Theatrical Reviews »

We're told at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats that "more of this is true than you would believe." But the story of the U.S. Army's attempts to harness psychic powers to create super-soldiers is so bizarre it almost HAS to be true, in accordance with the "how could anyone make this up?" principle. In fact, I believe more of this admittedly fictionalized story than I do of The Fourth Kind, which claims to be 100 percent true. Surely there's a lesson in there.

Based on Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, The Men Who Stare at Goats stars Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a journalist covering the Iraq War in 2003. Bob meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a private contractor with an unusual past: He claims to have worked for the government as a psychic spy. Bob once met a man, back home in Michigan (played by Stephen Root), who made the same claims, and who named Lyn Cassady as one of his colleagues.

You can see why the military would be interested in psychic spying. Surveillance is a lot less dangerous when you can do it entirely with your mind, rather than having to actually sneak up and eavesdrop on people. And if we could harness things like telekinesis, well, forget about it! We'd beat the Russkies for sure!

By Eric D. Snider (reprint from 1/19/09 -- Sundance Film Festival)

The premise of Precious is so unsettling and bleak that no one would blame you if you didn't want to see it: It's the story of an obese 16-year-old illiterate Harlem girl who's pregnant (for the second time) by her own father, lives with her monstrously abusive mother, and has almost given up on life. But if you do see it, you'll find that it's compelling and artistic, punctuated with warm humor and masterful performances, and ultimately triumphant and hopeful.

The girl is named Claireece "Precious" Jones (she goes by Precious), and she's played with astonishing rawness by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe. Narrating the film, Precious tells us the grim facts. Beyond the ones already noted, she is still in junior high school (where she's dumbly in love with her kindly math teacher); her first child, born with Down syndrome, is technically in her mother's custody but is actually cared for by her grandmother; and her mother, Mary (Mo'Nique), is a welfare-absorbing harridan who abuses Precious in every possible way, hating her daughter for "stealing" her man. Precious did no such thing, of course -- she was raped by her father -- but Mary is not interested in details.

Precious is directed by her principal to an alternative school called Each One Teach One. Her class is populated by other girls who dropped out or were kicked out of public schools for various reasons; it's telling that even in such a motley group, Precious is still the most timid, the most withdrawn, and the most messed-up. The teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), is dedicated to her work, perhaps the first adult to ever take a genuine interest in helping Precious. The other students might be Precious' first friends, too.

Richard Matheson's original short story, "Button, Button," was a nifty little morality tale about a couple faced with a peculiar opportunity -- if they push a button in a box, they'll get a sum of money but kill a stranger in doing so. That version of the story ended with the wife pushing the button and killing her husband, a man she didn't really know. As an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in 1986, the story ended with the couple paid off and assured that the device would then go to another couple to whom they qualify as strangers. Now, Richard Kelly's The Box takes that same basic premise and spins it into a mind-bender of the most baffling degree, starting out as another "Twilight Zone"-worthy variant but eventually reaching the outer limits of both patience and reason.

By Todd Gilchrist (reprint from 10/28/09 -- L.A. Screamfest)

I'm not sure exactly what quality it is that real people possess and actors lack, but any time a film pretends to document real behavior, either literally or as a reenactment, something is almost always missing. Sometimes the problem is a deliberate decision to enhance events with artificial emphasis or drama, and sometimes it's simply too great a sense of self-awareness in the actor, who knows he or she is performing. But while there are a precious few movies that nail that authenticity, notably the recent underdog-blockbuster Paranormal Activity, such is certainly the case in The Fourth Kind, a film that purports to build an argument for alien abductions using "actual" footage from case studies.

While much of the movie's so-called source material carries the convincing roughness and deficiencies of homemade, handheld recording, too much of it seems far too calculated, both in its technical proficiency and the performances contributed by its "real" people. Further, its accompanying reenactments by recognizable actors undermine the possibility that audiences can take its case seriously, all of which adds up to thriller that unravels easily even if it nevertheless occasionally qualifies as a scary good time.

The fear many of us had when it was announced Jim Carrey would play Ebenezer Scrooge and other parts in Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of A Christmas Carol was that Carrey's clowning would turn the story into a goofy farce. This fear turns out to have been unfounded. If anything, the opposite is true: The film has no personality at all, not Carrey's or anyone else's.

Charles Dickens' holiday classic has already been adapted for movies and TV dozens of times, but Zemeckis noticed something peculiar: Somehow, none of the previous incarnations had managed to be in 3-D! He sought to rectify this oversight with that newfangled motion-capture technology he's been so excited about the last several years, where actors' movements are translated into animation. The Polar Express and Beowulf demonstrated that for as neat-o as the technology is for action scenes, characters' faces -- especially their eyes -- look dead and soulless. Some improvement has been made in that respect, but most of the people in A Christmas Carol still look like creepy robots.

It's not uncommon to hear people discussing -- or complaining about -- the ways in which Hollywood celebrities are involved in politics, whether they're airing their opinions during a concert or speaking in public on behalf of a politician. Barry Levinson (Diner, Good Morning Vietnam) thought this was an interesting enough topic to address in his documentary Poliwood, which focuses on the 2008 national Democratic and Republican conventions. Unfortunately, the documentary shows us little that we haven't already seen, and tends to preach to the converted.

