Movie Nation

The telling day for any kids’ cartoon is the Saturday take, opening weekend, at the box office. It’s a full day when parents take their kids to the movies, and estimates from outfits like Deadline.com are always low, coming in Friday, because nobody there seems to take this into account.

And this movie’s commercials show just how hard it is to market. The trailers and TV spots don’t sell it, do it justice. As with “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” the texture of the stop motion animation, the dry wit of the writing and vocal performances, don’t lend themselves to a slapstick sales pitch. And it’s delightful.

So, low $20s, based on my read of the Friday take. Upper teens says Deadline.

Denzel Washington has a big hit, and a franchise-launch (a first for him) with “The Equalizer.” It cleaned up Friday and looks to clear $30 million by midnight Sunday.

This, despite the fact that Universal opened the similar but inferior “A Walk Among Tombstones” last weekend. Liam is cool, but past his “Taken” expiration date. And whatever business that film did Denzel just took away.

“This is Where I Leave You” is holding audience, thanks to the lack of competition.  Better comedies like “The Skeleton Twins” have not opened widely enough to crack the top ten.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” lingers, “Let’s Be Cops” is turning into one of the biggest comedies of the year. Go figure.

Somehow, the culture has twisted the hunt for happiness into a need to travel…the world.
Maybe that’s just Hollywood shorthand, but every Walter Mitty seems to think that “the answer” lies in an effort to “Eat, Pray, Love” your way through a lot of stamps on your passport. The movies spun from this idle, indulgent conceit are always self-satisfied excuses for movie stars and producers to span the globe for a working vacation.
Which brings us to “Hector and the Search for Happiness,” a glib and overlong tale of a frustrated London psychiatrist who sets out to do “research” to ostensibly help his patients, who are getting no happier under his care. Nor is he.
Actually, Hector (Simon Pegg) has taken to snapping at the rich housewife who whines about having to cut the number of days a week she employs a nanny. And he wonders why he’s unable to commit to his marketing guru girlfriend (Rosamund Pike). So he takes off.
He flies to China and Tibet, Africa and America, meets everyone from rich businessfolk and a Chinese “student” (Ming Zhao) to an African warlord and South America druglord (Jean Reno). He reconnects with college pals (Toni Collette among them) who have got on with the business of living.
And he takes notes.
“A lot of people think happiness means being richer or more important.” That he picks up from a rich guy (Stellan Skarsgard) who teaches him the pleasures of first class travel and exotic indulgences.
“Happiness is answering your calling.”
“Many people only see happiness in their future.”
That one seems to apply to Hector, putting off commitment when all he really needs is the simple advice from a passenger on an African flight.
“Does that person bring you predominantly A) Up or B) Down?”
These “rules” are strictly fortune cookie philosophy, and the travels — odd moments of slapstick or offhanded Pegg one-liners, exchanges with a young Buddhist monk who tells him the monastery he’s trekked to is “closed on Monday “– are trite, tried and true.
But a couple of co-stars animate the search. Jean Reno’s paranoid druglord is not the sort of fellow you want to run into in a bar, in Africa or anywhere else. He asks questions, one of which stands out.
“What’s in it for you?”
And Collette, as a college girlfriend, gets a dandy read-the-Brit-the-riot act scene.
Hector freely acknowledges he is experiencing a #richpeoplesproblem, both personally and professionally. Africans who “know how to celebrate” and embrace a really good “sweet potato stew” may have it right, fortune cookie philosophy in a nutshell.
The one touching moment is a gimme — a chance encounter with a cancer patient (Chantel Herman).
None of which add up to the catharsis the quest promises or the comedy the film supposedly is. Hector might have been better off staying at home and reading a book, which also pretty much applies to the audience, in this case.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some brief nudity
Cast: Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard, Ming Zhao, Christopher Plummer
Credits: Directed by Peter Chelsom, screenplay by Maria von Heland, Tinker, Lindsay and Peter Chelsom, based on the novel by François Lelord. A Relativity release.
Running time: 1:40

