So what would an alien invasion film directed by Terrence Malick look like? It initially seems like Monsters, the elliptical, no-bucks debut of British writer/director/effects guru Gareth Edwards, might offer a persuasive hypothetical answer. Instead the film is more credible as a sort of cinematic emergency drill: This is what might happen if a Terrence Malick film were invaded by an Ed Wood movie mellowed out on some powerful 'ludes.
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A smart, sophisticated songsmith in the tradition of Cole Porter, or an inscrutable, pretentious twit? In the course of his near-20-year career, Stephin Merritt -- the sort-of frontperson for the indie-rock collective Magnetic Fields -- has been considered both. And after watching Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara's documentary Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, you may still think he's a little of both, and that's OK. Strange Powers is a relaxed, enjoyable little documentary whose central figure emerges as a figure rendered in half-precise, half-diffuse pointillist dots: By the end, he's more charming and less self-serious than he seemed at the beginning, but he still escapes with much of his mystery intact.
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Part mythical creature, part Dolly Parton monolith, the title character of Jolene never emerges from the figurative, or otherwise manages to be fully one thing. Literary heroine might have been a start, considering her origins as the central character in a 2004 E.L. Doctorow story, but Jolene (played here by the soon-to-be ubiquitous Jessica Chastain; the story was adapted for the screen by fellow first-timer Dennis Yares) lacks the dimension and emotional depth required to turn a series of hard luck vignettes into an involving picaresque. The film surrounding her is similarly inconsistent in its vision, direction, and offer of persuasive reasons for tagging along.
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Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's Amer is an homage to '70s giallo, a riff on erotic slasher-horror movies made by the likes of Mario "Twitch of the Death Nerve" Bava and Sergio "Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key" Martino -- not to mention, of course, those made by the genre's maestro, Dario Argento.
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Oren Peli's 2007 lo-fi horror megahit Paranormal Activity was a pleasing enough combination of clever and silly: A phony video document of a young couple's efforts to get acquainted with the "demon" that haunts their midst -- invisibly opening doors, turning lights off and on, and making rumbly middle-of-the-night noises -- Paranormal Activity had its share of oblique, creepy moments, even if the ultimate effect was about as haunting as a demon burp. Still, Peli understood the advantages of suggesting horrors rather than showing them outright. The scariest things in Paranormal Activity are the things you don't see.
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If it's possible to make a completely gentle movie about boxing, Frederick Wiseman has done just that with Boxing Gym. This is hardly one of the world's -- or, for that matter, one of Wiseman's -- most earth-shattering documentaries. It's really just a moving-image snapshot of a particular world, Lord's Gym, in Austin, Tex., a laid-back joint where people who love boxing -- from kids and adult beginners to professionals -- congregate to hit the heavy bag and shoot the breeze, though not necessarily in that order.
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Americans find foreign places scary and believe dying and/or missing children to be the height of human tragedy. The above opinions are widely held in Iceland, a generalization I feel liberated to make after watching Inhale, a public service announcement packaged as a big, frowny movie that operates from a series of tiresome presumptions about both its subject and its audience. Director Baltasar Kormakur (A Little Trip to Heaven, Jar City) hails from Iceland, but was apparently weaned on the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director who loves to make American characters choke on their privilege, ideally while their children hang in the balance.
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The singing comedian is a rarefied niche, not much seen since the last days of vaudeville and the decline of the candy-gram. The potential flipside of nichehood, however, is that if there is an audience out there -- or if one can be created -- it is being hopelessly underserved. They Might Be Giants and Flight of the Conchords have helped keep the form alive, and in Punching the Clown Henry Phillips does his bit, playing his deadpan folk tunes about stone-cold bitches and privileged poverty on the coffee house circuit, entertaining America one incredulous micro-batch at a time.
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J.R. Ackerley's slim, beautifully observed memoir My Dog Tulip is often called one of the finest works about a dog ever written, though Truman Capote came closer when he called it "One of the greatest books ever written by anybody in the world." Those who love the book might have reason to be wary of an animated adaptation of it. But Paul and Sandra Fierlinger's My Dog Tulip -- which opens in Los Angeles this Friday, with other cities to follow -- is a double rarity: An adaptation that wholly and faithfully captures the spirit and mood of the book it's based on, and an example of computer animation -- the 2-D sort -- that shows the human touch in every frame.
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There really is no reason for Jackass 3D to be in 3-D. Then again, there really is no reason for Jackass 3D to even exist, since we probably don't need to see grown men, often dressed in their scanties, execute death-defying and/or genuinely dumb stunts with snappy names like "Beehive Tetherball," "Sweatsuit Cocktail" and "Lamborghini Toothpull." We don't need to see them kicked in the nuts by pissed-off donkeys, tossed into the air by bucking bulls, or play the trumpet through their asses.
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It's a tricky feat, channeling the glamour of a famous international terrorist without glamorizing him. But damned if French filmmaker Olivier Assayas doesn't pull it off with Carlos, his epic and highly entertaining portrait of Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan-born, pro-Palestinian, anti-Imperialist, Japanese Red Army-affiliated celebuterrorist of the '70s and '80s.
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On paper Conviction, the true story of a young man wrongly imprisoned for murder and his sister's 18-year quest to set him free, can't really lose. Director Tony Goldwyn was drawn to the story after his wife spotted it in the papers in 2001; he spent several years developing a film version, bringing on Pamela Gray (Music of the Heart) as screenwriter, Hilary Swank as his star and executive producer, Sin Nombre DP Adriano Goldman and an enviable cast of supporting players. It feels especially unfortunate, considering the firepower Goldwyn brought to the task, that the film's inspiration proved to be its biggest obstacle; the story is so bounteous that Goldwyn can't quite get a grip on it.
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A decadent action romp that isn't quite as fun as it should be, Red mixes high and low with a mad chemist's abandon. Although the picture invokes the popcorn pleasures of pulpy romance fiction, its muse is the world of comic books: Adapted from a graphic novel written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Cully Hamner, Red is given a hyper- and yet unimaginatively stylized treatment by director Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler's Wife). The kicker is in the casting: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Brian Cox and Helen Mirren all come out to play.
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In Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks' "2,000-Year-Old Man" routine, the aged one reflects on a long-ago time when he and his fellow villagers worshiped a local guy named Phil because, as scripture has it, "He was big, he was mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands." One day Phil was struck dead by a lightning bolt, prompting an epiphany among the locals: "There's something bigger than Phil." Hereafter is Clint Eastwood's "There's something bigger than Phil" movie: What happens after we die? Do we just dissolve into dust and that's the end of it? Or do we enter a corridor in which blurry figures murmur unintelligibly as they bump into one another?
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For a movie that's being touted as Wes Craven's first 3-D feature, My Soul to Take ought to be a lot more fun than it is. The problem isn't just that Craven offers the usual smorgasbord of a bunch of kids being stalked by a guy wearing a disguise and carrying a knife: There's probably still lots of queasy-comfortable pleasure left in that formula, depending on how a director tackles it. (Lord knows Craven has gotten enough mileage out of the Scream franchise.)
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