Movie Nation

Google the phrase “Abortion Comedy” and all the entries point you to one film — “Obvious Child.”

“Finally, a romantic comedy about abortion,” raves the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Then, there are the attacks — from the right wing blog Newsbusters, from CNS (the Christian News Service).

Followed by denials, which director Gillian Robespierre repeats, the moment the subject comes up.

“So many people have billed it as ‘an abortion comedy.’ We don’t really think that’s what it is. We hope we’re being very thoughtful about the jokes. You get to know our heroine, and any jokes that are made from Donna’s situation come from a place of love and playfulness, making life work.”

“Obvious Child” is about a smart, profane New Yorker who works in a leftist book store by day and tests the stand-up waters of the city’s alternative comedy scene as a monologist/stand-up comic by night. Donna, played by Jenny Slate, is in her late 20s, not really sure of who she is. But she does like to drink and, after being dumped by her boyfriend, gets drunk enough to have under-protected sex.

Sound familiar?

“There are many different ways a pregnancy story can play out,” Robespierre says. “We wanted to tell this one. We might have enjoyed ‘Juno’ or ‘Knocked Up,’ and there’s room for plenty of stories on this idea of an accidental pregnancy. But we thought this was the most honest way of treating it.”

Slate — like Robespierre, a New Yorker in her early 30s — is a character actress who has turned up in “This Means War” and “Parks & Recreation,” a voice actress who has lent her quirky sound to films such as “The Lorax” and TV shows like “Bob’s Burgers,” and a stand-up whose act Robespierre caught back in 2009.

“Donna does my sort of style of stand-up,” Slate says. “Even though the subject matter and the boundaries are a little different, she’s like me. She’s unaware of how much power she wields on the stage. She’s just very scattered about where she directs it.”

Donna’s “boundaries” include making light of her pregnancy predicament, joking around in the Planned Parenthood clinic where she goes looking for answers.

“”I would like an abortion, please. Sorry, that sounded like I was ordering in a drive-through!”

Slate says that like a lot of people in their late 20s, Donna “is still in the process of figuring out who she’s supposed to be.” Adult or not, she’s not ready for a baby. And in America, in reality, if not on TV or in most films, abortion is legal and an option for women. It’s not something “Juno” gives much thought to. And it’s never seriously discussed in “Knocked Up,” even though the heroine looked like Katherine Heigl and the guy who got her pregnant was Seth Rogen.

“I wanted to make a romantic comedy with a leading lady who was strong, who had all the best jokes, who was complex and vulnerable at the same time,” says Robespierre.”And we wanted, also, to present abortion as an option. A judgement-free option. It feels more true, in this situation.”

It’s an option someone like Donna, smart but “scattered,” prone to sharing her mistakes on stage in the golden age of social media and “over-sharing,” would consider, both director and star say. Even if most movies and TV shows steer clear of “the A-word” as subject matter.

“We don’t shy away from it,” Slate says. “We’re not afraid of the word ‘abortion.’ We understand the heaviness and weight to it in people’s lives. But it’s not a word that’s full of shame, judgement, or have any stigma to it.”

And “We don’t really make fun it,” her director insists. “So I wish people would stop calling ‘Obvious Child’ ‘The Abortion Comedy.’ That’s not what it is.”