There’s something about stop motion 3D animation — the not-quite-real textures of skin and hair, the quite real cloth and metal, the subtle gloomy lighting effects — that says “spooky.”
All the best animated films with a hint of Halloween have been stop motion animation or digital efforts that duplicate that hand-molded model look — “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline.”
“The Boxtrolls” is from Laika, the studio that made “ParaNorman” and “Coraline.” This adaptation of an Alan Snow novel (“Here Be Monsters”) is inventive and fanciful and almost certainly the best animated film of the year. It’s spooky and funny and a little twisted, with a little social commentary in the “ParaNorman” style. Start to finish, it’s a delight.
The title characters are pointy-eared trolls who live in abandoned cardboard boxes and rummage through the garbage cans of Cheesebridge at night. They collect geegaws and such; door knockers, busted alarm clocks, abandoned toys. When the lights come on, they skulk inside the boxes that they wear. When the sun comes up they flee below ground where they speak Minions-style gibberish, compare notes on what they’ve collected, tinker and invent.
But they’re feared. They’ve stolen a human baby, so that must be in their diet.
“Hide your cheese,” purrs the red hatted exterminator the townsfolk have hired to wipe out the trolls. “Hide your tender and delicious babies!”
Archibald Snatcher, voiced with malevolent glee and Brit-villain intonations by Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, wants to swap his red hat for a white hat. The men who wear those white hats, led by Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris), are an exclusive lot, rich members of a secret society who do exotic cheese tastings behind closed doors.
But Lord Portley-Rind’s daughter Winnifred (Elle Fanning, with a plummy English accent) spies the Boxtrolls at work, and sees a boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright) in their ranks. There’s more to them than Snatcher is letting on, and as she gets to know the boy, “Eggs,” she and we learn something of their true nature and their history.
Animation vets Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi and their design team make the most of this 3D world. We see the light through the thin cloth brim of Snatcher’s red hat, the mangled angles of his crooked teeth, the smoke and cinders from his assorted steam-powered vehicles and the wriggling leeches one of his henchmen (voiced with great relish by Tracy Morgan, Nick Frost and Richard Ayoade) treat “The Boss” with when he’s had too much cheese.
There are grownup jokes — street names are all cheese ingredients, cheese jokes and cheese references — “What the Gouda?” And small children will delight in the gross gags; bug eating and the like.
The plot is as clockwork as the many gadgets the trolls swipe and Snatcher uses to hunt them, with hints of class warfare and fear-mongering slipped in.
The story’s English fairytale tone, English accents and setting (late Victorian) call to mind Aardman’s “Wallace and Gromit” films. Laika’s earlier efforts hinted that they’d learned from those masters of this animation style. “Boxtrolls” suggests that they’ve mastered it.

MPAA Rating: PG for action, some peril and mild rude humor
Cast: The voices of Ben Kingsley, Elle Fanning, Jared Harris, Toni Collette, Nick Frost, Tracy Morgan
Credits: Directed by Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi , screenplay by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, based on an Alan Snow novel. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:37

