Movie Nation

The novelty of having a real homeless junkie play a version of herself drives “Heaven Knows What,” a gritty hand-held character portrait of heroin addict life in New York today.
The unblinking character study, shot in muted shades of grey, stars recovering addict Arrielle Holmes and is based on her memoir. Thanks to its subject and the contributions of electronic music artist Tomita to the film’s score, it plays like an awful flashback to an earlier age.
But kids these days, it’s not just vinyl that they’ve brought back. Heroin is in. Again. And here’s an indie-film era look at what their lives are like.
Harley (Holmes) has two great loves. One is Ilya (the actor Caleb Landry Jones). The other is heroin. Neither treats her with a hint of humanity.
Ilya is a cruel, selfish and childish junkie, laughing as he orders her to buy razor blades and open her veins.
“If you love me, you would’ve killed yourself by now.”
Harley writes him a love letter, gets the razor blades and tries to earn his attention long enough to prove herself to him.
“I’m about to die right now, and I really want you to BE there.”
She survives, endures the hospital and a little rehab. But on getting out, Ilya wants nothing to do with her. She clings to their skinny braggart-bully of a dealer, Mike (Buddy Duress). They drift from fast food joints where they shoot up in the restrooms, to snowy Central Park, to subway stations and street corners, begging for change or subway passes, stealing and living only for their next fix.
Sibling filmmakers Ben and Joshua Safdie, working from a script based on Holmes’ “Mad Love in New York City,” capture a colorful street life of sleepy-eyed stoners, drunks and junkies, prattling on about fights they’ve had, cops they’ve dodged and TV’s “Cosmos.”
Random? That’s the very definition of the lifestyle. Harley, heroin thin, blond and about 20, doesn’t plan for the future, be it a year from now or an hour from now.
“I need TWO to get straight,” she begs Mike. Any money she picks up is spent in an instant. Cheap booze, Dr. Pepper and DayQuil keep her and her whole crowd going between fixes. Food never seems to enter into it.
And truth be told, that’s about it. The filmmakers have contented themselves with the barest bones of a story, relying on local color and the nuts and bolts of being homeless and addicted in New York to carry the film.
But it doesn’t. The far superior “Animals” (released last month) captured a love story with an arc, a hazy fantasy life and the slim hope of living through the experience of heroin addiction — with real actors, and without the novelty of street people filling many of the roles.
See “Animals” and “Heaven Knows What”plays like more of a gritty snapshot than a movie.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use throughout, pervasive language, disturbing and violent images, sexuality, and graphic nudity

Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress
Credits: Directed by Ben Safdie, Joshua Safdie, script by Ronald Bronstein and Joshua Safdie, based on a book by Arielle Holmes. A Radius/TWC release

release.

Running time: 1:34

“Results” is a random, generally pointless romantic comedy set in the world of personal trainers.
We have Trevor (Guy Pearce), the Aussie building his dream “Power 4 Life” gym in Austin, Texas, exercising compulsively, with only his big galoot of a dog for company.
Kat (Cobie Smulders) is one of his best trainers, but intense — wrapped-too-tight, just as compulsive about running, lifting, etc. Only she’s inclined to tear into clients who “quit” on her. Maybe she and Trevor could have a “thing,” if only she didn’t have that temper. Got to love her training regimen, though.
“Imagine there’s a wall right behind you, and you’re trying to knock it down with your butt!”
Into this world comes pasty, balding and doughy Danny (Kevin Corrigan). His wife just dumped him, and he’s suddenly come into money. So. Train him.
“I want to be able to take a punch.”
Something about Kat — her temper, the fact she’s played with the willowy knockout Ms. Smulders –– gets to Danny. But there’ll be no rich guy courting his trainer here, thank you. Money or no money, Kat won’t have it. And Trevor seems to take that attempt a tad too personally, as well.
Actor turned writer-director Andrew Bujalski has some promising angles he could have pursued. Trevor’s idol is a Russian kettle bell trainer living and running gyms and selling his own line of equipment. The joke is that he’s played by Anthony Michael Hall and Grigory runs his empire from… West Texas. Brooklyn Decker plays his adoring wife.
Giovanni Ribisi is a lawyer rich-Danny meets and hires in a dumpy bar. Ribisi usually makes such sleaze funnier.
A sharper comedy would have played around with the addictive nature of exercise, the roid rage that Kat seems to suffer from with no other evidence that she takes steroids. There’s little contrast between the unhappy six-packers with the equally miserable “pudgy and mellow” Danny.
So as nice as it is to see Smulders get offered something other than a S.H.I.E.L.D. jumpsuit in the “Avengers” movies after “How I Met Your Mother,” as interesting as Pearce and Corrigan usually are, “Results” is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and drug use