Whatever charms turned the musical “Jersey Boys” into a Tony winning Broadway hit are sorely missed in Clint Eastwood’s tone deaf corpse of a movie. Late to the game, blandly cast and scripted with every Italian American cliche in the “How to Make Spaghetti” cookbook, it is Eastwood’s worst film as a director.
And it does Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons no great favors either, overselling their cultural significance, rendering their story in broad, tried and trite strokes.
“Jersey Boys” follows little Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young), son of a New Jersey barber, from his teens, training to follow in dad’s footsteps. But all the Italian-Americans in Belleville see bigger things for Frankie — whose voice could make him “bigger than Sinatra.”
If only he can get a break. If only he can stay out of trouble with his musician pal, Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), a “two-bit hustler” who does break-ins and “fell off truck” thefts in between gigs.
Frankie is the gang’s look-out, signalling that the cops are coming by screeching “Silhouettes,” the doo-wop hit by The Rays.
Since this happens in 1951 and the song didn’t come out until 1957, that Frankie was plainly ahead of his time. Or Eastwood has turned careless with the details, like a little old man whose every article of clothing, from shirt to shoes, now fastens with Velcro.
The story arc — struggles to get a record deal, inspiration in the studio, breaking out on radio, then money troubles, internal strife, tragedy, etc. — is so over familiar that it lacks a single surprise. Recycling that corny DJ locks himself in the studio playing their first hit over and over again until the cops break down the door? “The Buddy Holly Story” did it better back when Gary Busey was thin.
Members of the group turn, mid-scene (mid-concert, sometimes) to the camera and narrate their story — Tommy, Frankie, Nick ( Michael Lomenda) and songwriting singer Bob Guadio (Erich Bergen). Characters talk with their hands, say “Hand to GOD” a lot and slip from English to Italian the way such characters did in Italian-American sitcoms of the last century.
But the music? Removed from their era, Valli’s adenoidal falsetto evokes a giggle, on first hearing. Try to listen to “Sherry,” the group’s screeching first hit, without laughing. But his range was always impressive, as was their longevity — 29 Top 40 hits spanning three decades.
The musical mixes up the songs’ order and exposes the tunes’ limitations. “My Eyes Adored You”, where the line “though I never laid a hand on you” was always creepy, gets turned into a lullaby Frankie sings to his little girl. And turns even creepier when it does.
The Eastwood film exposes the play’s antecedents. It is structured like “Mamma Mia!”, with hints of their most famous and recent hit, “December 1963 (Oh What a Night),” book-ending the “Buddy Holly Without the Plane Crash Story” plot.
Piazza, playing the annoying, overbearing goombah DeVito, is the only member of the group to make an impression. Christopher Walken, playing the benign (of course) mobster who watches over Frankie, is given little to do. Only Renee Marino, as the Italian spitfire who became Frankie’s first wife, threatens to animate this picture and give it the acting jolt it needs. But doesn’t.
“Jersey Boys” is such a poor reflection of Eastwood’s best work that that just when you think, “At least the musician in him does justice to the songs,” there’s a botched horn arrangement in “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” Just when you think, “Well, there’s a big ensemble dance number coming, and he cast Christopher Walken,” he misses getting the famed dance man in the shot.
So the guy who made “Bird” has made the worst screen musical since “Rock of Ages.” And it’s little comfort knowing this won’t be his last film, or how he’s remembered. It just makes you fear he’ll end his directing career on an even worse note, 2015’s “American Sniper.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout
Cast: John Lloyd Young, Vincent Piazza, Renee Marino, Christopher Walken, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda
Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elise, based on their stage musical. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:17

