He popped up in “Son of Rambow,” and had the title role in “Hugo.”
Now the young Brit Asa Butterfield has the lead in a possible sci-fi franchise — “Ender’s Game.” He plays Orson Scott Card’s teen trained for combat with moral qualms about that combat in the first film in a possible film series (“Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind and Ender in Exile, A War of Gifts, Ender’s Shadow ).
Questions for Asa? Post them as comments below, and thanks for the suggestions.
Two mothers, grieving over their dead teenage sons, bond and then begin to wonder if the other’s son wasn’t responsible for their child’s death in “Torn,” a modest, emotionally lacking melodrama built around big themes and hot button issues.
Mahnoor Baloch is Maryam, Pakistani by birth, American by choice. She and her husband Ali (Faran Tahir of “Star Trek” and “Elysium”) have plunged into the American dream. He runs a Pakistani restaurant, she’s a real estate agent. They’re renovating their suburban California split-level and planning for the future.
But a message on their answering machine — “I’m going over to the mall” — upends their world completely. They think nothing of son Walter’s words until they turn on the TV news. The mall’s food court has blown up.
In the quietly heartbreaking aftermath of police coming to deliver the awful news, Walter’s name added to an impromptu shrine of flowers and photos at the mall, Maryam meets Lea Peltier (Dendrie Taylor of “Sons of Anarchy”). A brittle, working class single mom who has lost her music-loving son Eddie, she reaches out to the Pakistani woman.
Until the cops step in. John Heard plays the police inspector who first casts doubt on the “gas leak” theory of what happened. He plows through Lea Peltier’s snappish, profane protests.
“Mrs. Peltier, I’ve got a bomb and I’ve got a Pakistani kid.” His suspicions turn into hers, and before all is said and done, the accusations have flown back and forth, religious fanaticism, Islamic and Christian, have come into play and the mystery has deepened even as the repercussions of such accusations fall upon the two mothers.
Baloch so internalizes Maryam’s emotions that she robs the character of empathy, perhaps by design. “They,” after all, are different from “us.” Taylor gives away a flash of guilt here, a crippled by grief glance there.
But “Torn” never rises above emotionally lukewarm. The melodramatic touches include a finale that purports to solve the mystery, when really — that mystery, not knowing which scenario, which kid was more troubled than we realize, — is the best thing “Torn” has going for it.
Director Jeremiah Birnbaum’s best-conceived scenes are the quietest — police cars, silently pulling up in front of the house with unspoken news that is every parent’s worst nightmare.
This culture-clash/mother bonding story was never going to be “Frozen River,” but you do sense that a lot of potential was squandered in denying these mothers big moments of mourning, bigger confrontations with the fathers (Patrick St. Esprit plays Eddie’s dad) of their sons.
That makes “Torn” entirely too muted, muffled and watered down to deliver insights or emotional payoffs. 
MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, adult situations
Cast: Mahnoor Baloch, Faran Tahir, Dendrie Taylor and John Heard.
Credits: Directed by Jeremiah Birnbaum, screenplay by Michael Richter. A Film Collective/Barnstorm Media release.
Running time: 1:20
Costa-Gavras, that legendary lefty of the international cinema, is on message and but somewhat off his game with the French drama “Capital,” a mildly entertaining sermon about American “Cowboy Capitalism” as it rubs up against “The French Way.”
It’s a modestly engrossing tale of the shenanigans, boardroom intrigues and high stakes gambling at a big French investment bank. But when you’re preaching about workers suffering from the mistakes and misdeeds of the super rich, the sales pitch is muddled if it’s made by a fellow who sees himself as the “Robin Hood of the Rich,” stealing from the poor to pad the pockets of the one percent.
That’s how Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh of “Midnight in Paris” and “Priceless”) cynically describes himself. He’s a bit young to be in the upper echelons of Phenix Bank, but he took shortcuts — Goldman Sachs, to Phenix to ghost-writer of the company president’s autobiography. When that president is felled by illness in the opening scene, Marc’s life is upended. He’s anointed by that sickly president (Daniel Mesguich) as the new CEO of Phenix. The president figures he’ll be his “boy.” Schemers on the board such as the conniving De Suze (Bernard Le Coq) consider him a place-filler to keep the stock price up until the “real” transition takes place.