“The Equalizer” serves up Denzel Washington at his coolest.
Eyes weary with experience but still taking it all in, skull shaved to hide the advancing years, he still carries himself with that feline stride — the greatest, most masculine movie star walk since John Wayne’s.
He’s almost too cool for this film based on the ’80s TV series starring Edward Woodward as an ex secret agent who uses his retirement years to make the world a better place, righting one wrong at a time. Washington’s “Training Day” director treats him worshipfully, reminding us just what a treasure this Oscar winning screen hero has been for the past thirty years.
Robert McCall is a meticulous man, from the way he neatly shelves concrete mix at the home improvement warehouse store he works in to the ordered, spare apartment of shelved books and freshly-washed dishes where he lives.
He brings his own tea bag, carefully wrapped, to his favorite Boston diner when he can’t sleep, a place to read “The Old Man and the Sea” or some other novel from the list of 100 greatest books in English.
And he notices things. Like the fresh black eye that aspiring singer/teen hooker Terri’s wearing. We’ve seen he’s helpful guy, physically coaching an obese colleague to prep him for a physical for a security guard job. He tries to help Terri (Chloe Grace Moretz). And that’s when we discover the past this fastidious, working class man has been hiding.
“Got to be who we are in this world,” he says with a shrug. He sizes up a room full of Russian mobsters, the camera catching the engraved knife one thug is fingering, the bottle next to another, the corkscrew a tattooed, muscle-bound bartender is using. If we’ve seen the Robert Downey Jr. “Sherlock Holmes” movies, we know he’s working out the geometry of a brawl. We what’s coming. And it’ll be bloody.
Washington’s McCall rarely lets us see pangs of guilt, a promise he made to not return to the life of violence. And he never lets us see McCall lose his cool. He gives bad guys –crooked cops, the Russian killer (Marton Csokas) tracking him down — folksy options.
“When you pray for rain, you’ve got to deal with the mud, too.”
The villains, as they do in such morality tales, never do what’s good for them, never take the option that won’t leave them with a corkscrew in their windpipe.
Through it all, Washington’s stillness is emphasized, so much so that the film slows down just to make sure we appreciate the presence and the talent behind it.
And Fuqua, building on material even thinner than last week’s slightly inferior Liam Neeson vengeance-thriller “A Walk Among the Tombstones,” draws this out, announcing “Equalizer” as a franchise in the making.
Which is a shame. He almost turns Denzel, an invited, warmly embraced dinner guest into that guest who doesn’t know when to leave.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence and language throughout, including some sexual references
Cast: Denzel Washington, Chloe Grace Moretz, Marton Csokas
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Richard Wenk, based on the TV series. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 2:11

“Good People” is the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, a thriller that leaves no thriller trope unused, no melodramatic stone unturned, no foreshadowing un-shadowed.
Heck, it’s even got bad guys driving a Jaguar — just as the TV commercials promise.
But a good cast, some solid if gruesome action beats and a short running time mean we’ll stick with it, turning those predictable pages right up to the grand predictable finale.
James Franco and Kate Hudson are an American couple trying for a “fresh start” in London. She’s a school teacher, desperate to get pregnant. He’s a contractor/laborer who has spent their last cent restoring his grandmother’s run down house. His business in Chicago went bust, she had a miscarriage, so they moved.
But they’ve sublet the basement of their apartment to a thug, a guy who double-crossed the wrong people while robbing a Euro-drug lord (Omar Sy) of his “Liquid O” — heroin. When the double-crosser dies, the couple finds the body. And his cash stash.
That means the drug lord, who calls himself Genghis Khan, is making threats. The psychotic mobster (Sam Pruell) whose brother was one of those double-crossed and killed in the robbery is making more threats.
And the cop (Tom Wilkinson) who has been warned away from pursuing those assorted villains by his possibly corrupt boss is sure these Americans know more and possess more than they’re letting on. The cop’s daughter died of a drug overdose, by the way.
That’s a big feature of this script, based on a Marcus Sakey novel — that need to wholly motivate everybody involved. Khan wants revenge, Jack (Spruell) wants the cash, Anna (Hudson) needs in vitro fertilization money and Tom (Franco) needs to get them out from underwater, financially. And the cop wants closure.
Danish director Henrik Ruben Genz (“Terribly Happy”) can’t hide his cards and rarely even tries to. He’s stuck with a script that has “Promise you won’t kill us,” maybe the silliest line ever uttered to a murderer, but that features some dandy threats, some by the villain who doesn’t drive the Jaguar.
“Don’t you know when you find a pot of gold, there’s always a monster guarding it?”
Omar Sy stands out in this cast, smacking his lips with every Genghis Khan pun. He is “expanding my empire,” he cracks. Spruell is frightening in every second of screen time.
The beatings are fierce, the blood flows and everybody acts exactly the way characters in thrillers act, with undue bravado, blind lust for cash and easily disregarding the pain of this broken nose or that flesh wound.
Silly stuff, but you can’t help but turn the page to see if your guess as to how this all will come out is as on the money as you just know it is.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence and language
Cast: James Franco, Kate Hudson, Tom Wilkinson, Omar Sy, Sam Spruell
Credits: Directed by Henrik Ruben Genz , written by Kelly Masterson, based on the Marcus Sakey novel. A Millennium release.
Running time: 1:26

