Yet another story about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, this time presented from the viewpoint of an impressionable teenager witnessing the final days of their cat-and-mouse camaraderie, Vincent D’Onofrio’s film is a maudlin, violent affair that wants us both to admire and to understand the two Old West luminaries, but all it really does is remind us that famous people should seldom if ever be seen as role models.

Jake Schur plays Rio Cutler, a 14-year-old who intervenes in a fight between his mother, Mirabel (Jenny Gabrielle, “Only the Brave”), and father, Pete (Keith Jardine, “Logan”), and accidentally shoots him to death. Pete’s brother Grant (Chris Pratt) shows up full of grief and fury, but Rio stabs him and flees into the New Mexico wilderness with his sister, Sara (Leila George, “Mortal Engines”). But before they can find safe haven, Rio and Sara find themselves in the same hideout as Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan), who unfortunately has Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke) and a fleet of deputies hot on his heels.

Watch Video: 'Westworld' a Sitcom? Watch Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden Give It a Silly Spin

Apprehended and brought to a nearby town for safekeeping, Sara manufactures a story to lower Pat’s suspicions and hopefully to score them a police escort to safer territory. But when members of local law enforcement uninterested in due process become determined to make Billy pay for his crimes, Rio and Sara are caught between Billy and Pat as the former plots an escape attempt and the latter hardens his resolve to bring Billy to justice. Grant arrives to further complicate matters, kidnapping Sara and forcing Rio to grow up a lot faster than he’s ready to as he sets out to rescue his sister.

Written by Andrew Lanham (“The Shack”), “The Kid” trots out every Western cliché in the book and mashes them together in the hopes that audiences won’t notice there’s nothing original about its take on any of them. There’s the gregarious, guilt-stricken Billy, clinging to his last shred of humanity as he fumbles through mood swings with a combination of delusion and self-rationalization; rigid moralist Pat Garrett, who soon realizes that the “law of the west” possesses a few more shades of grey than the rules that he’s sworn to uphold; three groups of underlings and followers — Billy’s, Pat’s, and Grant’s — who exude obedience but largely exist to get in front of the bullets meant for their leaders; and Rio, a whiny, naive kid reckoning with the inhumanity and consequences of adulthood after absorbing the contradictory lessons of his would-be mentors.

Also Read: Tessa Thompson Western 'Little Woods' Roped in by Neon

Together, it’s a tedious, noisy slog. DeHaan, seeming ever more like an actor who was promised a career primarily because he looks like a much more talented one, mistakes volume for charisma, and his manic-depressive shtick as Billy quickly grows tiresome. Hawke is shrewd enough to underplay Garrett’s world-weariness, but he’s repeatedly hamstrung by a sense of pacing that suggests that the priority was getting through each scene as quickly as possible. Consequently, the movie repeatedly alludes to their respective legends, but neither satisfactorily provides intriguing, relatable details, nor bolsters them with feats of glory, greatness or even street-level poetry. The movie searches for charm and melancholy in their tête-a-tête, but instead finds a pathetic kind of repetition — if we weren’t fighting, what else would we do? — that could have opened up a completely new direction had it been intentional.

And then there’s Rio, a blank slate upon which Billy and Pat project their worldviews. Their dialectic unfolds a bit like Elias, Barnes and Chris in “Platoon,” albeit thankfully without the overt religious metaphors. But Oliver Stone had a hellish plot tying those three men together, and each character in D’Onofrio’s film is in his own story.

Perhaps more like Luke Skywalker scampering after Obi-Wan Kenobi, Rio admires these newfound father figures and yearns for their freedom and authority as much as he fears their adult world, but he lacks Hamill’s deliberate petulance, and rushes towards the movie’s eventual flip — he learns to be strong so that Sara can be weak — without earning the growth, much less understanding it.

