once was, whereas the more speculative nature of mental illness will keep it a phantom for the foreseeable future.

Although most attention will be focused on Trinca and her character’s increasing involvement with Carlo, this is a film in which every performance stuns, from the most minor parts to those starring front and center. The various terminally ill individuals and their distraught family members contribute hugely to the overall emotional heft of the piece, and our engagement with the eventual toll this takes on the protagonist (though she naturally tries to sublimate it at first).

Trinca, a relatively fresh face to most audiences, delivers a smouldering performance in the titular role. Oozing sex appeal yet also appearing emotionally distant at first, Irene is a transfixing, hugely compelling character, and with any luck, the stellar actress’s robust work here will only see the job offers come whizzing in.

More so than any one performance, though, it is the central relationship between Irene and Carlo that best sells the film’s thorny themes. Watching Carlo run rings around Irene with his undeniably sound logic — despite his unfortunate mental state — is at once frightening, hilarious and wholly heartfelt. It is the aching humanism cutting through the piece that makes it such a joy to behold despite the grim subject matter, even as it arrives at the sad conclusion that, in the best possible world, indeed, nobody really wants to die.

Regardless of whether or not Carlo goes through with his act, Golino’s closing statement on mental illness, both its lack of recognition and its miasmic nature, is a much-needed cinematic wake-up call. Skirting around the histrionic cliches associated with this type of film, Miele is a virtuoso masterpiece from a director who has instantly made herself one to watch.

The Upside: From top to bottom, this is a finely tuned drama with exceptionally drawn characters, pulled taut across a cinematic landscape that is beautiful to behold both visually and sonically. Sure to be a highlight of the festival, and perhaps the year also.

The Downside: Subject matter is inescapably dark and will therefore be a discomforting sit for many viewers. The film’s unconventional push for catharsis may also strike less-world-cinema-savvy viewers off-guard.

On the Side: Jasmine Trinca made her film debut in Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

Comic-Con is a little thing that geeks do. That might actually be a thought that has run through the head of an average person in America. Every July they see news stories about a great number of bearded pop culture-loving men and (a growing number every year) women who descend upon San Diego, California, for an annual ritual celebration of all things popular media. The titular medium Comics, the overwhelming presence of movies and, of course, a healthy smattering of television. There is even a place where you can get an autograph from Star Trek: The Next Generation star Brent Spiner, among others. It’s the movies element that has drawn us to cover it year-over-year in various fashions, mostly with commentary from the streets of San Diego and occasionally with silliness. But we love it all the same, this pilgrimage to Geek Mecca, despite its logistical nightmares and flesh-flooded walkways.

We’re Comic-Con people. Which makes it a safe assumption that you may also be Comic-Con people. As a conglomerate of Comic-Con people, we may all find this new infographic fascinating. We’re happy to present it to you with the help of the folks at BuyCostumes.com. It explores the economics of Comic-Con. Did you know that the San Diego Comic-Con is the world’s third largest comic convention? (Don’t tell Rob Hunter that there’s one in Japan, as he may finally want to cover a comic convention again.) Did you know that Comic-Con generates more than half the economic impact of a Super Bowl? As they say, the more you know…

San Diego’s Colossal Comic-Con infographic shared by BuyCostumes.com.

With The Hangover Part III’s May 24th release date rapidly approaching, it’s now officially crunch time for its marketing people. They’ve got a few short days left to convince anyone who might be on the fence about coming back for a third helping of Hangover-style decadence that this is a movie that can’t be missed. So, in order to round up every last box office dollar they can possibly find, they’re pulling out the big guns—a red band trailer.

If there are two things in this world that everyone, no matter what their age, class, or background, responds well to, they’re nostalgia and dirty jokes, so this new trailer makes liberal use of both. After you click through the link and give it a watch, prepare to be pled with to remember how fun that first movie was, and prepare to plug the ears of any kids who might be in the room.

Well, there you have it. It’s probably what one would expect: a quick rundown of the greatest hits moments from the first two films followed by Ken Jeong screeching a lot and a bunch of jokes about dudes being gay.

Is the promise that this is going to be the franchise capper enough to get you into the theater in order to give The Hangover a sendoff? Or was the second one so derivative of the first that you’re going to do your best to pretend like this was a one and done comedy that didn’t spawn any sequels? I suppose it comes down to how much affection you have for the principal actors, and how thoroughly you want to make sure their pockets are lined with gold. Somebody’s got to pay to keep Zach Galifianakis’ farm up and running.