The Paul Haggis drama “Third Person” is, like his Oscar-winning “Crash,” a
series of interlocking stories. Each is fascinating , or at least interesting
its own right. Each is cast with more than capable actors.
Like “Crash,” the conceit that ties those tales together is a bit obvious.
And like “Crash,” it rambles on and on, unable or unwilling to develop an exit
strategy. His all-star-cast has to get its money’s worth, even at the expense of
the audience’s patience.
Liam Neeson is Michael, a married writer visiting Paris as a cure for
writer’s block, trying to carry on an affair would a would-be novelist, Anna
(Olivia Wilde). When he gets the call from the front desk announcing she’s shown
up, he puts us on our guard.
“Does she appear to be…armed?”
<Wilde is cast on-the-nose as a scary-sexy, insulting and mercurial careerist
possibly using this “old man” to further her aims. Anna toys with Michael, turns
him on and turns on him and never lets on which Anna he’s going to be dealing
with in a given scene. Meanwhile, he is fielding calls from a sad, knowing wife
(Oscar winner Kim Basinger) back home.
In Rome, Oscar winner Adrien Brody is shady Sean, a fashion espionage agent
(he steals designs) and an ugly American — the sort of arrogant jerk who
doesn’t fall for Italy’s charms. He expects everybody to speak English and serve
cold Budweiser.
“‘Bar Americain,’ and you don’t speak English,” he sniffs to a bartender too
obsessed with soccer to be bothered with him. “You understand the term,
‘irony?'”
By chance, he runs into a beautiful Gypsy (Moran Atias) and becomes tangled
up in her melodrama — a hustler who wonders, at every turn, if he’s being
hustled by an expert.
Mila Kunis is Julia, a broke New Yorker who can only find work as a hotel
maid, whose life has been wrecked by an accusation of child neglect/abuse. Maria
Bello is her irritated lawyer, the one whose appointments Julia keeps missing.
James Franco, an artist who paints without a brush and who lives a stunning
Frenchwoman (Loan Chabanal), is mixed up in it.
The Neeson-Wilde scenes have a playful, dangerous and sexual edge, thanks
largely to Wilde’s fearlessness and cocksure comic sensibilities and Neeson’s
deadpan reactions to her.
Sean, bouncing all over Italy with a woman he seems to both lust after and
pity (Gypsy discrimination) in a succession of different generations of Fiats
she apparently steals, is all those things that Brody does best — aloof and
cool, a little macho and very sarcastic. I love the way he refuses to meet Italy
on its own terms, even when Sean runs into that rare Italian who isn’t a coward,
a bigot or criminal. Do Sean a favor and it’s “Spasiba.” He thanks you in
Russian, just to irk you.
The Kunis/Bello/Franco tale is the most melodramatic and least satisfying,
but even it has a nice payoff.
Haggis lets us get way ahead of the characters and the figure out what the
title of this writerly tale — “Third Person” — has to do with the sometimes
illogical connections between stories. That’s not a problem. Dragging, dragging
dragging the tales out after he reaches a logical climax and something close to
a resolution with each is not.
A generous whittling down and he might have had something special, from sad
story to giddy one with a sad edge, a hustle with pathos and romance intercut
with the consequences of infidelity.
But “Third Person,” despite its rewards, wears out its welcome long before
the third act is through.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality/nudity </P>
Cast: Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Mila Kunis, James Franco, Adrien Brody, Kim
Basinger, Moran Atias
Credits: Written and directed by Paul Haggis. A Sony Pictures Classics
release.
<Running time: 2:17

It helps, when you’re a movie star, to be what they call “Movie Star Handsome.”
But don’t tell that to Guy Pearce. A leading man, oft-employed as a dashing cad (“The King’s Speech”) or chiseled villain (“Iron Man 3”), he still thinks of himself as a character actor.
“Vanity goes out the window,” he says. Especially in his latest film, “The Rover.” He plays a man whose car is stolen in a post-Apocalyptic Australia. The power grid is down. Water is at a premium. So bathing, shaving or wearing anything other than stained and torn shorts is not an option.
“With a film like this, to maintain the integrity of the character, I really let myself go,” Pearce, 46, says with a chuckle. “We get to be vain enough on the red carpet. I let that go, in between red carpets, any way. You get far enough out in the desert, it doesn’t matter.”
His character in the film seems cruel, monomaniacal and ruthless. All he wants is that stolen car. He doesn’t care who has has to shoot or make an alliance with to get it back.
“The most interesting characters, to me, are the ones that let me swim around in that middle ground, where you might feel the urge to like or root for somebody, but they won’t let you. Not right away. You root for them, but you don’t know why, exactly. This mystery man may be redeemable. But you can’t figure him out.”
Pearce is winning some of the best reviews in years for the film, for “a performance of pure controlled ferocity,” as Kenneth Turan wrote in The Los Angeles Times.
“You know so little about this guy for so much of the film,” Pearce says. “You get little hints, here and there, about who he is or was. And you kind of get why he has to get this car back. It’s a tough ask, to ask the audience to go all the way with you, to commit to the character, from beginning to end in this movie. I hope they buy in.”
Pearce, born in Britain-raised in Australia, was the “L.A. Confidential” star who didn’t turn into Russell Crowe. He had his shot, but 2002’s “The Time Machine” and other Hollywood efforts didn’t make him a superstar.
He had his dark years — drug addictions that he has spoken of, after he found the wherewithal to quit. And then he found his niche — leading roles in offbeat thrillers, such as “Memento,” chewy supporting roles in “Traitor,” “The Hurt Locker,” or “Factory Girl” where he did spot-on impersonation of Andy Warhol.
But co-starring in “The Rover” with Robert Pattinson of “Twilight” gave him a taste of what he missed.
“I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it as well as him,” Pearce says of Pattinson. “I’m certainly glad I avoided that, but I was never in a position where it was going to get that out of hand, for me. Some people naturally resonate a kind of energy that draws the crazy fans, and lots of them. Rob has that magnetism, and invites that sort of enthusiasm.
“But if you shoot deep enough in the Australian desert, they can’t find you. Rob got mobbed by the locals. There weren’t many of them. It was nice to see him enjoy the remoteness, the privacy and freedom that being that far away from the mobs gave him.”
Something about Australia has always suggested “end of days” in the movies. From “On the Beach” to “The Road Warrior,” the Outback has been a favorite vision of what the world will look like if the environment, the economy and civilization break down.
“The landscape, with its vast, barren open spaces, says the end is coming, or has already arrived, doesn’t it? When we think of civilization ending, life reaching some sort of environmental extreme, we think the deserts of Australia.”
But it’s not just the landscape. Many of those “End Times” films were actually created in Australia. Might something in the national character at work?
“Maybe we feel we’re pretty tough down there, and maybe we figure we’ll be the last ones standing when it all goes wrong,” Pearce says, laughing. “We do love our cars, love the long, empty roads. We’ve held out down there for a couple of hundred years OK. We’ll survive And we’ll have our cars with us.”