Also Read: 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs' Film Review: Coen Brothers Western Anthology Makes for an Uneven Binge

Cinematically, D’Onofrio shows tremendous improvement as a director in his first film since 2010’s “Don’t Go in the Woods,” an almost unwatchable mess of horror clichés. This is watchable, just not very good. If you’re going to make a Western in 2019, then you need to figure out what you’re going to say about one of cinema’s oldest genres, if only to avoid mixing a lot of conflicting messages and themes.

I’m sure there’s a fresh approach to be found with the history surrounding Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, whether it’s based in the truth, pure legend or even in metaphor.

“It doesn’t matter what’s true,” Garrett observes in the film. “What matters is the story they tell when you’re gone.” But that lesson is something that D’Onofrio failed to heed himself, which is why “The Kid” never tells a story, true or false, that matters.

Vincent D'Onofrio Asks Twitter Followers If It's OK to Play an 'Irredeemable Racist' Right Now

Stacey Abrams, Elisabeth Moss and Ethan Hawke Added as SXSW Speakers

Chris Pratt to Star in Taylor Sheridan's Upcoming Thriller

'Emerald City' Star Vincent D'Onofrio Reveals Why He Joined Series Before Reading The Script

Duplass plays Michael, a copy-shop clerk with one friend, his upstairs neighbor Andy (Romano). Notwithstanding their separate apartments, the duo spends virtually every free minute together, mostly rewatching the same kung fu movie while eating frozen pizza, but occasionally venturing outside to play an invented sport called “paddleton” which involves hitting a racquetball off of the screen of an abandoned drive-in movie theater into a barrel.

After Michael’s cancer diagnosis proves inoperable, he decides to commit medically-assisted suicide and asks Andy to join him on the six-hour drive to the nearest pharmacy that will fill his prescription. But after the two of them acquire the pharmaceutical cocktail Michael needs in order to escape his increasing pain, Andy becomes less sure that he wants to watch his best friend kill himself and not-so-slyly begins a campaign to keep him from the medication he needs.

Also Read: Apple's Morning Show Drama Series Adds Nestor Carbonell and Mark Duplass

As familiar as the concept may be of watching two awkward, maybe-not-so-smart adult men navigate a gently dysfunctional friendship, Lehmann, working from a script co-written by Duplass, manages to elevate what could have been an improvisational exercise or sophomoric retread into something delicate and substantial without leaning too heavily on the natural melodrama of his premise.

Michael and Andy are two lonely, average men without any real professional or social prospects, and the protective routine of their friendship rings with real human authenticity, especially after Andy begins to realize that he’s on the verge of losing the only person with whom he feels he can freely communicate. Michael, an admitted failure as a spouse and sibling, seems to embrace the occasionally puerile but mostly earnest interactions he shares with Andy, enjoying their simplicity together, their shared interests, and their unvarnished honesty — even when Andy is embellishing, or clearly lying.

Watch Video: Jon Hamm's Impression of Ray Romano Playing Golf Is Simply the Best

Romano has played a number of versions of this role in the past, but as the comedian edges further away from his sitcom days, he seems to find different ways to bring a guy like Andy to life. Here, he’s less affable but more realistic; a guy who hates small talk and daydreams about the inspirational halftime speech he intends to sell one day to some unlucky coach, he finds a soulmate in Michael via their mutual surrender to the challenges of more serious relationships or the outside world as a whole. Romano lets Andy be obnoxious, but the actor tenders those abrasive edges with an almost childlike commitment to his friend that manifests itself as often as true compassion as it does petulance or selfishness.

Duplass, meanwhile, seems to enjoy purely the rapport between Michael and Andy. Michael has clearly had a few more adult experiences than Andy, but Duplass never plays him as condescending or superior, instead just in a sort of constant admiration for his friend, even when he’s behaving like, well, a little kid. As co-screenwriter, he gives Romano’s character the more interesting journey, but as an actor it’s his character’s consistency — his appreciation and acceptance of Andy’s shortcomings — that facilitates his BFF’s incremental growth.

Also Read: Is Netflix's $25 Million-Plus Oscar Campaign for 'Roma' a Game Changer?