“Believe Me” has cynical, snarky frat boys who think nothing of stealing, drinking and chasing other guys’ girlfriends. It has them conning gullible true believers with a fake Christian charity, mocking the conventions of modern worship and the naivete of those attracted to it.
It has profanity.
“Christians HATE swear words,” the frat boys discover, “but LOVE swearing.”
This is not a Billy Graham brand faith-based film. It hides its intent behind a PG-13 edge. And if it’s not convincing as either a find-one’s-faith parable or clever spoof of pop Christianity, at least it’s relevant.
Sam, played by Alex Russell (“Carrie”), is a fresh-faced pledge chair of his college fraternity, a guy headed to law school if his financial aid comes through. Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”) plays the bottle-in-his-desk financial aid officer who gives him the bad news.
“Son, stop thinking about your dreams being crushed as a BAD thing…Think of this as the first day in the rest of your pathetic life!”
An evening church service gives Sam inspiration. They’re raising money for missionaries…to go to Hawaii. If Christians can be talked into sending pretty coeds to the island paradise, they can be suckered into anything, he reasons.
With several of his financially-strapped frat brothers, Sam invents a charity to provide fresh water for African villages, “Get Wells Soon.” He and his mates — Miles Fisher, Max Adler and Sinqua Walls (“Shark Night 3D”) — put on a show, make their pitch. And despite being clumsy and insincere, they score.
What’s more, veteran pitchman Ken (Christopher MacDonald), who runs a touring crusade, sees them and hires them to take their message all over the Bible Belt. On that tour, from Atlanta to Dallas, we see Tyler (Walls) emerge as the conscience of this con job, with pretty tour manager Callie (Johanna Braddy) and diva Christian rocker Gabriel (Zachary Knighton) as the only two insiders these crooks have to fool as they skim the offering plate.
The presence of Offerman, whose disdain for organized religion drips off the pages of his self-help auto-biography, “Paddle Your Own Canoe,” suggests this script might have looked like “Saved!” or “Leap of Faith,” hard-nosed satires of the Christian Industrial Complex. But the frat boys are never as rowdy as that description suggests. And their lack of concern about stealing suggests the belief that non-Christians have no clue about the difference between right and wrong.
What works, sometimes hilariously, are the “God Squad’s” power-point presentations to each other, salesmen showing their market research to reveal how to pass for true believers and fleece such believers out of their cash.
What do you do with your hands in mid-praise? There’s “the gecko” (arms stretched out at your side), “the straight jacket,” “the Shawshank” (raised up high) or “the casual five,” in which you look like “you’re high-fiving God.”
Buzzwords and phrases in sermons and prayer can quickly close the sale — “Father, Lord…Father God, Creator.”
But the cynicism is rarely sharp enough and the conversion story arc is clumsy. And frankly, the young cast is not rowdy or charismatic enough to match such vets as Offerman and MacDonald, who walk off with their scenes without even trying.
It takes a leap of faith to make “Believe Me,” notorious for an unconventional marketing strategy that seemed to offer money to critics for writing about it (not me), into anything other than a pulled punch of a comedy. It’s a “nice try” that probably won’t please either Christians or those who come to laugh at them.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language.
Cast: Alex Russell, Johanna Braddy, Miles Fisher, Christopher MacDonald, Zachary Knighton, Nick Offerman
Credits: Directed by Will Bakke, screenplay by Michael B. Allen, Will Bakke. A Gravitas release.
Running time: 1:33