“Vanda” stumbles into the theater from off the street, drenched from a French cloudburst.
She curses, stumbles about, pleads. Can’t she get an audition?
Thomas, the adapter/director, has just gotten off the phone, griping to his fiancee that he cannot cast this new play. It needs “a woman.” These days, actresses “sound like ten year-olds on helium.”
But Vanda, all woman, isn’t who he had in mind. She’s in a bustier, black stockings and leather mini skirt. The play he’s casting, “Venus in Fur,” is based on a novel, “not the Lou Reed song.” Her resume is underwhelming. She doesn’t know what a “divan” (half-sofa) is when directed to it on stage. She’s gauche, snapping her gum as she dives into the huge stuff bag of costumes, makeup, what have you. Vanda dolled up like this because she was sure this piece was some sort of “S & M” thing.
No no, Thomas sputters, losing patience. This is “a great love story,” lovers “handcuffed at the heart.” Not “S & M porn.”
But the 1870 novel “Venus in Furs” was by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The author’s last name became the inspiration for the word “masochism.” So maybe she’s on the right track, even if he won’t hear it.
Roman Polanski’s film of David Ives’ play is claustrophobic and theatrical, a chamber piece that’s almost a filmed play. It’s just Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) and Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), on stage, doing an overlong audition that toys with issues of directorial control, class conflict and sexism.
It’s a playful riff on the material, starting with the casting. Amalric (“Quantum of Solace”) is as close to a French-speaking Polanski look-alike as there is. And Seigner is the director’s wife.
Seigner, who worked with Polanski on “Frantic” and co-starred in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” with Amalric, wears her years in the opening moments. Vanda got her S & M dog collar “from when I was a hooker,” she says. And we can believe it. Unsophisticated, out of her depth, unread, she exhausts Thomas’s sympathy by insisting on donning a costume she dragged with her, on doing vocal exercises before beginning, on dismissing the play that she says her agent just handed her.
“Symbolic?” she wonders, at every odd prop or moment. Especially the fur.
And then she strips off the eyelashes, dabs off some of the lip gloss and transforms. Thomas reads Severin, the male lead role, and is stunned by the fact that she knows his new play by heart. He is exasperated by her efforts to deconstruct the play, to infer that its kinkier moments have their roots in his own past.
And he is captivated. She flirts, teases and tempts him.
“Naked on stage?” she suggests as she starts re-staging the play. “For you, no extra charge.”
Polanski plays up the playful side to material that is not as remotely daring as it must have seemed when the novel was new. The camera moves as the characters slip back and forth from the play to their personal “reality” outside of the script. Seigner and Amalric show their own light touches as they slip back and forth, from positions of power — dominance — to submission.
As slight as “Venus” feels, it’s just titillating enough to matter, just twisted enough — Really, casting your wife and a guy who looks like you? — to suggest that even in his 70s, even with virtually no budget, Polanski can deliver a compelling walk on the kinky side.
　
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, some nudity, mild violence
Cast: Emmanuelle Seigner, Mathieu Amalric
Credits: Directed by Roman Polanski, screenplay by David Ives and Roman Polanski, based on the David Ives play. A Sundance Selects release.
Running time: 1:32