Simultaneously, a small coterie of supporting performances, including Dendrie Taylor (“Saving Mr. Banks”) as a bohemian hotel clerk and Kadeem Hardison (“Black Monday”) as an empathetic pharmacist, subtly test Andy’s insular worldview and provide the duo with opportunities to showcase their sometimes-discordant chemistry.

Lehmann doesn’t offer much of a take on assisted suicide except for “if you’re going to commit suicide, make sure someone who truly cares assists you,” and it’s his subtle observations about the way the two characters know and understand one another that makes their final moments feel almost shockingly powerful. But as a snapshot of two guys with enough self-awareness to joke about being “weirdos,” or a vignette about that quiet neighbor (or couple) in your apartment complex who comes and goes without making an impression, “Paddleton” is quietly funny and full of compassion — the kind of movie that, much like its characters, feels likely to get overlooked or ignored but proves surprisingly rewarding once you make the effort to look past its surface.

Ray Romano Explains What He 'Borrowed' From Brian Grazer to Play 'Washed-Up' Producer on 'Get Shorty'

Mark Duplass Apologizes for Praising Right-Wing Pundit Ben Shapiro: 'That Tweet Was a Disaster'

Jay and Mark Duplass Sign New 4-Picture Deal With Netflix

'Blue Jay' Review: Sarah Paulson and Mark Duplass Shine in Actors' Showcase

Following in the footsteps of the fly-on-the-wall “11/8/16,” a dozen or more other big- and small-screen documentary works, and the ever-expanding library of print profiles chronicling the president’s base’s feelings of cultural and political disaffectedness, filmmaker James D. Stern delivers his own version of this now extremely familiar story, that of Trump’s ascendance through the eyes of a liberal voter, one who never thought in a million years that Hillary Clinton would lose when he compassionately decided to offer a platform for their views.

Stern, a film producer (“Snowden”) and documentarian (“Every Little Step”), puts himself in front of the camera as he canvasses Trump supporters across the U.S. for their feelings about what made him such a lightning rod for “ordinary Americans” in the days leading up to the 2016 election. The Chicago native makes his incredulity about Trump’s candidacy clear early on, but also suggests that liberals like himself have been too contemptuous, or dismissive, of the issues that have rallied Red-State voters to his side. Consequently, and with the expectation that Trump will not prevail, he decides to “not yell at them, but to just listen to them” in exactly the same way that The New York Times and many others have as the events of his presidency have unfolded.

Watch Video: Colbert Warns Carolina Residents That Trump Is 'Prepared to Make You the Next Puerto Rico'

Occasionally adding his own perspective, alongside comments from a variety of experts in different fields (climate change, sociology, etc.), Stern attends viewing parties and watches from within rallies as Trump fires up his base with each new exaggeration or outright lie about Clinton’s compounding evil, virtually all of which has now become right-wing boilerplate. The individuals with whom he speaks range from conservative radio hosts to displaced West Virginia coal workers, each offering a slightly different answer but one sharing a common theme: They demand to be accommodated in an America where they do not need to accommodate anyone else. Gun control, coal production, border security, political corruption and xenophobia are among the issues that they consider important, but in almost all cases, their arguments are founded on a combination of specious information in terms both of the problem and its solution.

Meanwhile, the specter of Obama and his would-be successor Clinton is ever-present as a bogeyman to indoctrinate these simple small-town folk into a terrible, kinder, gentler world where they might have to acknowledge that the Great America they want re-made perhaps wasn’t for everyone quite the way they want to remember it.

Watch Video: Seth Meyers Doesn't Have High Hopes for How Our 'Callous, Incompetent Moron' President Will Handle Hurricane Florence

Particularly just two weeks after the release of “Active Measures,” an essential documentary that draws explicit lines between Putin’s rise to power and Trump’s evolution between the 1980s and today, the anecdotal approach of “American Chaos” feels positively quaint by comparison. Like many of its other well-intentioned brethren, including “11/8/16,” Stern’s film basically serves as a chronicle of one liberal’s disbelief and disillusionment as election night dashes all of his ideals about the progress he thought our country had made.