“He’s a good boy. He’ll do what I say.”
And then there’s Dittmar, the Irishman (Gabriel Byrne) heading up the bloc of high rolling, American corporate raiders. Dittmar cajoles (“We’re your only friends, Marc.”) and threatens Marc to get him to do what his group wants.
“Time for you to start firing people.”
Slashing staff will boost the stock price. But Marc, married to a liberal (Natacha Régnier) and descended from old school leftists, is loathe to do it. He buys some time by hiring a private detective to dig up dirt on the opposition and listens to his wife, who suggests using strategies time-tested by Chairman Mao. Win over the workers. So he starts thinning the workforce by getting employees to give blunt assessments of their bosses.
“A hated leader is a bad leader.”
Meanwhile, he’s angling for better pay, scheming to find ways to make his promotion permanent and falling into the supermodel trap (Liya Kebede) that has been the undoing of many a titan of business.
Costa-Gavras and his co-writer cannot seem to make their minds up about their hero. Is he the paragon of “The French Way,” protecting employees, “ethical” in his investments? Or is he a self-serving opportunist, cavalier about his underlings, playing hardball with the big boys, squirreling away cash, hungry for the sexual perquisites of power?
The director of “Missing,” “Betrayed”, “The Music Box”, “State of Siege” and “Z” has his finger on the pulse of outrage, as usual. But he seems lost trying to make up his mind about Marc and resorts to smug to-the-camera narration, quietly confrontational dinners with his workers-unite relatives and an ugly sexual moment to show how power corrupts the fellow. On occasional Marc fantasizes what he’d REALLY like to do or say to those whose views are anathema to him.
Byrne makes a perfectly acceptable villain, but Costa-Gavras keeps him at arm’s length, making him hurl most of his threats through Skype video calls.
Costa-Gavras fails to turn this situation and these promising characters into the indictment of capitalism he set out to make, or into an entertaining , Oliver Stone-style financial double-cross thriller which is what “Capital” (in English and French, with English subtitles) falsely promises to deliver.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language and drug use
Cast: Gad Elmaleh, Gabriel Byrne, Natacha Régnier, Bernard Le Coq, Liya Kebede
Credits: Directed by Costa-Gavras, written by Costa-Gavras and Karim Boukercha . A Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:49
Say this for “Blue is the Warmest Color”, the Cannes award winner that is as famous for its long, explicit sex scenes as it is for its honors and actresses. It earns the NC-17 rating the MPAA imposed on it.
This overlong, somewhat sad-faced account of a lesbian romance, from its beginnings to its end, features what has already become the most notorious lesbian sex scene in screen history — ten minutes of grappling, groping and bare-skin slapping that flirts with pornography.
The movie surrounding that epic moment of titillation? A bit slack, repetitious and sometimes frustrating. “Blue,” titled “La Vie Adele” in France, is a 100 minute movie straining to break out of a three hour long argument for tighter editing.
We meet Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) as a 17 year-old, a high school junior with a lot of girlfriends given to frank talk about boys and sex. In a long first act, we see the bookish Adele, all mussed hair and lips that default to a sort of depressed pout, deal with the confusion she feels amid the peer pressure to hook up.
Thomas (Jérémie Laheurte) is interested. But he doesn’t do it for her. Adele’s erotic dreams are about the girl with the short, blue hair she glimpsed in a crowd. And when she finally meets Emma (Léa Seydoux of “Farewell, My Queen” and “Midnight in Paris”), Adele learns what chemistry is all about.
Emma is a college fine arts major who wonders if Adele is “a straight girl who’s a little curious.” But she likes her “type” — young, inexperienced. Adele lures Emma out of her long-term affair and Emma teaches Adele all about being gay in France — pride parades, introduction to the “art” crowd, the works. And she instructs the younger woman about sex.
The second act of the film sees them co-habitating, Adele now teaching school, Emma an artist on the rise. The adoring Adele may say (in French with English subtitles) “I am fulfilled with you,” but the camera catches the hints of jealousy, infidelity and the like — the “late nights at work,” the revenge hook-ups.