You don’t have to know Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to get something out of “Days and Nights,” Christian Camargo’s adaptation of it set in rural New York in the Reagan Era ’80s. But considering how unclear the relationships are, how opaque the symbolism, how self-consciously theatrical the whole all-star affair is, understanding Anton would help.
Elizabeth (Allison Janney) is a famous actress, Peter (Camargo) is her famous filmmaker lover. They take the train from Manhattan to upstate, where they weekend in the country home of sickly Herb (William Hurt). Jean Reno is Louis, Herb’s doctor.
Eric (Ben Whishaw) is Elizabeth’s son, a would-be multi-media artist who resents Peter and lusts for Eva (Juliet Rylance), a frustrated local beauty whom he is using in his latest blend of music, dance, narration and video. She longs to escape the sticks, and if Eric can’t manage that, perhaps cozying up to Peter will help.
Alex (Katie Holmes) is a new mom, trapped in the country, married to Stephen (Mark Rylance), a state ornithologist who is monitoring an eagle’s nest on the property and warning the others of changes in the climate.
Mary (Cherry Jones) is married to the daft, gun-happy Johan, played by Michael Nyqvist of the Swedish “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), a guy whose malapropisms and quick dismissal of incidents, accidents and injuries wear on everyone.
“Johan, WHY do you have to do that?”
“What?”
“APPEAR.”
It’s 1984, and Ronald Reagan’s TV scary “Bear in the woods” TV ads are on TV and Herb, when he’s not being pushed around the estate in a little red wagon by the local children, dances to Supertramp.
Frustrated people start coupling or re-coupling, or at the very least getting under each other’s skin. Eric and Eva put on their show, to Elizabeth’s catty derision. She also mocks Peter’s possible interest in Eva, and Eric takes out his frustration over this with one and all.
Camargo has dabbled in a little symbolism of his own in adapting this — the eagle-Reagan Era connection. An actor (“The Hurt Locker”, TV’s “Dexter”) turned director, he’s the blandest presence on screen, here. Janney is beautifully caustic and vain, Whishaw is properly infuriating, Hurt is colorfully daft and Nyqvist all but steals the movie with his bemused, fractured line readings and droll arched eyebrow at all these artsy city folk.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Define…hurt.”
The sylvan setting and short bursts of dramatic interplay are more interesting than coherent in this brief, undeveloped adaptation. All I could think of watching it was how many equally pointless indie films have seemed to come into being simply because some filmmaker had access to “a country house.” As Chekhov did.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, adult situations
Cast: William Hurt, Allison Janney, Christian Camargo, Katie Holmes, Ben Whishaw, Jean Reno, Michael Nyqvist
Credits: Written and directed by Christian Camargo. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:31