Almost two years later, though, who needs or wants to see that? For those people, the news cycle is a nonstop horror show of inhumanity, so a Ralph Wiggum-style freeze frame of the moment their hearts first broke is probably unwelcome. And as evidenced by a series of Skype conversations conducted post-election, his subjects feel validated and their support of Trump is stronger than ever, so who cares how their opponents feel?

Also Read: Stormy Daniels Has Written Tell-All Book 'Full Disclosure'

In which case, perhaps “American Chaos” — whose self-parodic title would fit in perfectly with the name of some fake movie by Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Who Is America” alter ego Dr. Nira Cain-N’Degeocello — should serve as an object lesson for liberal filmmakers, if not also liberals themselves. Maybe don’t wait for two years into Trump’s presidency to release your portrait of the people who put him in office; both you, and your viewers, know who they are now. Bank that footage and wait until after it’s over, whatever happens, and then go back and find your subjects and ask them how they feel about their candidate and his accomplishments in office in relation to their needs and priorities. Did he bring back your job as a coal worker? Has he secured the borders and made you feel safer? Has his rampant criminality undermined or made you question your support for Trump? Has he brought back the America you believe was great? Do you now feel heard and recognized?

Ultimately, “American Chaos” isn’t bad, it’s just kind of too late to do any real good. As Stern himself observes, Trump supporters “want to take America back to a time that no longer is viable,” but that’s basically what all of these films want as well: a time before Trump. And just like all of the others by liberals about the election, Stern’s film desperately yearns for a redemptive or hopeful conclusion for what amounts to them to a waking nightmare. But the only way to achieve that conclusion is, unfortunately, to wait for it and, where possible, take the steps of policy and strategy to make it happen.

Until then, what we probably need are fewer reflective post-mortems on history that’s already been decided, much less covered exhaustively in every available medium, and a little more holding of feet to the fire of truth — in which case, start with the soul-searching filmmakers, move on to their subjects, and then, try to make real progress from there.

'Black-ish' Creator Kenya Barris: I Left Disney for Netflix Over Shelved Anti-Trump Episode

Trump Called Out for Fist-Pumping on Way to 9/11 Memorial in Pennsylvania

Kimmel: Trump Talks About the Woodward Book So Much 'He Must Be Getting a Piece of the Profits'

Seth Meyers: Trump 'Sounds Like Sherlock Holmes After a Concussion' Talking About NYT Op-Ed (Video)

“White Boy Rick,” director Yann Demange’s account of the young, wasted life of real-life teen drug dealer and FBI informant Richard Wershe Jr., is punctuated by surprising verisimilitude that uplifts a latter-day “Scared Straight” premise beyond the boundaries of the A-list cast brought in to bolster its prestige. But it’s Merritt’s devastatingly authentic turn as a kid propelled by good intentions and naïve ambition to scuttle his own life in order to create a better one for his family that makes Demange’s follow-up to the critically-acclaimed “’71” a frequently indelible cinematic experience, charged with unique energy and impact even when its premise is overly familiar.

Wershe Jr.’s story begins at age 14, when he was hustling dealers at Michigan gun shows on behalf of his father, Richard Sr. (Matthew McConaughey), and then turning around to sell unregistered AK-47s to Detroit drug lords like Lil’ Man (Jonathan Majors) and his teenage lieutenants. It doesn’t take much time for the FBI to connect the dots between the source of the guns and the crimes committed with them, so Agents Snyder (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Byrd (Rory Cochrane) offer Rick a deal in exchange for protection of his father: buy — and later sell — drugs so they and a local police officer (Brian Tyree Henry) can create a paper trail to nab the “real” crooks. He reluctantly agrees but winds up getting shot after Lil’ Man discovers that he’s working with the authorities.