Here’s the thing. If your movie is going to feature two attractive women, completely nude, my first reaction shouldn’t be to laugh. And my second reaction most definitely shouldn’t be to hope they get dressed as soon as possible.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Black Rock is a new thriller with a fairly unusual pedigree. Katie Aselton (The League) stars and directs from a script by her traditionally light-hearted husband, Mark Duplass, and the resulting film is an occasionally successful hybrid of character piece and generic slasher. It essentially drops well-written characters into a highly traditional genre scenario, and while the combination has its benefits it also allows for more than a few issues.

Sarah (Kate Bosworth) has planned a relaxing weekend trip with her two best friends since childhood, but she’s neglected to tell each of them that the other is also coming along. While they were once a tight trio an act of indiscretion committed years ago by Lou (Lake Bell) against Abby (Aselton) has kept the two on the outs ever since. Sarah’s intentional deception is in the hopes that the other two can finally bury the hatchet and once again be friends. The plan is to camp overnight on a remote island off the coast of Maine, an isolated and wooded area they considered their playground kingdom as children, but their arrival is interrupted by the discovery that they’re not as alone as they expected.

It’s here where the film moves into some very familiar territory as the three women finds themselves targeted by what amounts to some aggressively disturbed men. The movie becomes a cat and mouse game of failed escape attempts before the women realize their only chance of survival is to channel their own inner animal instincts and fight back.

The film is undoubtedly a thriller, but where most in the genre pick up once the action starts this one is actually at its best before the first drop of blood is even spilled. Duplass’ script fills his protagonists with humanity and depth often absent in genre films fleshing each of them out in distinct ways. Sarah is the peacemaker, Lou is the slightly wild one and Abby seems to have it all figured out, but they’re also each more than that simple descriptor. The actresses in turn bring them to charismatic and feisty life turning them into characters we’re invested in and concerned for.

Well, except for Abby. She can suck an egg.

The trouble starts though when the trouble starts. Characters who had felt real and believable suddenly veer toward the typical women-on-the-run-from-psychos we’re used to. They make some questionable decisions (including that stimulating but utterly ridiculous nude scene) before finally deciding to fight back, but even as an incredibly big deal is made of their newfound and aggressive tenacity their resulting actions are weak and half-hearted. Basically this second half of the film is a series of frustrations falsely elevated by a recurring and unnecessary message of girl power competing with the theme of our pasts coming back to haunt us.

The efforts to drive that last point home, the one about repercussions for past transgressions, threaten to undue the character work accomplished early on, and it’s not long before they do just that. This heavy-handed theme spills over into the killers’ laps as well once their oddly stereotypical story is revealed. Events and silly acts leave us no one to really root for, and that’s hardly the aim of a thriller.

It sounds like the film is more bad than good, but there are elements to enjoy here. In addition to the strong opening and solid acting the score by Ben Lovett creates momentum and energy even when the visuals don’t. The film also looks good thanks to some starkly beautiful cinematography (even if the action scenes feel a bit sloppy).

Black Rock thinks it’s doing things differently, but instead it makes all the same moves an equivalent direct-to-DVD thriller would. Good actors and some legitimate laughs don’t change that. That said, it’s still a better than usual example of the genre strictly due to the level of acting and a first act that invests its characters with humor and humanity.

The Upside: Solid dialogue between friends used to create depth in relationships; energetic score; strong acting for the genre

The Downside: Suspenseful bits feel manufactured not natural; theme doesn’t stick its landing; girl power flails

On the Side: Black Rock premiered at last year’s Sundance… as in January 2012.

What is Casting Couch? It’s tying a nice bow on this work week with casting news concerning lovely ladies like Michelle Yeoh, Olga Kurylenko, and Chloe Moretz. Oh yeah, and there’s some stuff about some dudes in there too.

The upcoming adaptation of the Steven Sondheim musical Into the Woods that Rob Marshall has been putting together for Disney hasn’t been too secretive about its casting process. James Corden is rumored to be on board as the film’s lead, the Baker, we know for sure that mega-stars Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep are signed for sizzle roles as the wolf and the witch, and we even recently learned that Chris Pine and Jake Gyllenhaal are close to landing the roles of a couple of bumbling princes. But the one key ingredient that’s always been missing is who’s going to play the female lead, the Baker’s wife. Until now. Variety is reporting that Emily Blunt is finalizing a deal to take the role, and —oh man—does that super-talented angel coming on board instantly make this movie that much more appealing or what? The Wrap has a report that the delightful Christine Baranski may soon be getting an offer to join as well, but let’s take these things one step at a time.

