Wispy but sweet as spun sugar, The Secret World of Arrietty feels like a modest but exquisitely trimmed Japanese gift to fans of The Borrowers, British author Mary Norton’s classic children’s books. Having originated in Japan’s Studio Ghibli, home to animated films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the American version of Arrietty is its third translation; when Disney signed on it added a second director in seasoned sound designer Gary Rydstrom (the Japanese version is directed by Ghibli animator Hiromasa Yonebayashi). And yet the look and feel are unmistakable, adding anime flavor to a story so beloved in the West that the BBC took a crack at it with a live-action version just last year.
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Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them.
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The allegory-rich Chronicle opens with a kind of generational statement: “I bought a camera,” senior class punching bag Andrew (Dane DeHaan) says, “and I’m filming everything from here on out.” Andrew is talking to his father (Michael Kelly), a drunkard ex-fireman who punishes his son for the stress of caring for his dying wife, though the announcement is meant for us as well. Chronicle fits into the growing genre of “found footage” films, though that becomes just one formal element of many director Josh Trank meshes together to put a new spin on the subject of teenage alienation and its more extreme social side effects.
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The heroes and heroines of old-fashioned ghost-story flicks resemble the average horror fan more closely than any other of the genre’s archetypes. Amateur ghostbusters like The Innkeepers’s Claire (Sara Paxton), for instance, troll spooky hallways and scour dank basements for thrills, which is to say without the real threat of physical harm. We go to movies like The Innkeepers, Ti West’s follow-up to his delightful old-school creep-out The House of the Devil, to explore and experience fear from a similarly safe remove. Like the average horror fan, Claire can be her own worst enemy; on both sides of the screen, much depends on the question of whether one can be scared to death.
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South Korea’s 2012 contender for a foreign language Oscar feels more like a war movie than a movie about the Korean war, right up until its pitilessly bleak final frames. Though the American presence in that war is peripheral to its story, Hollywood clichés pervade The Front Line, from its slate and sepia tones to its stock company of characters and dialogue that translates macho posturing into present-day slang. And yet the movie has its startling moments, moments with the spark of specificity and the bitter clarity of perspective. Those stabs of the unexpected culminate in an ending that refuses to raise even the mildest or most melancholy flag of redemption.
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If horror movies have taught us anything, it’s that you can lead teenagers to a big red sign that reads “DON’T GO IN THE WOODS,” but you can’t make them not go in the woods anyway. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio nods to this and other slasher clichés in Don’t Go in the Woods, his feature directing debut -- that is, when he’s not nodding to clichés native to the musical and the old “star is born” storyline.
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The filmmaking in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's A Separation is so spare and unfussy that, save for the occasional camera jiggle, you're barely aware of the filmmaking at all. This is a drama about two families -- one deeply religious, one not -- who clash over an escalating series of misunderstandings, and the emotion Farhadi teases out of this increasingly complex situation are unvarnished but restrained. Nothing earth-shattering happens in A Separation, but the straightforwardness of this view of a disintegrating marriage, set in the context of complicated cultural and religious morés, is dramatic by itself.
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Movies with multiple intersecting storylines aren't exclusive to Los Angeles, but it's a city for which they seem ideally suited, perhaps because it's one in which incidental contact with the lives of strangers is less common and therefore more weighted with meaning. (Or maybe it's just that L.A. has such an abundance of screenwriters sitting in coffee shops projecting potential narratives on passers-by.) Out of disparate threads we're meant to draw common themes or emotional resonances, from Crash's "everyone's a little bit racist" to Magnolia's ideas about loneliness and coming to terms with the past. Answers to Nothing, written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler (Dead & Breakfast), follows a group of linked lost souls navigating personal obstacles against the backdrop of a missing neighborhood girl, as they all come to discover that it's OK to be an awful person, as long as you don't tell anyone about it.
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After the Shrek series used up its charm on rote third and fourth installments that nevertheless raked in giant piles of box office bullion, the prospect of a spin-off prequel focusing on Antonio Banderas' swashbuckling, footwear-sporting feline seemed as inevitable as it was unpromising. But Puss in Boots, directed by Chris Miller (who also helmed Shrek the Third) is a legitimately entertaining prequel that encapsulates what the franchise does best: Breezy action, clever twists on classic figures from fables and grown-up gags tucked in amidst the kid-friendly developments. ("You got any idea what they do to eggs in prison? I'll tell you this -- it ain't over easy!" the Zach Galifianakis-voiced Humpty Dumpty quavers at one point, in the first prison rape joke I can think of to not only be slipped into a kiddie flick but also highlighted in the trailer.)
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The opening scene of Sean Durkin's debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene suggests we're in for a big rusty bread pan's worth of rural miserablism, and even though we're not, the yeasty grayness of those early moments is clearly intentional: A group of women in drab dresses and droopy T-shirts go about preparing dinner in a house whose unfinished interior looks either new and hastily erected or ancient and about to fall apart -- it's hard to tell which. A young boy stomps about in a dusty, scrubby yard; a woman sits on the porch working on a crocheted afghan. When dinner's ready, a bunch of men sit down to eat; then they leave the table -- the man who appears to be the leader murmurs something appreciative about the meal -- and the women take their places. Then there's one lone shot of a ton of dirty dishes jumbled into and around the kitchen sink -- there's no question who's going to be scouring them clean. It's as if Amishtown had been taken over by a nicer version of the Manson family.
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The idea of building a person to spec -- especially when that person is some form of ideal woman -- is one that's haunted the movies in variations from My Fair Lady to Vertigo to Bride of Frankenstein to Weird Science. It's an echo of the constructing of a character that results in what you see on screen -- a figure who's the joint creation of an actor, director, writer, makeup artist, dialect coach, costume designer, ad infinitum. But it's also a concept that provides a counter to the typical romance saga in which two people who are perfect for one other come together. Why search for your match when you can make one?
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A tribute to vibrators and the women who love them, Tanya Wexler's Hysteria is a jaunty little entertainment that's almost plowed under by its early-suffragette arguments for women's equality. But like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, the movie's charms are ultimately irresistible.
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Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's In a Better World raises a number of intriguing questions about the true meaning of masculinity, about how kids view their parents, about the necessity of knowing when it's not a good thing to turn the other cheek. But too many of these ideas simply hang in the air, like fruit that can't decide whether it's ripe or not. In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture, and at the very least, it's a tight piece of craftsmanship. But it's at once too polished and vaguely unfinished, and its final act of forgiveness demands a huge leap on the part of the audience. The movie isn't just looking toward a better world; it has way too much faith in an unrealistically perfect one.
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