Cast: Cobie Smulders, Guy Pearce, Kevin Corrigan
Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

“Barely Lethal” is a fairly amusing rough draft for a high concept high school romantic comedy.

It’s “Agent Cody Banks” meets “Sixteen Candles” — with quotably snark one-liners, hormonal kids being hormonal, and a socially inept teen the mean girls don’t want to cross. Because she knows 66 ways to kill you.
Hailee Steinfeld of “Pitch Perfect 2” is #83, who has been trained as an assassin, pretty much since birth. But she longs to see “this whole other world I’m missing” and go to high school. Or at least the version of high school she’s seen on “90210,” “10 Things I Hate About You,” “Mean Girls” and the films of John Hughes.
That’s why she fakes her death so her boss (Samuel L. Jackson, of course) won’t come looking for her. That’s why she passes herself off as an exchange student “from…Canada” at Newton High.
But those movies and dated TV shows are no guide for blending in — today. Let’s start with the fashions.
“You look like you had a one-night-stand with Mr. Potatohead!”
Then, there’s the labeling that those comedies tend toward. Calling the helpful Roger (Thomas Mann) “an A.V. Geek” is no way to make friends.
Megan, as #83 now calls herself, may be able to break into the school to change seating assignments and defend herself from a “kidnap the school mascot” (her) prank. She may have studied up via movies. But that doesn’t keep her from falling for the pretty and shallow boy with a band, known as “The Wrong Guy” in “Pretty in Pink” and its ilk.
Director Kyle Newman is entirely too tentative with a potentially terrific script by John D’Arco.
The best lines go to Dove Cameron, as the edgy, eye-rolling “sister” in Megan’s host family. Her put downs, long or short, are lethal.
“Jesus, Ringwald!”
Jackson has fun taunting the little orphan girl trainees as he teaches them martial arts and bomb defusal. And Jessica Alba, as a “rogue agent,” gets a nice fight scene.
Steinfeld (“True Grit”) is more at home here than among the Bellas of “Pitch Perfect.” But the film feels like a series of pulled punches, slow-footed and sluggish.
With the teen world crying out for this generation’s “Breakfast Club,” with teens swearing, drinking and narrowly dodging bad decisions, “Barely Lethal” suggests that movie is coming. It just needs more polish than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 on appeal for sexual material, teen drinking, language, drug references and some action violence

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Samuel L. Jackson, Thomas Mann, Jessica Alba, Dove Cameron, Sophie Turner
Credits: Directed by Kyle Newman, script by John D’Arco. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:38

