Guru

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***½

The former skateboarder and director of the intriguing Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), Stacy Peralta, returns with Crips and Bloods: Made in America, a surprisingly powerful, moving new documentary. Like Roger Corman spending time with the Hell's Angels in the 1960s, Peralta has descended into the most dangerous neighborhoods of Los Angeles to interview various gang members. Though most outsiders have a tendency to believe that these gangsters are responsible for their own dark fates, Peralta outlines a history of black America over the past century, pinpointing just how certain simple agendas trapped them in certain neighborhoods and began breeding anger, hatred and violence. (The film's subtitle is crucial here.)

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): **½

On the surface of it, In the Realm of the Senses seems a perfect failure as a pornographic film -- and it is about as pornographic as any mainstream porno in terms of what is shown (it is still censored in Japan). But Nagisa Oshima has other things in mind, although I suspect that viewers unfamiliar with Oshima's work will be hard pressed to say exactly what those things might be.

As I mentioned in my review of Empire of the Senses, Oshima is a filmmaker who considers sexual transgression to be political transgression. Now, the ways in which individuals live their lives, including their sexual proclivities and identities, can indeed have political implications, as anyone following recent developments in marriage laws in the United States knows. But to Oshima, all sexual transgression, including the violent and murdurous kind, is merely a tragic reaction to social repression.

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ****

Fritz Lang loved to tell the story about how, in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler summoned him for a meeting. The Fuhrer had seen Lang's Metropolis and wanted Lang to be an official Reich filmmaker. Lang said, "Sure," and then proceeded to flee the country, not even stopping to clean out his bank account. A few years later, in Hollywood, Lang had a small chance to set the record straight with the excellent thriller Man Hunt.

Reviewer: Andrew Wright
Rating (out of 5): ***

Even the brashest of screenwriters might have trouble selling a studio on the character arc of Clint Eastwood as a fictional character. To wit: Guy becomes famous as tight-lipped bullet dispenser; moves on to self-aware, awesomely sideburned buddy of orangutans; settles, finally, on being a Grand Old Master of American Cinema. Out-and-out masterpieces like Unforgiven and Letters From Iwo Jima aside, what makes Eastwood's output as a filmmaker so fascinating is the way that his different eras tend to come unstuck and swagger into each others' respective turf: even in his most restrained films, there comes the occasional jarring reminder -- Hilary Swank's Lil' Abner relatives in Million Dollar Baby, Tim Robbins barking at the moon in the otherwise magisterial Mystic River -- that, yes, this is also the man behind such barn-broad dillies as Pink Cadillac and The Rookie.

Gran Torino, purportedly Eastwood's final time in front of the camera (and his second film of 2008, following the rather turgid Changeling) is the damndest thing: an elegiac treatise on race, aging, and manhood that keeps rearing up and going full-tilt cartoonishly loco. Featuring no small number of creaky plot contrivances and enough racial invectives to make Redd Foxx blanch, it's the most purely entertaining film that Eastwood has been involved with since In the Line of Fire. That it also manages to be ultimately rather moving may stand as the best testament yet to The Man's considerable skill set.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

Scott Walker: 30 Century Man provides intimate insight into the world that surrounds a charismatic but elusive artist. Even to people who don't quite understand the appeal of Walker's music, it's quite fascinating that he can compel people to follow him despite having an overall vision that is never abundantly clear -- sometimes even in the final product.

Reviewer: Amy Monaghan
Rating (out of 5): **

Originally slated for a 2008 release, “broad” “comedy” Spring Breakdown deservedly sat on the shelf, screened only once (Sundance 2009), and then went straight to DVD. Breakdown is a letdown because it’s a missed opportunity. The spring-break genre flick remains ripe for the type of surgical skewering this cast is capable of.

Christopher Guest regular/indie It girl Parker Posey, Amy Poehler, and cowriter (with director Ryan Shiraki) Rachel Dratch play three dowdy single gals who’ve been pals since college. Becky (Posey) is a meek cat lady, Judi (Dratch) is engaged to the terminally fey William (lisped by Saturday Night Live’s Seth Myers), and Gayle (Poehler) was just turned down by a blind client (real-life husband Will Arnett in a cameo) at her dog-training school.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½

When you think about it, Killshot has a most impressive roster of names attached: Award-winning director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), based on the novel by Elmore Leonard (who also executive-produced), a guy who knows his way around crime, thrills and black humor. The movie stars Diane Lane and Thomas Jane (neither of whom seem to have ever given a bad performance) and the newly resuscitated Mickey Rourke, plus a supporting cast that includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt (giving one of the scariest performances on record – right up there with Richard Widmark's in Kiss of Death), Rosario Dawson, Lois Smith and Hal Holbrook. Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel. Production design: Andrew Jackness (Big Night). On and on go the renowned names. But while the movie is certainly not bad, it's utterly second-hand.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Note: This review contains spoilers for Skins, Series 1.