Gerard Butler

Back in December 2010, Universal acquired the rights to a sci-fi action short called The Raven, with the hopes that they would eventually turn it into a feature. Things haven’t gone so smoothly on that front though. The deal took longer to get together than expected, and eventually things didn’t work out with the leading man they had attached to anchor the film, Liam Hemsworth, so the project has kind of been on the back burner for a while. But now Heat Vision is reporting that things are starting to move along again and Gerard Butler is in talks to take the lead, which would be really welcome, because Butler has had some success as an action lead before and, good lord, nobody wants to see him take anymore of these soulful surfer or sexy soccer player roles. Just yell a lot and break things, please.

Michelle Yeoh

The Weinstein Company seems to be hoping that everyone has fond memories of Ang Lee’s 2000 kung-fu epic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, because word is they’re putting a sequel into production. Neither Lee nor any of his writers are coming back to make the sequel or anything, but Screen Daily does have word that Michelle Yeoh is going to be on board to reprise her role as Yu Shu Lien, and ultimate martial arts badass Donnie Yen will be taking the starring role of a character named Silent Wolf. That should be enough to get fans of martial arts movies intrigued right there, even without Lee in the director’s chair. Don’t you think?

Dev Patel

Remember Dev Patel, that kid who starred in Slumdog Millionaire and seems really nice? He’s about to play a genius in a biopic about a math prodigy. THR is reporting that he’s signed on for the lead role in The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, which, perhaps predictably, is about a guy named Ramaujan. Srinivasa Ramanujan, to be exact, who is a math wiz who was plucked from the obscurity of Edwardian India and taken to the bustling intellectual hub of Cambridge, probably so that he could write out huge equations on giant chalk boards or something. Think of him as being like Will Hunting, only real and with a less annoying accent.

Olga Kurylenko

The Pierce Brosnan-starring espionage thriller November Man seems to be making great strides toward filling out the rest of its cast. The film will see Brosnan playing an ex-CIA guy who has to battle his former pupil in order to find a woman who holds the key to an international conspiracy. As generic as that sounds, the film’s PR people have just announced [via Coming Soon] that GI Joe: Retaliation actor Luke Bracey is now on board as the pupil, and Olga Kurylenko has signed on to play the mysterious girl, so suddenly the movie is starting to look pretty interesting anyway. A little Kurylenko goes a long way.

Asa Butterfield & Chloe Moretz

Remember how cute Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz were together in Hugo? Well, these days they’re a little bit lankier, and a little bit less cherub-faced, but we’re still going to get to see them star in another movie together again. Variety is reporting that the duo are now attached to a dark fairytale that Terry Gilliam is producing called The White Circus. The first feature from the directors of the Oscar-nominated short, Madame Tutli-Putli, Circus is about a pilot who crashes his plane in a war-torn town and winds up falling in love with a cabaret singer. After that, there’s running from evil despots, talking bears, and who knows what else. It all sounds fairly interesting so far, but let’s just hope it doesn’t get as boring as Brave once that talking bear shows up.

Do you like fun things? Things like beer and love and friendship and mostly improvised movies? Or even fun people? Fun people like Jake Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston? Would you like to see all of those things and people together in one of SXSW’s biggest hits from earlier this year? Good, you can do that quite soon. Until then, here is a poster. Refreshing!

Drinking Buddies will be available on VOD on July 25th, with a theatrical release following on August 23rd. [EW]

Wouldn’t it be so great if a group of smart, dedicated, ambitious astronauts blasted up into space in search of intelligent life and the pursuit of knowledge and something wonderful happened? Like they didn’t die at the hands of a bunch of screeching, flashing, horrifying aliens? Or they didn’t get abandoned up there, away from the only home they know? Or they didn’t leave behind a bunch of video depicting their last days alive? Wouldn’t that be just the tops?

Well, probably not in terms of pure entertainment value, but it would certainly be a different take on the tired space exploration genre. However, based purely on the pull quotes in this first full-length trailer for Sebastian Cordero’s Europa Report, the space-exploration-gone-horribly-awry trope might still have some fresh moonrock to mine, and this feature just might do it. Starring Michael Nyqvist, Sharlto Copley, and Daniel Wu, the film centers on a private mission to Jupiter’s fourth moon (Europa) and apparently a whole bunch of bad stuff that goes down once the crew touches down and starts work. You know how it is.

So what happens up there? Oh, we don’t know, but check out the first full trailer for Europa Report after the break to get a tiny idea of what might await us in space.

Europa Report will be available on VOD and iTunes on June 27th, with a theatrical release kicking off on August 2nd.

Why Watch? We’ve been at Cannes since Wednesday, we’ll be there through next week, and we’ll continue to highlight short films that have played near the Mediterranean shore through then.