A famous French unsolved disappearance and a mother’s decades-long search for justice is the focus of “In the Name of My Daughter.” That, as such, is the promise of the title.
But Andre Techine’s ponderous and misshapen tale, told with “poetic license” an opening title tells us, is more about a daughter’s misguided love affair and betrayal than about mom, more about the accused killer’s guilty behavior than his inner life. It is as inconclusive as this endless French court case has proven to be.
Catherine Deneuve is Renee Le Roux, owner of the Palais de la Méditerranée casino in Nice. She welcomes her newly-divorced daughter Agnes (Adele Haenel) home from Africa, where she’d been living, only to learn Agnes wants her inheritance — now.
Mom is barely in control of the casino during a mid-70s economic downturn. The mafia, she is told, is out to get it. They already control the other casinos along that coast, she is also told.
And the person telling her all this is her hustling, blunt-talking legal advisor, Maurice Agnelet, played with a poker-faced impatience by Guillaume Canet of “Farewell”).
Renee never really trusts Maurice, despite his many services for her. He’s shifty, a guy who tape records conversations in a French version of what in America would be recognized as CYA behavior.
Agnes is smitten. But he keeps his emotional distance. The daughter should be on her guard, especially when Maurice’s other lover warns her, “He beds everyone, in the end.”
Of course he does, and that’s a tipping point for the Palais board of directors. Mom gets voted out, and in a heartbeat — the casino is closed, Maurice distances himself from Agnes, Agnes attempts suicide, and then Agnes disappears.
Techine (“The Girl on the Train”) spends so much time setting up the love affair and betrayal that he has nothing left for the mother’s deepening, maddening conviction that Agnelet has gotten away with murder. That’s the movie here, not the endless details of love, sex and motive that eat up most of the screen time.
“In the Name of My Daughter,” in French with English subtitles, never creates empathy for any character, never picks up enough speed to draw us in. Lacking a smoking gun, this Riviera-set crime thriller lacks both thrills and convincing evidence of a crime. “Poetic license” or not, that doesn’t add up to an engrossing film.

MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, nudity and some language.

Cast: Guillaume Canet, Catherine Deneuve, Adèle Haenel
Credits: Directed by Andre Techine, script by Cedric Anger and Andre Techine. A Cohen Media release.

Running time: 1:52

The three top films at the box office this Memorial Day weekend are separated by just a few tickets, based on Friday night’s numbers. “Mad Max,””Pitch Perfect 2” and newcomer “Tomorrowland” are all looking like 3 day weekend winners in the $33-35 million range, four day takes around $40 million.

Good news for “Tomorrowland” and Disney, which is riding weak reviews and a half-hearted promotional push by George Clooney. “Mad Max” is holding much more of its audience than “Pitch,” which added theaters and is still losing 50% of its opening weekend take.

“Poltergeist,” the limp remake, is doing a spectacular $25 million+ on its opening weekend — very good for a horror film. Established brand and all that.

“Paul Blart 2” is still in the top ten, which points to our decline as a nation louder than anything I can think of.

Well, the little girl gets it.
Kennedi Clements plays Maddy Bowen, the child trapped between the real world and the afterlife in the new version of “Poltergeist,” gives us wild-eyed terror that we can hang onto and a blood-curdling scream that will haunt your nightmares.
The rest of the players? They sort of shrug it off. Sam Rockwell, as the father of the missing child, lands his laughs. But he, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jane Adams (as a paranormal academic) and others under-react to the stunning evidence of a supernatural menace in a way one can only describe as blase.
Were they unimpressed with the effects, to be added in later? Or perhaps they’re as over-familiar with this story as the rest of us; a subdivision, built over a graveyard, a house in which pro-active ghosts — poltergeists — talk to a child through a static-ridden TV, and snatch her through her closet.
The 1982 Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg film is an oft-telecast classic. But generations have been exposed to the plot, and its loopiness, thanks to reruns of “The Simpsons.” Hard to get too worked up about a “Treehouse of Horror” tale.
David Lindsay-Abaire’s script is full of “We can’t go to the cops” excuses designed to explain why the family whose little girl vanishes in the middle of a thunderstorm. The assault on the family, limited to the kids, comes all at once — after fraidy-cat middle kid (Kyle Catlett) has seen plenty of evidence that the place is spooked. And the spooks themselves are not suggested, but revealed fully, lessening the fear even further.
A nearby college conveniently has a “Paranormal Studies” department, but obvious foreshadowing tells us the TV ghost hunter Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris, not bad) will be “the cavalry” the Bowen family eventually calls in.
The 3D frights — a grasping tree, the maw of hell, skeletal hands and faces reaching for children — are what you’d expect from the director of the animated (and superior) “Monster House.” Gil Kenan has to take the blame for the performances, though.
Best effect this time? Shadowy hands pressed against an HDTV screen, from the INSIDE. Worst effect? That cast, model-pretty and inexpressive, even when all hell is breaking loose.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for intense frightening sequences, brief suggestive material, and some language