Series 1 of the BBC teen dramedy Skins [reviewed here] ended with the shocking cliffhanger in which its charming scoundrel protagonist Tony (Nicholas Hoult) was hit by a speeding bus. The event was shocking mostly because the first season of the show was structured and executed like a prim character study. The doggedly plotless pacing would have been agonizing had it not been inhabited by characters that were the most depraved, drug-addled set of teenagers ever depicted on television.

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): ****

Straightforward, unpretentious, and insightful, Doris Dörrie's Cherry Blossoms is the sort of movie I've longed to see after what often seemed an interminable parade of drek. Anyone recently subjected to the trailer for the new "Transformers" marketing opportunity (some still prefer to call them movies) and its relentless onslaught of whizzes and bangs, not to mention its lurid hotwheels color palette, surely knows what I'm talking about. But even some "serious" filmmakers seem out to get the audience, to measure their worth in how much they can make us squirm with existential dread, or get stuck in moral impasses, or cry our eyes out, or question the very basis of our civilization. Whatever the excuses, too many films feel designed to shake us up and slap us around. Meanwhile, a film like Cherry Blossoms can make you feel human again.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***½

A young man, Eun-Soo, drives on a lonely forest highway while having an argument via cell phone with his girlfriend. This leads to what could serve as the greatest PSA warning about the dangers of talking on a cell phone while driving: his loses control of the car just long enough to swerve and flip over a ditch. In his dazed, bloodied state he wanders into a forest before passing out with a concussion. When Eun-Soo (Jeong-myeong Cheon) wakes, he's pleased to see a young girl -- wearing a little red riding hood, natch -- has found him. She offers to lead the dazed man back to her home, which welcomes him with a sign reading "Home for Happy Children" -- a good indicator that things are just not going to go well here. It's a house not made of gingerbread but seemingly too good to be true... And that's just the first few minutes of Hansel and Gretel, director Yim Phil-sung's (Antarctic Journal) memorably dark fable inspired by, but also transposing, the titular Grimm fairy tale.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **½

Inkheart is more or less a distant second cousin to The Princess Bride (1987); they're both based on fantasy books for young people and reading is a part of their plots, but that's about where the comparison stops. Whereas The Princess Bride is warmly crisp and unerringly funny and breathlessly romantic, Inkheart is a jagged, irritating mess. If the goal of a fantasy is to invite a viewer into a unique and imaginative new world, then Inkheart forgot to send out invitations.

Reviewer: Jeffrey Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

Despite some brilliant performances from its three female leads, Daniel Barnz's Phoebe in Wonderland is an off-putting, misguided disease-of-the-week picture that tries to disguise itself as something else before finally coming clean. Elle Fanning plays the Phoebe of the title. She's the child of two brilliant parents, both writers. Her father (Bill Pullman) is putting the finishing touches on a book that will be published by a scholarly press. Her mother (Felicity Huffman) has been working on a study of "Alice in Wonderland," but never finds the time to write. Phoebe also has a sister (Bailee Madison) who complains that Phoebe gets all the attention--and she's right, because this sister never really makes much of a mark on the film.

Reviewer: Aaron Hillis
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"Love is preposterous and a lie. That doesn't mean it's a lie to you. In other words, you may think you're in love with another person, but really, what you love about that person tends to be what you project upon that person, and what you love in them that you feel you lack yourself."- James Gray

What a curious title, Two Lovers. Like the movie itself and the believably grown-up affairs it depicts, that surface simplicity has multiple meanings, could be a basis for allegory, and mines rich if devastating emotion out of its ambiguities. Just try to forget for a moment that star Joaquin Phoenix is quickly becoming an eccentric performance artist of the Andy Kaufman variety in real life, and cherish what he claims will be his last film: a fantastic, sumptuously lit and shot melodrama of overlapping, shaky love triangles that is mature like nothing else yet on screens this year.