The spring and summer of 2012 are forever ago — in movie years. And that suits Taylor Kitsch just fine. It’s a year worth forgetting, in a lot of ways.

The hunky star of the TV version of “Friday Night Lights” had his big screen coming out party in 2012, a lead role in two blockbusters (“John Carter”, “Battleship”) that broke the bank, not box office records. Reviews of both films zeroed in on the budgets ($250 million for “John Carter), the bloated silliness of the projects. And Kitsch got caught in the crossfire. Even in his native Canada, people were making fun of “the unfortunately named Taylor Kitsch” (Toronto Globe and Mail).

So the Kelowna, British Columbia native changed direction. He went back to ensemble work, which his TV show had championed. He chose scripts that demanded more of a performance. And he went back to Canada.

“I don’t know if it’s a burden, carrying a film” Kitsch, 33, says. ” You’d be an idiot to say ‘No’ to (“John Carter” director Andrew) Stanton. You’d be an idiot to say ‘No’ to Peter Berg (“Battleship”).

“But if you get to bounce off Gleason, Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts or Travolta — any of those guys — you dive right in. Surrounded by wonderful actors, you can just feel the weight off your shoulders. I don’t have to do the heavy lifting.”

“Lone Survivor” was an ensemble piece, a true story combat film set in Afghanistan that was a hit back in January. “The Normal Heart” is a new all-star HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play about gay activism in the early days of the AIDS crisis. But the film that reminded Kitsch of why he loves “ensemble” is the first one he made, post-“Battleship.” “The Grand Seduction,” is a Canadian remake of an earlier French-Canadian film (“Seducing Dr. Lewis”). It’s a whimsical comedy about a dying fishing village that tries to trick a hip young doctor into settling there.

“I felt I could this guy justice,” Kitsch says of the role, a too-pretty plastic surgeon hijacked to tiny Tickle Cove, Newfoundland. “I could bounce off Brendan Gleeson (playing a townie in charge of the “Seduction” scheme) and not carry a huge film. No pressure working back in Canada. I wanted to work there because I’ve never a done movie there. And I like this guy. He’s dry and dorky and everybody else’s reaction to him is hilarious. There’s a charm about this script that is kind of infectious.”

And?

“It’s refreshing to be standing in front of real people and a real waterfront, and not have a (bleeping) green screen behind me,” Kitsch cracks.

Better reviews have followed this change in direction, with “Seduction” moving John Hartl of The Seattle Times to call Kitsch a “self-deprecating hunk…who could be branded for life (in a nice way) with a line like “No one has cheekbones like that.”

The critically-acclaimed “The Normal Heart” was “the most fulfilling job I’ve ever had,” Kitsch says. “It gave me so much to do, to think about and work on. The whole process of making it was rewarding, start to finish.” Sharing scenes with Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts and others, playing a character with “duality” and a real story arc “made me a better actor, I think. And a better person.”

But “Grand Seduction” may turn out to have the biggest long-term impact on Kitsch’s life, if not his career. The production put him up “in this place on a 100 foot bluff overlooking the ocean. That’s living…That taste of small town living, the pace of really living, exposes you to all the negative things you’ve brought into your life. How much (bleep) you add on that isn’t necessary, you realize that when you’re back to living at that pace.”

So he’s moving to Austin, Texas, with its “very hard, fast-paced lifestyle — tubing and wake-boarding and golfing…It reinvigorates you, I think. The tone, the pace, the people, just the simplicity of life gets to you, especially if you’ve been doing time in Los Angeles.