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kennedi Clements, Kyle Catlett, Saxon Sharbino     Saxon Sharbino, Jared Harris
Credits: Directed by Gil Kenan, screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire,based on the 1982 film. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:33

What’s that old showbiz maxim? “Just give the people what they want.”
That’s the byword for “Chocolate City,” an African American riff on a certain stripper movie smash of a couple of summers back.
“Magic Mike ain’t got NOTHING on you,” the unemployed hustler Chris (DeRay Davis) gushes to his baby brother Michael (Robert Ri’chard of “Coach Carter”).
And he’s right. Even though Channing Tatum’s “Magic Mike” had a sharper script, funnier characters and more pathos, Michael is ripped and rhythmic enough to take it all and drive the ladies crazy.
A college student without the cash to take on a girlfriend (Imani Hakim) or help his widowed working-two-jobs mom (Vivica A. Fox), Mike answers a men’s room solicitation from MC Princeton (Michael Jai White) and joins the dance crew at Chocolate City. And Ladies’ Night will never be the same.
The costumes — cop, soldier, Spartan and cowboy — and lack of them mimics “Magic Mike.” The melodrama — keeping his sideline secret from his mother and would-be girlfriend — duller.
There’s rage and diva behavior in the macho dressing room — “Who’re you calling SENSITIVE?”
And there are rules — “Give them the fantasy. Give’em what they can’t get at home…But never get personal.” Because there’s more touching and grinding in “Chocolate City,” and every Sunday — this being an African American comedy shot in Tyler Perrytown (Atlanta) — there’s a scolding from the preacher.
Writer-director Jean-Claude La Marre plays that hip and happening man of the cloth, dropping cracks Chris Brown, “the club,” the stoner comedy “Friday” and “the faint smell of Stoli-cranberry” into his sermons. But he’s the highlight of his movie.
His leading man and that lead’s love interest have no chemistry. His master of ceremonies has no flash. The funny supporting cast has little to do. It’s got one violent scene, some African American comedy cliches (clueless church ladies, etc.) and not nearly enough laughs to carry “Chocolate City” from appetizer to dessert.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content throughout, partial nudity, language and brief violence.

Cast: Robert Ri’chard, DeRay Davis, Vivica A. Fox, Carmen Electra. Michael Jai White
Credits: Written and directed by Jean-Claude La Marre. A Freestyle/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:31

