EASY MONEY

Review: Easy Money
3 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

It's easy to be impressed by the breadth of Easy Money, a two-hour crime saga that packs in enough dirty details, plot tendrils, and peripheral characters to feel worthy, at least in spirit, of the Martin Scorsese endorsement that's stamped on the film's posters. Known as Snabba Cash in its native Sweden, where it topped 2010's box-office charts before being snatched up by the Weinstein Company, the movie ultimately benefits from a sprawling sense of narrative accomplishment, thanks to the comprehensiveness with which lawyer turned author Jens Lapidus's hit novel is adapted. But coupled with the kind of gritty technique that can read as compensation for lack of substance, the scope is precisely what serves to mask Easy Money's intimate failings.

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KATY PERRY: PART OF ME

Review: Katy Perry: Part of Me
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Katy Perry: Part of Me begins with a slew of video confessionals from teenagers, who declare that the pop star's music and lyrics have changed their lives. "She writes songs about real experiences," says one fan. "She tells me it's okay to be me," says another. Within moments, the action cuts to Perry's backstage inspection of a whipped-cream-shooting candy cane, and her own declaration that, in her skimpy new concert outfit, she looks like she's "got an ass like Nicki Minaj." Directed by Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, whose production company, Magical Elves, was also behind Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, this frothy 3D concert doc spends its entirety toggling between put-on profundity and frivolous, risqué showstoppers, resulting in a disconnect that hinders the goal of exposing an artist's identity.

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THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE

Review: The Magic of Belle Isle
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

That the The Magic of Belle Isle can conjure any true feeling at all is some kind of wonder. Set in upstate New York, at the idyllic lakeside town of the title, this gooey reteaming of Rob Reiner and Morgan Freeman is crammed tight with baldly manipulative elements, its tearjerker quota busting at the seams. A cute dog, a mentally challenged neighbor, a caricatured Muslim cashier, a precocious young girl, her adorable sisters, a kindly single mom, and Freeman's redemption-bound curmudgeon are all accounted for, in a setting where the sun kisses everything and everyone knows your name. Freeman's character, a washed-up, wheelchair-bound author, goes by the name of Monte Wildhorn, and like the hero in the western novel that made his career, Monte exudes the moody heartache of a lonely cowboy—or, at least, that's what we're supposed to think. When Monte moves into a rent-free cabin with little more than a snarl, a Larry McMurtry typewriter, and a soon-to-be-replenished supply of scotch, he's greeted by all but the violins.

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THE DICTATOR

Review: The Dictator
2 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

In The Dictator, no real-life, innocent bystanders are accosted, and that may just be the most significant flaw of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest, an uncharacteristically arid and unfunny potboiler that makes Borat seem worlds away. For the first time since 2002's Ali G Indahouse, Baron Cohen forgoes the mockumentary style that made him a global superstar, and opts instead for ultra-produced, narrative-humor traditions. He emerges with something that calls to mind the worst of Mike Myers, and lacks the utilized vigor of mad happenstance that colored his last two Larry Charles collaborations. In terms of being on trend, it makes sense that Baron Cohen would want to change his formal tune, as the 15 minutes for faux docs are most certainly up. But in the past decade, no mock-doc star has pushed buttons and tickled ribs better than the man behind Borat and Brüno, and it's something of a crime that The Dictator, a base-level provocation at best, feels like thousands of other filmic expressions of gross-out, bad behavior.

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HICK

Review: Hick
1 star (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

It doesn't take long to gather the influences trickling through Derick Martini's Hick, an aimless tumbleweed of a road movie if ever there was one. Pointing a .45 at a bedroom mirror in her shabby Nebraska home, which rests in the silo-riddled outskirts of a podunk main drag, 13-year-old Luli (Chloë Grace Moretz) does her best Travis Bickle while reciting lines from Dirty Harry. Her walls are papered with drawings of both cowboys and princesses, and as she asks her reflection if it "feels lucky," she shakes her hips to move the ruffles on a pair of rainbow panties. Over the rainbow is indeed where Luli dreams of ending up, and with her halter top, sunglasses, pistol, and improvised basket (a fringed and studded cowgirl's handbag), the soon-to-be runaway looks every bit the hybrid of Judy Garland's Dorothy and Jodie Foster's Iris Steensma, whose mohawked guardian seems a Luli fantasy spawned by daddy issues (her boozy father, played by Anson Mount, is barely in the picture).