The only intolerance that turns up in this enlightened French world comes from Adele’s mean girl teen peers. Her parents accept her, she has a gay pal, (Sandor Funtek), sort of a Hollywood rom-com cliche and shyness and uncertainty aside, her transition into this world is mostly drama free.
Director and co-writer Abdellatif Kechiche pours most of his effort into the signature sex scenes. Everything else exists to establish Adele’s character, her pragmatic life, her state of mind. And there’s too much of that, too many scenes that don’t advance the story and too many that go on and on after making their point. There are lengthy conversations and lengthy meals. We never visit Adele as a student or later as a teacher in a scene that doesn’t go on for endless minutes beyond what was needed. Even the sex scenes betray a lack of understanding of “How much is enough?”
But Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.
You can see where a director might become so besotted with his star that he’d be reluctant to trim her scenes and her star vehicle to a more digestible length. But that doesn’t excuse it. That robs “Blue” of some of its pathos and warmth, if not its heat.
MPAA Rating: NC-17 for explicit sexual content
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Adèle Exarchopoulos.
Credits: Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, written by Abdellatif Kechiche and
Ghalia Lacroix based on the graphic novel “Blue Angel.” An IFC release.
Running time: 2:57
This is an interesting direction for Liam Neeson’s career to settle into — man of action, Mr. “Taken” and “A-Team.”
In “Non Stop,” he’s a U.S. Air Marshal whose flight has a murderer/blackmailer on board. Julianne Moore looks like the likeliest suspect in this cast. That woman from “Downton Abbey” is here, a couple of other faces.
Like the “Taken” movies, this one has a mid-winter (Feb.) opening.
Say this for “Last Vegas.” CBS Films didn’t scrimp on cast, baby.
FIVE Oscar winners star in this comedy about old men, lifelong pals “from the neighborhood,” gathering in Vegas to celebrate the marriage of one of their ranks.
Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Kline AND…Mary Steenburgen, as a Vegas lounge singer who sort of upsets the applecart.
Talking with Douglas and Steenburgen today. He’s having a pretty good year, thanks to this film and his Liberace turn. She’s had a long, delightful career that (“Melvin & Howard,” “Cross Creek”) that included working with everybody who is anybody — Jack Nicholson, Malcolm McDowell (“Time After Time”), and so on.
Questions for the on-screen “couple”? One or the other? Post them as comments, and thanks.
James Franco gets to play the bad guy — and didn’t you see that coming? — in “Homefront,” what looks to be a standard issue Jason Statham actioner about a very tough and accomplished guy, trying to keep on the down low and settle in with his little girl, in a bumpkin-berg in America’s Meth Belt. And they just won’t leave him be. Surely they’ve seen a Jason Statham movie before? They know how this comes out, right?
Erotic, but about more than the sex, droll, but about more than witty lines and cutting observations by and about bored suburban moms, “Concussion” is a most promising first feature from writer-director Stacie Passon.
It’s well-acted, sometimes poignant and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. Passon’s little domestic melodrama about the demands of motherhood, the dullness of upscale suburbia with its Pilates-hot yoga-ladies who lunch, hangs on what could have been just a gimmick, but isn’t.
So don’t call it “Desperate Lesbian Housewives.”
We meet Abbey (Robin Weigert), 42, covered in blood, racing to the hospital and cursing the rambunctious son who whacked her in the head with a ball. The damage is probably superficial. But you never know, so there are tests.
That blow to the head might have shaken up Abbey’s world. Is she content to gossip, jog, do exercise classes and listen to the blah-blah-blah chatter of women whose horizons are as limited as hers? Her wife (Julie Fain Lawrence) is older and has lost interest in sex. And Abbey isn’t inclined to suffer all this in silence.
She’s a decorator who buys, fixes up and flips lofts “in the city” (Manhattan). And she tells Justin (Johnathan Tchaikovsky), her hunky young contractor, everything.
“You’re like, a swinger, right?”
Abbey confesses that she just visited a hooker, and it didn’t work. One thing leads to another, and Justin sets her up with “The Girl,” a mysterious madam who arranges a better quality of gay prostitute.
Stick with me, here.
One thing leads to another, and very quickly, the mother of two, who throws fabulous dinner parties where gay and straight neighbors meet and mingle without a hint of awkwardness, is working for “The Girl,” with Justin as their go between.