Poliwood is subtitled "a Barry Levinson film essay," which signals us that this will be a more personal style of documentary. Levinson opens the movie with shots from his 1990 feature film Avalon and uses this footage to discuss the ways American lives have changed because of television. His focus is on the Creative Coalition, a non-partisan organization of celebrities that focuses on issues such as arts education. The documentary shifts to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Creative Coalition members such as Anne Hathaway, Tim Daly, and Ellen Burstyn talk about how they include politics in their lives. It's especially surreal to see Richard Schiff at the convention after his role on The West Wing -- in one scene, someone from the Clinton administration walks up to him and says "You played me!" -- but Schiff handles it all with good humor.

By Peter Hall (reprinted from 9/28/09 -- Fantastic Fest review)

Quirkiness only carries so far. Napoleon Dynamite, the film that ushered in the career of Gentlemen Broncos director Jared Hess, is enjoyable because it cherishes the nervous twitches of puberty, identity crisis, and the weird kind of people who worship at Walmart strip malls. The director embraced his small-town roots to assemble a film in love with those who don't have any station in life, who have no big conflict in their mundane lives, and who have no particularly interesting story to tell, either. Hess' latest film, on the other hand, does have an interesting story to tell and it does have a three-act conventional conflict, but it barrels past being quirky into the weird-for-weird's-sake hinterland of comedy where subtlety is abolished in favor of broad, hit-and-miss gags.

Gentlemen Broncos could have been great. It's about a teenage boy (Michael Angarano) whose fantasy novel featuring an underdog hero on a nonsensical planet (Sam Rockwell) is stolen by not only his washed-up hero author (Jemaine Clement) at a crash-course writing camp, but two insufferable "friends" who want to turn the story into their cinematic gateway to Hollywood. The film often wanders out of the real-world of poor Benjamin's unenviable life and into the entertaining fantasy world of his childish writings, but for the most part it feels as directionless as the confused boy we're supposed to be rooting for.

By Eric D. Snider (reprint from 5/3/2009 -- Tribeca Film Festival)

The House of the Devil is a great name for a movie. It hearkens back to the days of grindhouse horror, when a film's title and its trailer told you basically everything you needed to know. Yet it's different from those movies, too, in that it prefers slow-building tension over frequent bloodletting and mayhem. You have to wait for "The House of the Devil" to deliver on its promises -- but when it does, holy crap. I know that isn't a very scholarly analysis, but seriously. Holy crap.

The film is set in the early 1980s, apparently, with appropriately synthesized rock on the soundtrack and lots of freeze-frames in the opening credits. Our perky young heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), is a college student who's sick of living in the dorms and is preparing to move into an apartment with her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig). Eager to earn some money to facilitate the move, Samantha responds to a flier posted on a campus bulletin board looking for a babysitter. Rather suspiciously (to me, anyway), the flier is blank except for a phone number and the words "BABYSITTER WANTED."

The clients are the Ulmans -- Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan) is a tall, gentle-voiced man who uses a walking stick; his wife (Mary Woronov) is old-school sophisticated, a woman whose evening wear requires fur. Samantha learns when she arrives at the house -- a huge old isolated place, I needn't tell you -- that the babysitting duties will be slightly different from the norm, but it's not a deal-breaker. And the Ulmans are offering a lot of money.

The first thing everyone seems to mention about Serious Moonlight is that its screenplay is the last one written by the late Adrienne Shelly. Actress Cheryl Hines, who had a role in Shelly's film Waitress, is making her feature directorial debut with the dark comedy, which stars Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton. The movie opened Austin Film Festival this year. It sounds like a sure-fire comedy, but unfortunately it just left me with a headache.

Serious Moonlight focuses on a married couple, Louise (Meg Ryan) and Ian (Timothy Hutton), who are supposed to meet in their country house for a rendezvous, but both arrive a day early. Louise wants to surprise her husband, but finds out that he also has a surprise: he's leaving her. She refuses to accept this, and ends up cracking him on the head with a vase, binding him with duct tape, and refusing to let him loose until he comes to his senses and realizes how much he loves her and wants to stay with her.

I'm not sure exactly what quality it is that real people possess and actors lack, but any time a film pretends to document real behavior, either literally or as a reenactment, something is almost always missing. Sometimes the problem is a deliberate decision to enhance events with artificial emphasis or drama, and sometimes it's simply too great a sense of self-awareness in the actor, who knows he or she is performing. But while there are a precious few movies that nail that authenticity, notably the recent underdog-blockbuster Paranormal Activity, such is certainly the case in The Fourth Kind, a film that purports to build an argument for alien abductions using "actual" footage from case studies.

While much of the movie's so-called source material carries the convincing roughness and deficiencies of homemade, handheld recording, too much of it seems far too calculated, both in its technical proficiency and the performances contributed by its "real" people. Further, its accompanying reenactments by recognizable actors undermine the possibility that audiences can take its case seriously, all of which adds up to thriller that unravels easily even if it nevertheless occasionally qualifies as a scary good time.