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THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

Review: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
3.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is continually resuscitated by the basic elements of its conceit. Based on the 2004 novel These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach, it tells of a handful of senior citizens who converge on a 55-and-over retreat in India, and the golden-year stars and golden-hot locale offer grand assistance to screenwriter Ol Parker, whose adaptation otherwise feels like a rather workaday rom-com. The dialogue penned for the characters isn't without heart or interest, but it's much ado about little until spoken by the likes of Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, and Maggie Smith, who lend the material a sizable touch of class. Clustered together as if headed to a summer camp for West End stage greats, the distinguished company of Dames and Sirs (also on board are Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup, and Celia Imrie) provides numerous pockets of earnest interplay, and the surroundings, a bejeweled bit of third-world bustle that visually recalls Fernando Meirelles's shaky-cam stomping grounds, manage to add urgency and natural beauty to a plot flecked with saccharine flourishes.

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SOUND OF MY VOICE

Review: Sound of My Voice
3 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

In this age of dime-a-dozen mockumentaries and found-footage thrillers, the urgent phrase "We have to complete this film!" has become both eye-roller and mood-killer. For modern audiences, there aren't too many plot and protagonist propellers more tired than the moral obligation to keep shooting whatever troubling things are afoot. And so it is that Sound of My Voice arrives with a built-in drawback, hinging its infiltration of a time-traveler's cult on a young couple's filmmaking project, and devoting plenty of screen time to arguments over whether or not production should cease. Peter Aitken (Christopher Denham) is a skeptical journalist determined to expose the deception of Maggie (Brit Marling), the ailing leader of a group of L.A. basement dwellers, who claims she's journeyed back from 2054. Lorna Michaelson (Nicole Vicius), Peter's recovering-addict girlfriend, is the accomplice quick to voice trepidation when things get extra spooky.

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THE GIANT MECHANICAL MAN

Review: The Giant Mechanical Man
4 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

For a first-time filmmaker, Lee Kirk sure knows how to pick his establishing shots. He opens The Giant Mechanical Man, his alternative rom-com debut, with quaint stills of a gray, generic city; a collection of well-worn art supplies; and a hanging silver suit, whose precise pairing with a bowler hat plainly evokes René Magritte's The Son of Man. Giving you his movie in three nutshells, Kirk introduces an archetypal urban fantasy centered on a romantic artist, whose signature act as an anonymous curbside robot makes him a walking commentary on the lost millions devoted to a grind. So much of Kirk's triumph is in the telling—in his handling of tone, tableaux, and acting talent. A lesser director would have turned his flawed script into a giggly, spiritless romance of the week, and missed by a mile the sweet fable of broad strokes the film thankfully became.

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FREE SAMPLES

Review: Free Samples 
1.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

If you're particularly fond of Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren, then you're among the few who should be even slightly persuaded to sit through Free Samples, an angry indie that favors hollow ridicule over credibility. In the L.A.-set film, Hedren plays an aging bombshell not unlike herself, who keeps the TV tuned to TCM because it "seems like a reunion," and shares insights on lust and vanity like a shrewd call girl trapped in elderly skin. Hedren's brief scenes prove remarkably arresting, and her character's life tips for lead whiner Jillian (Jess Weixler) mark the only true escape from a litany of bad jokes and affected crises. Frequenting the ice cream truck that Jillian's manning as a favor to a friend, Hedren's actress, Betty, offers fascinating wisdom on everything from life stages to gay husbands, and she confides that she visits the truck because it reminds her of her childhood. But the fact that Betty prefers ski poles to a cane, and walks down the street with them in the gleam of the midday sun, is a good indication of the kind of faux quirks this movie peddles, and it's telling that even the ice cream is discussed as being creepily artificial.

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THE LUCKY ONE

Review: The Lucky One
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Fate plays an integral role in movies based on the works of Nicholas Sparks, not just in terms of theme, but also in the way the films are made. At this point, Sparksian romances unfold via their own preordained formula, and measures of their merits largely hinge on how well each can bend the cookie-cutter. Just as inevitably as Zac Efron's Iraq War vet mutters narration about everyone having a destiny and making the choice to follow it, Scott Hicks's The Lucky One dutifully follows a set, familiar path, taking place in a North Carolina of perpetual golden sunsets, and showcasing the very best of life according to those of Sparks's mindset—a spiritual Americana consisting of rowboats, ice cream, tire swings, faithful dogs, elbow grease, churches, and, of course, love of country.