They marched into battle — the oldest were teenagers — in parade order, and charged the enemy like the schoolboys they were. And when the smoke had cleared, there were shoes — sucked off their feet in the mud, torn from bodies yanked by cannonballs, minieballs and bayonets.
“Field of Lost Shoes” is about one of the more storied minor battles of the Civil War, when cadets from the Virginia Military Institute were hurled into action to stop a Union invasion of their corner of the Shenandoah Valley. It’s a sentimental, sometimes moving affair, an old fashioned and conventional young-men-at-war film. It is also at times a reminder of how hard it is to manage a decent Civil War movie on a limited budget, and how hard it is, even today, to tell a Civil War tale untainted by revisionism.
Seven friends, six upper classmen and a freshman “Brother Rat” (Nolan Gould), study and drill at the elite school up until the day in May of 1864 that they’re summoned to save General Lee’s flank by marching from Lexington to New Market.
John Wise (Luke Benward) is a governor’s son. A descendant of Thomas Jefferson (Parker Croft) is in their ranks, the artistic Moses Ezekiel, “our resident Jew” (Josh Zuckerman) is the best shot.
Sam Atwill (Max Lloyd-Jones) falls in love with a local girl — played by Mary Mouser. Lauren Holley plays her mom.
The boys haze, tussle, talk about honor, debate the merits of the conflict and make deals with the kindly slave (Keith David) who runs the school bakery. Old Judge is wise.
“Old men make the promises. Young men got to pay’em.”
Eventually, the young men are called to do just that.
The younger players are adequate, and “star” casting helps in some other instances. Jason Isaacs is a properly droll General Breckinridge, the former vice president who took up arms for the Confederacy.
“Wake up, Yankees. Time for breakfast!”
But a mere look-alike plays Lincoln, Tom Skerritt is decades too old to manage the bluster of U.S. Grant. David Arquette does a lot of shouting as a Union artillery officer.
The battle itself is nicely staged and grimly personal. Hand to hand combat in the mud is not a pretty affair.
But even though the film is not revisionist, it comes darned close. Cadets sympathetically help slaves at every turn, even though this was the patrician class that insisted upon the war and the preservation of that “peculiar institution.”
Wise’s father, Gov. Henry Wise, is painted as anti-slavery, anti-secessionist. This is patently false. Governor Henry Wise was a rabid secessionist, even though his son became a post-war moderate in Virginia politics.
“Soul Surfer” director Sean McNamara may not have had the budget to deliver the scope and sheen of a Technicolor epic. This is no “Red Badge of Courage,” more a small scale “Gettysburg.” But he and his cast serve up enough lump-in-the-throat moments to ensure “Field of Lost Shoes” will at least go over in Daughters of the Confederacy meetings from this day forward, especially in the Old Dominion.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for war violence and some thematic elements
Cast: Luke Benward, Jason Isaacs, Max Lloyd-Jones, Keith David, Lauren Holley, David Arquette, Nolan Gould, Tom Skerrit, Mary Mouser, Josh Zuckerman
Credits: Directed by Sean McNamara, written by Thomas Farrell and David Kennedy. An Arc Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:35

Here’s how you make a movie about Jimi Hendrix without the participation of his fractious/litigious estate.
You frame it within a brief window, just when his fame was blossoming. The film opens in 1966, when he was an anonymous side man playing New York clubs, and ends just before his incendiary breakthrough performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967. That lets you avoid legal action from his family, which wasn’t going to be portrayed in a flattering light.
And since that family didn’t grant music rights, for performance scenes you recreate traces of a few of his great early cover songs, “Wild Thing,” and a memorable blast through “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Maybe “Jimi: All is By My Side” is as good a Jimi Hendrix bio-pic as we’ll ever get, at least so long as there are legal entanglements strangling the late guitar god’s legacy. It’s not as giddy or all-encompassing as “Great Balls of Fire” or “Get On Up.” This is more a sketch, just one telling chapter in his life, rather like what “Backbeat” did with the early Beatles.
“All is By My Side” is an artistic overreach for Oscar winning screenwriter John Ridley (“12 Years A Slave”), turned writer-director here. He strains to set the scene, peppering the film with news footage of Mod London, the TV shows of the era including those where bands such as The Animals performed. He rarely finds the pop art in this florid, musically inventive Sgt. Pepper’s era.
But he scored one great coup landing Andre Benjamin, Outkast singer and sometime actor (“Be Cool”) as Hendrix. He’s older than Hendrix ever was — close to 40, when Hendrix died at 27. But he nails the voice, the laid-back flower child vibe. This is the Hendrix of flaky TV appearances, dreamy sci-fi idealist and free spirit with only hints of the drink that made him a mean, abusive drunk, or the drugs that killed him at the peak of his fame.
Ridley tells the story mainly through the eyes of the British women who entered Jimi’s life. Linda Keith (Imogen Poots) is a posh, spoiled Brit model who frets that the only thing anyone will remember her for is being Keith Richards’ girlfriend. But she knows genius when she hears and sees it, even if Jimmy, as he was then-known, was just a sideman for R&B singer Curtis Knight, picking at his bad complexion and snapping gum in between show-off solos.
Keith urges reluctant people in the business to check Hendrix out, finds him a manager and nags him to take the stage “like you actually want to amount to something.”
Andrew Buckley plays Chas Chandler, who quit as bassist for The Animals to bring Jimi to Britain and spends his last dime making him a star. Burn Gorman makes a feral impression as later manager Michael Jefferey, who changes “Jimmy” to “Jimi.”
Hayley Atwell is Kathy Etchingham, the short-tempered working class groupie who became Jimi’s steady girlfriend, much to the chagrin of Linda Keith.
But it is Benjamin who pulls this film out of its formulaic rut with his mastery of the Hendrix onstage mystique and offstage patter in that sort of quizzical Dylan-Meets-Andy-Warhol voice. They’re auditioning drummers for The Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Mitch Mitchell may be too intense.
“You can’t knock a cat for bein’ fierce!”
British bobbies (cops) hassle the inter-racial couple, Jimi and Kathy, for walking hand-in-hand.
“What are we about? Nothing. EVERYthing.”
Interviewers are mesmerized by him – “When the power of love takes over the love of power, that’s when things will change.”
Whatever the film’s other virtues, Benjamin’s Hendrix makes sure we all “look at that pimp with the backwards guitar” every moment he’s on screen.