“I have two acres on Lake Austin that I’ve yet to build on, and I was there just the other day thinking, ‘THIS is what it’s about.’ You’re not listening not to the city, the traffic, the phone. You’re listening to the changes in the wind. THAT’S living.”

Leading roles in major motion pictures may come back. “I’ve got one I THINK I’ve landed, unless I’m jinxing it.” But he directed a short film — a dramatic thriller “Pieces” — that he’s gotten the money to turn into a feature. And he’s getting into a whole different movie business scene, in Austin, where indie icons Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and others have set up cinematic shop, just beyond Hollywood’s grip. That could pay off, too.

Austin filmmaker “David Gordon Green (director of “Joe,” “Pineapple Express”) and I are meeting up, having five or ten too many drinks — something it’s easy to do in Austin — and seeing if there’s something we can do together. If that’s how things work down here. I think I’m going to like it.”

“Coherence” is an indie thriller of modestly cerebral ambitions, a Theatre of the Absurd piece with “Twilight Zone” touches.

Round up eight friends for a dinner party. Set us up for the usual interpersonal melodramas — this character used to date that one, these two slept together and didn’t tell — and then toss in the comet.

The comet? That’s the sci-fi plot device that makes the power go out and cell phones shatter. That’s the excuse for one character to recite weird bits of comet lore.

And that’s when the eight see one house still has light, way up the street. A couple of them go to check it out. Who do they see? Themselves, or versions of themselves, gathered for this same dinner party, coping with the increasingly odd evening in many of the same ways.

Writer-director James Ward Byrkit concocts a Mobius loop of illogical temporal logic as the people in the first house — ballerina Em (Emily Baldoni), home owner Hugh (Hugo Armstrong), actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and the others — puzzle over what is happening, the clues each version of themselves leaves the other, and what to do about it.

“If there’s another version of me, I want to meet him!”

Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), wife of Hugh, references “that movie, ‘Sliding Doors,'” as they speculate on how they might tamper with or choose among the alternate realities they seem to be confronting. Can they undo something their alternate selves have done? Can they mix and match party guests, alternative versions of each other, with the other house? On a dark, confusing night, with only glow sticks (blue for one house, red for the other) and a passing comet to illuminate the gloomy suburban street, how can they avoid that?

How long before the Yahtzee dice come out to introduce true “randomness” to their reasoning? When does the violence start? And is there more wine?

“Coherence” provides the cast with one puzzle and the audience with another. Characters sit and try to reason out the motives for this or that action for the other versions of themselves.

“The other ‘Mike’ is worried about you.”

And the viewer tries to keep track of who is doing what to whom, and where. And when.

Byrkit keeps a lot of the mystery off camera and tells the story, more or less, from Em’s point of view. As curious as the men at the party might be, Em is the one proactive one, playing her cards close to her vest as she does. Baldoni makes her interesting enough for us to identify with her.

But its 87 minutes feel like more of a writing/plotting exercise than a finished, polished film. The one thing “Coherence” needs most is that word that gives it its title.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations

Cast: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Elizabeth Gracen, Hugo Armstrong, Alex Manugian, Lauren Maher

Credits: Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Running time

The big releases from major studios this week are getting enthusiastic endorsements — or at least some love, from most critics.

The riotous “22 Jump Street” is the sequel to end all sequels. It mocks the idea of making a sequel, and then proceeds to ride that mockery all the way through a closing credits sequence that puts an exclamation point on the cynicism that inspires such films. Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill score again, and Ice Cube uses his baggage to great effect in many his funniest performance since “Friday.”

I was never one to swoon over “How to Train Your Dragon.” Nice message, good animation, not a lot of laughs. More heart than laughs. Fine. What else? The sequel has even fewer laughs and the message is a bit more pacifist and muddled, to me anyway. I am in the minority on that one. Not bad, but not all that, either. Overwhelmingly positive reviews for “Dragon 2.”

“The Signal” is a fascinatingly strange and beautifully executed sci-fi thriller, more cerebral than most. Kind of “Catfish” like, if you follow. Mixed reviews for that one, but I liked it more than some.

