Guru

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

Over the decades a minor sub-genre has emerged in science fiction. As far as I know it has no name, so I hereby dub it the "Diplomatic Alien" genre. As opposed to the more familiar and numerous alien invasion stories, where mighty alien races appear without warning and proceed to wreak unprecedented mayhem (War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Mars Attacks, etc.), there has been another, much more interesting strain of alien invasion films which may have begun with The Day the Earth Stood Still. In these stories the aliens come to negotiate, and naturally this sets the stage for all sorts of interesting social and political commentary. The TV spin-off Torchwood: Children of Earth, while not without flaws, is still a welcome addition to this genre.

I won't give many more details about the plot, because Children of Earth does manage to be very suspenseful. All you really need to know is that something is on its way to have a chat with us humans, and it doesn't appear friendly. I will say that Children of Earth is quite brilliant at drawing out the very fundamental social issues at stake when the aliens finally arrive.

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ****

Japanese director and avant-garde poet Sion Sono has a reputation for making controversial and provocative films with a goofy touch (for example, one of his less well-received films is a horror flick about cursed hair extensions). Hazard is the first film of his that I've seen, and I found it playfully transgressive and hilarious, entertaining all the way through, if also a little too long.

The storyline is equal parts gritty coming-of-age story, noirish crime spree, absurdist theater, buddy film, and meditation on being a young male in the naked (New York) city; it features a lot of armed robbery, gunfights, rhapsodic talk, pointless killing, a bad cop who gets axed (literally), a shootout in a Chinatown mafia den, and many, many gallons of speed-laced ice cream. However, it's safe for those with weak stomachs: although the packaging plays the film up as a Tarantino-style splatterfest, the bloodshed here is mostly notional, in classic low-budget style. When the blanks go off, the 'victims' double over and fall out of the shot, and that's the last we see of them.

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

Protesting government policies in 1940 Japan is something you don’t see covered all that often in film. Given Japan’s history as a people both sheep-like (to be fair, most citizenry is) but also ruled by a keen sense of shame, I suspect that this kind of protest did not occur all that frequently. Pressure on the Japanese people to follow the prescribed path is always enormous. In Kabei: Our Mother, the wonderful director Yôji Yamada (The Hidden Blade, The Twilight Samurai) tackles a very different kind of film: a quiet family saga full of love, pain, hope and sadness. Time has lent enough distance and perspective that we can now watch a film about a WWII Japanese family and experience it from their viewpoint and shared humanity.

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

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal technically directed Trouble the Water, the Oscar-nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the massive destruction it wreaked in 2005, but the real center of the film comes from local couple Kimberly and Scott Roberts, who captured the arrival of the storm on their store-bought video camera. We get a real grasp of the disaster from a ground level; we can finally understand just how fast the water rose, and just how difficult it was to keep one's head above it. Kimberly and Scott retreated to their attic as the waters rose up through the first floor of their home, and their untrained camerawork captures the terror and claustrophobia of that time.

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

At one point in the first ten minutes of Crank 2: High Voltage, Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) wakes up, leans forward and watches incredulously as someone performs heart surgery on him. Rather than being shocked, or racked with pain, he merely looks annoyed. Later in that same scene, a guy drops cigarette ashes into Chev's chest cavity. Does any of this stop him from being a super-badass-adrenaline-machine? Not on your life.

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

Directed by Alexander Korda, 1941's That Hamilton Woman is sometimes gorgeous and beautifully ornate, but very often stiff and dull -- especially, oddly enough, in its battle-at-sea scenes. It was partly made to rouse American and British audiences into supporting WWII, and in that regard it has dated badly. But the movie has an odd cult appeal that has endured.

Vivien Leigh, at her most stunningly gorgeous -- in black and white no less -- stars as Emma, who begins life as a lower-class nothing on the grim streets of London. She becomes engaged to the son of an ambassador but discovers that her betrothed is deeply in debt and has "given" her to his father, Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray), a collector of beautiful things. They marry and she becomes "Lady Hamilton." She begins to enjoy her social life, until a bedraggled soldier, Lord Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) happens into her palatial home, asking for aid in the war against Napoleon. Her husband hems and haws, but Lady Hamilton uses her friendship with the Queen of Naples to get Lord Nelson what he needs without delay. From there, the married Lord Nelson and the married Lady Hamilton slowly form a passionate, centuries-spanning, heartbreaking illicit romance to end all romances.

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

Only the sixth of some 65 film performances credited to master British actor Alec Guinness, Last Holiday doesn't rate among his most popular. Our knowledge of the film's existence probably came to the fore most keenly when Queen Latifah and Gerard Depardieu starred in a simple-minded remake in 2006. A comparison of the two films once again contrasts British reserve and subtlety with the American feel-good-at-all-cost sensibility. If you missed the remake, no worries, but thanks to this new DVD from Criterion's Essential Art House collection, it's time to appreciate the original.