“You’d be my…what?” she asks him, coyly.
“Let’s…not…go there. I’m just the guy who sets things up.”
Abbey soon finds herself screening (“We can meet for coffee. Or tea.”) and then having a paid tumble with awkward young women looking for an older woman experience, or lonely, sex-starved women closer to her own age — who come to her unfinished loft for an assignation, and maybe a little judgment about her decorating choices.
Meetings with “The Girl” (Emily Kinney, a stitch) are both all business and hilarious.
Meetings with clients have a hint of the absurd in them. Abbey hands an overweight, inexperienced girl books on diet and sex.
“‘The Essential Gandhi.’ It’s an excellent book for weight loss.”
Of course there are consequences, predictable enough. And a gorgeous neighbor (Maggie Siff) threatens the whole notion of anonymous, consequence-free fooling around.
Sasson doesn’t do much with her title metaphor, doesn’t make much of those Abbey neglects with her new side career. Hot sex scenes? Sure, a few. And some of the downside of the trade is suggested. The whole “bored so I became a hooker” thing is a little played out, even with the lesbian twist.
But “Concussion” deserves more of an audience than just the film festival circuit. And it’s not just an introduction to a writer-director with talent, but to a slew of under-employed and superb actresses, and the hunky Tchaikovsky.
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content and some language
Cast: Robin Weigert,Johnathan Tchaikovsky, Maggie Siff, Julie Fain Lawrence, Emily Kinney
Credits: Written and directed by Stacie Passon. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 1:37
Getting a Broadway show on its feet and up and running is a journey often fraught with drama, hurt feelings and failure. Happy endings are rare and best appreciated if we know the struggle, revisions, hard work and tough casting and re-casting decisions it took to achieve success.
Much of that is missing from “Broadway Idiot,” a tuneful but extremely superficial slice of cinematic triumphalism celebrating the conversion of Green Day’s 2004 concept album, “American Idiot,” into a stage musical that ran for 422 performances at Broadway’s St. James Theatre. Producers had to update a Bush Era screed about suburban angst and post 9/11 American ennui into something that felt fresh in 2009-10.
Though we’re treated to some wonderful moments and we develop a pretty thorough understanding of the back story on the songs and the era that spawned this angry, defiant, anarchic song cycle, there’s never a discouraging word uttered in this picture’s 80 minutes.
We don’t see the casting process, just a little of how the creative team turned songs into character and story ideas. We skim past the mixed to bad reviews, the pain of changing actors — re-casting for this reason or that. There’s little drama to the big moment when Green Day gives its permission for the show to proceed. There’s just Billie Joe Armstrong and the other two guys in the band (totally in the background), sitting in a rehearsal studio, beaming, slack-jawed at the conversion of “Last Night on Earth” from rock ballad to a moving, choral moment.
“Oh,” Armstrong grins. “This can work.”
Nobody argues. Nobody’s feelings are hurt when Green Day frontman and singer-songwriter Armstrong takes over the lead role on Broadway, after others have busted their humps to get it there. That we know of, anyway.
The big revelation here is that Armstrong, a Bay Area punk who formed and leads an American band that is the only serious modern contender for U2’s “Most Relevant Rock Act” title, knows Broadway and sang show tunes, on stage, as a child. Director Doug Hamilton, a PBS vet, wisely sticks this information in the later acts. It’s like that moment we learned gangster rapper Tupac Shakur was indulged with acting and ballet lessons as a child — a bit of a head-snap.
The “American Idiot” album — with later songs such as “Last Night on Earth” and “21 Guns” added to the stage production — has the thematic weight to carry a musical. The film captures the magic and manic energy of the performances, the inventive choreography and spine-tingling tunes.
But surely there was more struggle to getting it on stage than we see here. And stage director and book co-writer Michael Mayer may say “I don’t read the reviews” and the cast can agree with him. That doesn’t make them go away, the way this show did long before entering Broadway’s record books.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with lots of profanity
Cast: Billie Joe Armstrong, Michael Mayer, Rebeca Naomi Jones, John Gallagher Jr.
Credits: Directed by Doug Hamilton. A FilmBuff release .
Running time: 1:21