There are this week, as most weeks, a lot of limited releases that are worth considering — films that smaller distributors picked up off the festival circuit.

“The Rover” is a powerful, minimalist thriller from A24, a “Mad Max” sort of post-Apocalyptic Australia road trip quest directed by the “Animal Kingdom” guy and starring Guy Pearce (terrific, grisly, dressed down) and Robert Pattinson (somewhat less so). Good notices for that one.

I really liked the minimalist dark comedy “A Coffee in Berlin,” sort of a “Slacker” in German and in black and white — very cool, funny at times. Lovely to look at.

“Hellion” is a very good teen in trouble drama with Aaron Paul as a blue collar dad trying to keep his motocross punk son in line after a family tragedy. Juliette Lewis is also very good in it. Mixed notices for that one.

“Lullaby” is a more moving, more pointed treatment of end-of-life issues than the monster teen hit “The Fault in Our Stars.” But it has no teens, so the critical pandering isn’t there, nor will there be much of an audience. Nice work by Richard Jenkins, Anne Archer, Garrett Hedlund and Amy Adams kind of goes to waste because of it.

“Witching & Bitching” is a hilarious Spanish comic thriller about a divorced robber whose getaway runs him, his sidekicks and his kid afoul of Spanish witches. Very Almodovarian. Fun.

“The Human Race” is a horror sci-fi purgatory thriller with some promise, despite the familiar tropes trotted out in it.

The charms of “How to Train Your Dragon” are thinned a bit for its sequel, a cartoon with better animation and livelier action, if fewer jokes. If there’s one thing these sweet-message/great flying sequence movies don’t need is fewer jokes.
The misfit, inventive and now one-legged Viking teen, Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and his pet Night Fury dragon, Toothless, are living with other Vikings and other dragons in utter harmony on the island of Berk. Their days are taken up with Dragon Racing, a dragon-mounted chase game that’s reminiscent of Hogwarts’ sport, Quiddich, with catapulted sheep as the ball to be battled over.
“No sheep, no glory!”
Hiccup’s dad, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) still has the kid’s ascent to the chiefdom of Berk in mind. But Hiccup would rather ride like the wind with Toothless.
Hiccup and his peers (America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Christopher Mintz-Plasse do some of their voices) are venturing far afield, exploring lands to the west. That’s where they stumble into The Dragon Thief and rumors of an army of Vikings mounted on dragons led by the malevolent Drago, “a madman without conscience or pity.”
Hiccup, an optimist and, against all odds, a Viking pacifist, wants to fix that.
“Let’s go find him and change his mind!”
“How to Train Your Dragon 2” is about that quest to do just that. Kit Harrington, Cate Blanchett and Djimon Hounsou voice new characters that the Berk kids stumble into. First the younger Berks, then the adults tangle with these new faces, with their different dragons and their differing dragon agendas.
The original “Dragon” broke from the Dreamworks formula as a film not overly reliant on one-liners and verbal comedy. That’s even more true about the sequel, in which writer-director Dean DeBlois, no longer sharing those duties with his “Lilo & Stitch” teammate Chris Sanders, ignores the bevy of potentially funny voices and focuses on physical shtick. It was all about the “respect the differently-abled” message. Even the message is watered down, here.
But Berk, now dragon friendly, has its own dragon (cat) lady. There are scads of giggle-worthy sight gags involving pet dragons imitating puppy behavior — manic games of fetch, bellies being rubbed and the like. Awww.
New dragons mean new menaces and new lessons for Hiccup to learn in his journey to manhood — “A chief protects his own.” And a second film meant a chance to up the ante with the animation, with dragons frolicking like seagulls in the seaside updrafts. These 3D films have sequences that play like a prospectus for a theme park ride.
But the whole franchise — yes, “How to Train Your Dragon 3” is already in the works — while still airborne, is also already bit winded, and only getting more so.

MPAA Rating: PG for adventure action and some mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of Jay Baruchel, Cate Blanchett, Djimon Hounsou, America Ferrera, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill
Credits: Written and directed by De DeBlois, based on the Cressida Cowell books. A Dreamworks Animation/Fox release.
Running time: 1:42