In 2009, this short from Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland won a Special Distinction, and it’s easy to see why. With a subtle somberness that lets the danger of being 8 years old ring true, this story of a young boy who has to stand up to his bullies is fierce and also beautifully shot.

What Will It Cost? About 15 minutes.

Keep Watching Short Films

It starts like any other love story – there is dancing and music and laughter and secrets and plans – but no matter how it might look at first blush, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha isn’t a film about a pair of twentysomethings falling in and out of love in New York City, it’s a film about a pair of twentysomethings falling in and out of friendship in New York City. The result is something far more rich and rewarding than the vast majority of wide release, standard issue romantic comedies, and perhaps star Greta Gerwig‘s most charming performance yet.

When it comes to romance, Frances (Gerwig) isn’t so concerned with finding a boyfriend, since she’s quite perfectly happy with her life as is, because even though it includes a potentially dead-end career (she’s a modern dancer who can’t really dance), it also includes her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner). Well, for now. Most love stories do, after all, end. When Sophie unceremoniously (and seemingly unfeelingly) moves out on Frances in favor of a better apartment in a better zip code, the divide between the pair seems clearer than ever. Sophie has matured beyond Frances, at least in a traditional sense, and Sophie’s allegiances now lay with her boyfriend Patch (yes, Patch) and her blossoming career in publishing (though Frances never fails to remind people that Sophie doesn’t even really read). Her friendship with Sophie has served as the defining relationship in Frances’ current life, and when she is “dumped” (even Frances explains it to people as such) by the person who has filled the soulmate slot for so long, Frances’ entire life is thrown into turmoil and upheaval.

It may all sound a bit insufferable (and, yes, a bit like Girls or any other number of features or shows about twentysomething gals in the big city), but Frances Ha has one hell of an ace up its sleeve in the form of the ceaselessly lovely and unrelentingly engaging Gerwig.

Gerwig’s success as Frances is doubtless (at least partially) due to her co-writing credit (along with Baumbach) on the film, as the infectiously delightful exuberance of Frances that nearly vibrates off the screen is clearly tailor-made for the actress. Frances may be a bit lost and a bit of a loser, but she’s also so fully herself, such a hugely satisfying presence, that her personal journey cannot help but be totally engaging. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Baumbach and Gerwig have eschewed traditional genre tropes for Frances Ha – there’s never going to be some random hot dude who comes along just to “save” Frances but, more importantly, there doesn’t need to be – and have instead focused on the intense pleasure and pain of deep friendships, the kind that are profound enough and important enough to supersede romantic dalliances.

Frances bounces between residences and friendships in search of a home to fill the void left by Sophie (who flits back into and then again out of Frances’ life with an aching regularity), moving from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Sacramento to her former college and back, with a hilariously heartbreaking stopover in Paris along the way. Frequently waylaid, continuously struck down, Frances never loses her charm, positivity, and warmth, and it’s nothing short of joyful to watch Gerwig on screen (even when she’s making a total ass out of herself, which happens more often than you’d likely expect).

The plot of Frances Ha might prove simple, but the character of Frances herself is a wonderfully realistic and fully realized one, and that’s what makes the entire film just so damn satisfying and delightful to watch. Frances Ha is essentially a one-woman show, but Gerwig is more than up for the task, and her work here is some of her finest and most feeling yet.

The Upside: A warm and infectiously lovely performance from Gerwig, an extremely funny and real storyline, exuberantly filmed (did we fail to mention that the film is in black and white? we must have forgotten the lack of color, and you will, too).

The Downside: The film may have limited appeal to audiences of a certain age (your dad might not like this one), needs more Adam Driver.

On the Side: The film very well could have been called just Frances, but Baumbach and Gerwig didn’t want to step on the toes of the other Frances film (a courtesy that they wish that other Kicking and Screaming extended to them).

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen drunk Morgan Freeman. The actor has been having a lot of fun lately with his roles, but none of them compare to whatever is going on in Last Vegas.

In fact, as Old Dogs Meets The Hangover as it sounds, the trailer for this movie starring Michael Douglas, Kevin Kline, Robert De Niro and Freeman actually makes it look like a bit of harmless fun. Probably not a lot of fun, but fun. Of course, it also looks like a vacation for wealthy actors and director Jon Turtletaub.

This is what retirement looks like for living legends. Broad humor, twenty-something eye candy and fruity drinks. Oh, and they probably made a movie somewhere in there.

Check out the trailer for yourself:

Douglas is obviously Bradley Cooper, but I can’t quite match up the rest.

Last Vegas is in theaters November 1st.

Source: Yahoo!