“Tomorrowland” is Brad Bird’s Jeremiad against the dystopia that is modern culture, with its yen for zombie apocalypses, environmental catastrophes and the 24 hours of fear telecast by cable news.
It’s a movie for the “dreamers,” the ones like its teenage heroine Casey (Britt Robertson). She’s the only kid in class who asks the obvious, when confronted with lectures on nuclear proliferation, the unstable politics of much of the world and global climate change.
“Can we fix it?”
So it’s not just the ponderous theme park attraction in search of a movie that this Vision of the Future sometimes seems to be. Or the dystopian critique of dystopian pop culture — thank you, fanboys — it actually is.
“Tomorrowland” is a sci fi mini epic told in flashback by a girl genius, Casey, who spends her teens sabotaging a NASA launchpad dismantling project her dad (country singer Tim McGraw) is overseeing, and the one-time boy genius, Frank (George Clooney) she’s come to for answers.
Casey has been chosen, as boy-inventor Frank was once chosen at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. A British pixie, Athena (Raffey Cassidy, quite good) gave each of them a special “T” medallion. It’s a badge that magically connects her to this alternate reality where science and reason, optimism and imagination have been given free rein.
It’s all jet packs and hover-rails and skyscrapers straight out of Walt Disney’s notion of what the future would be like.
But somebody is trying to keep Casey from getting there, and that’s how she’s thrown in with Frank. They have to team up to save the future.
Clooney makes a properly grumpy guide to this world Frank once knew, was banished from but whom Casey convinces is worth a return trip.
“The future is scary,” Frank warns. And it is, with killer robots, fights to the death (vaporization) and the odd spot of blood.
Evil Governor Nix of Tomorrowland (Hugh Laurie, never duller) wears silly Oz jodhpurs and tries to rationalize why the real world is not ready for Tomorrow, and that the self-fulfulling prophecies of our TV news of Doom is a good thing.
It’s all about how “imagination is more important than knowledge” and not giving up, making “Tomorrowland” the sort of movie Walt might greenlight, when Disney thaws him out.
Young Robertson gets across a nice sense of wonder in early scenes, with the spectacle of tomorrow laid before her. But her character takes Frank’s pleas too much to heart and the wonder is gone.
“Can’t you just be amazed and move on?”
Bird cooks up lots of eye candy, but the dazzle wears off, and nobody really connects emotionally.
Disney keeps shoving “dreamer” as a challenge into some of its chancier films, as if daring us not to endorse their vision. But our not hugging the boring bits of this — and there are a few — is not because we lack imagination. That’s on you, for stealing from “Men in Black.”
As much as one appreciates the idea of optimism, looking for solutions instead of bemoaning the doom-laden futility of it all, “Tomorrowland” falls short. The future isn’t what it used to be, but maybe it will, when Walt comes back.

MPAA Rating: PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and peril, thematic elements, and language

Cast: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie.

Credits: Directed by Brad Bird, script by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird. A Disney release.

Running time: 2:10

“Aloft” is a melancholy, cryptic drama that guards its secrets as if they’re the answer to some ancient riddle about the human condition.
And they’re not.
Peruvian writer-director Claudia Llosa (“The Milk of Sorrow”) landed a top flight cast, and gives this Canadian co-production an air of mystery and the feel of a glum sci-fi dystopia.
But the mystery isn’t that mysterious, and the fiction here is more mundane than scientific or fantastical.
Under perpetually grey skies, Jennifer Connelly plays Nana, an impoverished single mom taking her two little boys on a pilgrimage into the Canadian wilderness. One of the boys, the willful and stubborn Ivan (Zen McGrath) has his pet falcon with him.
They’ve joined others hitchhiking their way into the woods where, under a big Indian hogan made of twigs, sticks and vines, “The Architect Newman” (William Shimell) promises healing. Nana’s other son (Winta McGrath) is very sick.
Something happens that breaks the spirit of the day and dashes the hopes of the legions of poor and desperate parents grasping at the shaman’s straws. The Architect then suggests Nana is the true healer.
The story flashes forward 20 years as a reporter (Melanie Laurent of “Now You See Me” and “Beginners”) shows up to interview the adult Ivan (Cillian Murphy). She said she was interested in his “hybrid falcons.” What she really wants to know is where his mother is.
Llosa skips back and forth between the present quest to find Nana in the frozen north and the past events — tragic and mystical — that sent her off the grid.
Murphy is properly bitter as the adult son of a woman who “abandoned” him. Laurent maintains an air of mystery even as her true motives become clear. The Oscar winning Connelly plays a quiet desperation and world weariness, and never seems truly out of place in this world — until the movie reveals how much of a tease it is.
What are these kids suffering from, some Future Plague? Why are these poor and good looking Canadians, with one of the world’s great health care systems, seeking the help of a shaman? And who IS this hustler/healer?
“You can’t avoid pain by resisting it,” The Architect pretentiously intones.
Llosa ably blends the past with the film’s present, but dawdles as she does. And in doling out information so sparingly, she gives the viewer the same false hopes that are common currency in the shaman trade. We’re hoping something profound or at least futuristic happens. It doesn’t.
The falcon metaphor is clumsy and ill-defined, and “Aloft” is never much more than a lovely, dull cheat.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality

Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, Melanie Laurent, Oona Chaplin, William Shimell
Credits: Written and directed by Claudia Llosa. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52