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and some drug content
Cast: Andre Benjamin, Imogen Poots, Hayley Atwell, Burn Gorman
Credits: Written and directed by John Ridley. An XLrator Media release.
Running time: 1:57

The Hungarian World War II film “The Notebook” makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable, a tale of compassionate, city-bred twins who teach themselves the cruelty they need in order to survive the horrors of war.
The pre-teen boys — whose names we never learn — are inseparable. That’s why their mother (Gyöngyvér Bognár) refuses to split them up even though their father (Ulrich Matthes) says “twins are too conspicuous in wartime.”
So in the last summer of the war, she takes them to the Hungarian countryside, to the border farm where her estranged mother (Piroska Molnárnt) eeks out an existence.
The lads — played by Lazlso and Andras Gyemant — silently witness the hatred the two women have for each other, tearfully watch their mother leave and begin a grueling existence there. The locals call the old lady a witch, and we can believe it. She slaps them, calls the kids “swine, idiots, bastards” and locks them out of the house that first night.
But they learn to do chores and how to handle the old lady. They train themselves to not flinch at pain by having violent slap fights. They learn to steal from a neighbor girl they call “Harelip.” They find a soldier in the woods, and resolve to fast as long as he did, without dying as he does. They practice being deaf and being blind, to sharpen their connection.
They force themselves to forget the mother that they’re sure has forgotten them. And they practice cruelty, on each other, chickens and the old witch.
The boys — who regard grandma, the pedophile SS officer who takes over part of the farm, the amoral priest and other hateful locals with the same emotionless scowl — are a chilling pair. Whatever one thinks of the predilections of boys of that age, we totally buy kids turning into what these lads become in the horrors of war.
The beatings they endure are hard to watch, the deaths they witness are both expected and unexpected. And their behavior is sometimes as illogical as their mother’s.
Everybody thinks granny poisoned granddad. Yet this is who Mom leaves them with?
“The Notebook,” in Hungarian with English subtitles, benefits from a spare, percussive score that underlines the sudden bursts of violence. The effects are simple, obvious and effective. Air raids consist of shadows of planes, the roar of engines and fake-looking bomb blasts.
There is rough justice to this tale, based on an Agota Kristof novel. But there’s just as much injustice, a kind of heartless expediency that only writers who need to illustrate how war hardens children could dream up, and that only children forced to imitate the most recent adult behaviors they witness — carnal, venal, racist or kind — would find acceptable.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violent and sexual content, nudity and language
Cast: László Gyémánt, András Gyémá, Piroska Molnárnt
Credits: Directed by János Szász, screenplay by János Szász, András Szekér and Tom Abrams, based on the Agota Kristof novel . A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:52