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

Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) was a great liberal/progressive, a smart man and a terrific writer of letters, if not screenplays (have you seen Johnny Got His Gun or The Sandpiper lately?). Yes, he won two Oscars -- for story (Roman Holiday in 1953) and screenplay (The Brave One in 1956) -- under pseudonyms, as he was blacklisted during these years. For the most part, however, he was a journeyman screenwriter, always competent and sometimes more than that. What he is most noted for now, and what the fine documentary Trumbo brings home so clearly, is his character and his unusual ability and courage in speaking truth to power and then paying for it.

Directed by Peter Askin (Company Man) and written by Trumbo's son Christopher (adapted from his own play, which Askin has opened up and out extremely well), the documentary tracks Dalton Trumbo before, during and after the infamous Blacklist that destroyed so many fine lives both in and out of the movie industry. (As ever, we seem to hear most about Hollywood and the Blacklist, but the House Un-American Activities Committee went after "Reds" in every area from science and government to arts and entertainment.)

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

Jody Hill's Observe and Report is a tough nut to crack about a tough nut who cracks. The dark, dark comedy, which Hill wrote and directed, is a more subversive take on the bedraggled mall cop comedy than patrons watching it (ironically) in mall multiplexes probably expected, so it's little surprise it wasn't a huge box office hit. But because Observe is more challenging, in both good and bad ways, it's far more interesting because of it.

Seth Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a mall security guard with delusions of grandeur who becomes obsessed with a serial flasher accosting unsuspecting mall patrons. Ronnie is also quite taken with an airheaded, self-involved cosmetics counter girl (played unforgettably by Anna Faris, who does this better than anyone these days), seeing himself as her knight in shining armor after she is traumatized from a run-in with the flasher (Randy Gambill, now a Jody Hill regular). From there, Ronnie has to work with -- or more accurately around -- a policeman (Ray Liotta) assigned to the case, as well as deal with his own personal demons the whole case brings out of him.

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

Each year there are a handful of new "coming of age" movies, and they all seem based more on memories of movies than on memories of life. But So Yong Kim's new Treeless Mountain, from South Korea, takes extraordinary steps to climb out of that rut and place these movies back into the eyes of children. Her simple technique is to film her heroines, six-year-old Jin (Hee-Yeon Kim) and four-year-old Bin (Song-Hee Kim), mainly in close-up. The adult world is cut off, forever just outside the frame, out of reach and beyond understanding. These adults behave strangely and often badly, but we -- like the girls -- have no idea why.

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

When in a state of terror, the brain begins to develop a series of processes to cope with the brutality. Watching a film as bad as Good Dick, I find myself first desperately clinging to hope, trying to find potential in any nook or cranny. Then the monotonous boredom reaches a near Zen-like state as my spirit begins to let go of any concept of there being a beginning or an end, a passive acceptance that what is happening merely is. Eventually, what breaks down the inner Bodhisattva is a profound sense of sorrow that there was a person whose mind generated not only these ideas, but wrote them down, and communicated them to the outside world.

Good Dick is the story of the unlikely romance between two people simply credited as "Man" (Jason Ritter) and "Woman" (Marianna Palka). He is homeless and she is borderline agoraphobic. Once a week, they meet at the video store where he works and she occasionally rents pornography. They have awkward exchanges about her film choices and through the power of terrible movie magic and even worse screenwriting, this all somehow leads to a profound emotional connection that baffles both his friends and any viewer. Man and Woman move in together and proceed to do and say horrible things to each other. Their cruelty is punctuated by long, boring scenes that could possibly be interpreted as happiness, but feel, to the audience, about as pleasurable as having a car door slammed repeatedly on your hand.

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

2008 seems to have been the year the British discovered that they, too, could do torture porn a la Hostel and Saw. And maybe do it a tad better in some ways: lower budgets and more primeval plots that are less fussy and set-piece-heavy – and subtler, too. That year saw the release of both the award-winning Eden Lake and the lesser-known Mum & Dad. The latter, released to DVD a few months back, is written and directed by Steven Sheil, whose first full-length film this is (he's made but one eight-minute horror short previously, though he did work as cinematographer on a handful of films). The movie is very well cast with an ensemble of just five major players, three small supporting parts and a few walk-ons.

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): **

My wife walked into the room and sat down while I was watching this indie dramedy period piece about a suburban family falling apart and said, "Oh, good, I love The Ice Storm." And I do, too. I can still remember the fullness of the world that Ang Lee created in that indie dramedy period piece about a suburban family falling apart through.

Alas, Lymelife is not that movie.

Lymelife so closely hews to The Ice Storm that one wonders if it came about in a parallel universe where Lee's film was a runaway hit and some savvy studio exec gave the green light to all 70's-era coming of age stories with families torn asunder by self-centered, adulterous parents.