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BLUE LIKE JAZZ

Review: Blue Like Jazz
3.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

These days, narrative films about religion don't leave a lot of room for gray area. You either get checkout-line preach pieces like Kirk Cameron's Fireproof, or ultra left-wing comedies like Easy A, which defeats its own purposes by crassly bullying Christianity. Blue Like Jazz, a grassroots indie based on Donald Miller's bestseller of the same name, doesn't fall into either of these traps. Though directed and co-adapted by Steve Taylor, a former Christian singer whose previous film was the pastor-on-a-journey drama The Second Chance, the movie is malleable and curious, much like its protagonist, Don (Marhall Allman), a Southern Baptist who veers from his Texas-raised path to attend Portland's über-liberal Reed College. Blue Like Jazz charts a typical existential coming-of-age tale, yet remains atypical by being hip while also treating religion fairly.

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TITANIC 3D

Review: Titanic 3D
4.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

It's easy to be cynical when it comes to Titanic, a film that reached such dizzying heights of success and cultural prominence that, eventually, the only thing left for it to become was a punchline. Watching its two most famous and parodied moments, both of which take place on the bow of the ship, one almost feels required to snicker. But 15 years later, stretched across the big screen, Kate Winslet's "I'm flying" bit and Leonardo DiCaprio's "I'm the king of the world" declaration also feel moving and momentous, two scenes as deeply iconic as any to have played in theaters since. While recent interviews have suggested that James Cameron is interested in giving the middle finger to films and filmmakers beholden to post-converted 3D, he insists the chief motivation and benefit of Titanic 3D is to let folks witness the film theatrically, quite possibly for the first time. Seeing the result, with eyes aged a decade and a half, the project seems fully warranted, as does that lofty 3D ticket price.

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MIRROR MIRROR

Review: Mirror Mirror
2.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

For all its pomp and fabulosity, Mirror Mirror is actually Tarsem Singh's most minimalistic effort, a dialed-down game board of elaborate pieces that's akin to the human chess set captained by evil Queen Clementianna (Julia Roberts). Like Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella with just a dash of Lars von Trier's Dogville, his rendering of this revisionist fairy tale is less cinematic than it is purposefully theatrical. The queen's ornately decorated, yet largely sparse bed chamber looks out to a sky that's basically a moving matte painting, and even the forest is a simple backdrop of black and white, full of nothing but snow and rocks that mirror endless birch trees. More than anything previously seen in a Tarsem film, the production design (here by frequent collaborator Tom Foden) appears obsessively placed and inorganic, with a near-palpable wariness of human contact. The visuals work because the director is knowingly embracing a new twist on his aesthetic, withholding in more ways than one for his first fairy tale that isn't chiefly aimed at adults.

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HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE

Review: How to Survive a Plague
4.5 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

How to Survive a Plague teems with poignant facts and stats, but the most telling detail about this from-the-front-lines AIDS-crisis doc is that camcorders just happened to hit the market right when the disease began to spread. With video equipment available to all, 1982 marked the dawn of insta-media, and with members of the activist group ACT UP able to film their every move, their revolution wouldn't just be televised, it would be fully documented too. Such is why journalist turned filmmaker David France's epic account of this pitch-dark time is so amazingly thorough, composed of a plethora of priceless footage from the very heart of the issue. Beyond offering an aesthetic that is the '80s and early '90s, his stunning film contains scene after scene that would oft-require recreation in narrative form, showing stalwart heroes caught up in drama no script could conceivably beat

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THE HUNGER GAMES

Review: The Hunger Games
4 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Dystopian revolution is at the heart of Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, which imagines a futuristic, postwar North America at the mercy of an iron-fisted empire. But deeper still is mandatory adolescent homicide, a plainspoken, horrifying bloodsport that, in the first installment especially, lays down eerie and deeply powerful stakes. For those who aren't hip to the story (or, given the incessant chatter, simply aren't hip), the titular games are an annual, televised form of punishment, wherein the scattered "districts" who once rebelled are reminded to fall in line by watching 24 of their children fight to the death until only one remains. No matter how Collins chose to develop her saga, she licked half the battle with her continually unsettling crux, which provides a firm foundation made of heady dramatic gold. The Hunger Games, whose script was co-penned by Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross, repeatedly tests the disquiet of kiddie-carnage awareness, proving its awesome influence again and again.

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OMAR KILLED ME

Review: Omar Killed Me
3 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

In Omar Killed Me, a straightforward indictment of the French justice system by actor turned director Roschdy Zem, lead star Sami Bouajila has the look of an eternally sad Sacha Baron Cohen, a tall, dark-featured man who might have been jubilant once, but will likely never laugh again. Bouajila is Omar Raddad, a real-life Moroccan-born Frenchman who, while working as a gardener in Marseilles in the mid '90s, was accused of murdering his rich employer. No sooner were the fingers pointed than Omar was shuffled off to prison. A kindred film to so many that just battled it out for Oscar, Omar Killed Me is at best a very watchable performance showcase, cementing Bouajila as a formidable and highly affecting on-screen presence. His turn is an amalgam of dogged earnestness, pitiful heartbreak, and the visual wear of a personal fight against disadvantage.

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FOUND MEMORIES

Review: Found Memories
4 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

"If bread doesn't breathe, it gets stiff," says Madalena (Sônia Guedes), an elderly woman in the fictitious Brazilian village of Jotuombo, whose daily grind involves kneading dough and baking rolls before sunrise. She's talking to Rita (Lisa Fávero), a young photographer who happens upon the village, and indeed, before Rita's arrival, Madalena and her neighbors were living a rather airless and rigid existence. The first narrative feature from native Brazilian Julia Murat, Found Memories has all the makings of a turn-this-town-upside-down banality, its plucky drifter softening the crusty locals with her fresh breath of vitality. But Murat holds the reins on blatant convention about as tightly as she does the gaze of her static camera, which, like Rita, is most often a curious visitor of a sleepy haven forgotten by time. In this film of patient, carefully placed compositions, whose subjects leave and return instead of being followed, common metaphors are at once clearly framed and left unforced, resulting in a shrewd dance that continually tiptoes past built-in clichés.

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FRIENDS WITH KIDS

Review: Friends with Kids
3 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

With the foul-mouthed dramedy Friends with Kids, writer/producer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt is juggling so much, it's a wonder there aren't more jokes about balls. Depending on your tastes, odds are you'll find something to like here, at least for a little while. Positioning Westfeldt as Julie, longtime best friend and neighbor of fellow Manhattanite Jason (Adam Scott), the script kicks off with a whole lot of sitcom lingo, like BFF conversation starters that are really just gun-on-the-mantle quips, bound to be recycled and fired off again later ("Death by shark or crocodile?" Julie asks during a late-night phone call). As the minutes—of which Julie is ever-conscious—tick by, the duo's banter becomes a lot of hollow, retro ping-pong, the speedy delivery and sentence-finishing apparently stylized to evoke the best of Cary Grant. And then the chit-chat veers modern, covering odds and ends presumed to be important to New Yorkers of a certain age, and including enough profanity to maintain that edgy, in-vogue R rating.

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BEING FLYNN

Review: Being Flynn

2 stars (out of 5)

By R. Kurt Osenlund

As a film about poverty, Being Flynn at least conveys the great field-leveling of a societal epidemic, placing newly laid-off businessmen alongside drunken, unshaved archetypes, and expressing the sad humility that's firmly tied to this very relevant problem. An adaptation of poet Nick Flynn's memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which charts the author's social work, daddy issues, and addiction problems in 1980s Boston, Being Flynn largely focuses on Nick's estranged father, Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro), a typically delusional, curmudgeonly flake whose denial-laden pride is slowly chipped away as his failed-writer circumstances lead him to skid row. An apartment eviction begets sleeping in the cab that at some point paid the bills, and a car accident, in turn, begets sleeping on sidewalk vents. Soon enough, Jonathan is swallowing hard and tiptoeing into the local shelter, where Nick (Paul Dano) just happens to work. However transparent, the irrepressible grandeur of Jonathan's pathetically warped ego adds a sting of classic tragedy to his systematic downfall.

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GONE

Review: Gone
2 stars (out of 5)
By R. Kurt Osenlund

Nearly a year has passed since the release of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood, and Amanda Seyfried is still crying wolf. At least that's the opinion of the drastically one-dimensional dickhead cops in Gone, who coldly dismiss Jill's (Seyfried) claims that her sister's been kidnapped, chalking it up to yet more hysterics from the crazy girl who swears she, too, was abducted a year earlier. Jill doesn't have a lick of proof, but she does have more credibility-crushing traits than a registered sex offender, including a history of mental illness, recently deceased parents, an inability to ID her supposed boogeyman, and a past stint in a psych ward that's left her on a regular pill-popping schedule. Hell, even her allegedly missing sis (Emily Wickersham) is newly on the wagon. Thus, there are countless opportunities for Detective Powers (Daniel Sunjata) and his butchy colleague Erica (Katherine Moennig) to roll their eyes and appear both negligent and inept.

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