Watch Video: Watch Matthew McConaughey Play the Bongo Shirtless in NSFW 'The Beach Bum' Trailer

Rick’s gunshot injury waylays his decision to go back to school, where he’s considered too dangerous to be around other students. But after finding out that he’s inadvertently fathered a daughter with Brenda (Kyanna Simone Simpson), a former classmate, and that his sister Dawn (Bel Powley) is on skid row addicted to drugs, he convinces Rick Sr. to let him sell drugs in order to lift the Wershe family out of debt and give them an opportunity for some sense of normalcy. He soon discovers the very adult consequences of his actions when Snyder and Byrd arrest him and threaten a life sentence unless he helps once again — this time to catch a local politician they believe has underworld connections.

Written by Andy Weiss (“Punk’d”) and Logan and Noah Miller (“Sweetwater”), “White Boy Rick” is leavened with more humor than you might expect, and it’s a welcome flavor offered frequently enough in this tragic story that the whole thing doesn’t feel like an unrelenting downer; one imagines it’s hard to make drug addiction and poverty seem even occasionally amusing, but throw McConaughey and Powley in scene together, bickering over going out for frozen custard as a family, and there’s a funny, humanistic spark here that films like “Black Mass” seem to lack.

What’s further interesting about their approach to this true story is the matter-of-factness with which it’s told from this kid’s point of view: he’s neither a wholesome, corruptible innocent nor a calculating criminal in training, but a kid who’s watched his dad’s lifelong, feckless hustle, and learned how to survive — and occasionally, profit — from a perspective adjacent to and occasionally outside the law.

Also Read: Sorry, Parrotheads! Matthew McConaughey's 'The Beach Bum' Trailer Misspells Jimmy Buffett's Name

Although Rick is driven by the desire to reunite his family, and he certainly enjoys the spoils of his particular vocation, the movie never belabors the Wershes’ financial straits nor preys upon them to make more grandiose observations about blue-collar desperation, Detroit (then or now) or more broadly, The Failure of The American Dream. Liberated from direct connections to those larger themes, Rick’s story seems like one of simple fallibility, the misguided notions of a kid who in some cases is misled, and others make actively dangerous choices because the struggle to keep his family together becomes too exasperating to bear.

That feels much more relatable and powerful than any sort of deliberate cultural commentary, especially amplified through the performances of Merritt and the rest of the cast. (At the same time, not one but two separate conversations make the observation it would be “better” if Rick killed someone than sold them drugs, because the criminal penalty would be lower, which is certainly something to think about in the justice system both of the 1980s, when this all happened, and right now.)

Acting can be a tricky thing, and sometimes it can just be a trick, but Merritt has the gift of naturalism, be it an act of design or accident, that cannot be taught. He literally never brings more to a moment than is needed, instead absorbing his surroundings much like Rick must have, processing what next step to take, and reacting with a combination of pragmatism and quiet, buried hope. McConaughey is sort of a perfect foil for this sort of performance (he gives a lot of showy energy), but it works here because it makes Rick seem like his whole life has been an act of observation, the receding background of his father’s flamboyant failures, finally come to bear in his son’s self-destructive choices. Powley further feels like an alchemic combination for this family unit, transcending drug-addict clichés to play a young woman able to turn her desperate need for help into a constant source of gallows humor.

Also Read: Reminder: 'Titanic' Almost Starred Matthew McConaughey and Gwyneth Paltrow (Podcast)

The movie’s sense of place, both geographic and cultural, is similarly specific, but it feels more like a mixtape of atmospheres than the encyclopedic jukebox of Scorsese or his imitators; a soundtrack of pre-hip-hop tracks (such as Bob James’ “Take Me To Mardi Gras”) and early rap classics (Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full”) provide more or less seamless interstitial music from one stage of his criminal career to the next. But again, what ultimately makes “White Boy Rick” so special is Merritt’s performance, and the promise, the hope that other filmmakers will find the right use for his brand of unforced realism in front of the camera, the sense that he’s not “acting” but actually is the character at his core.

All of which is why frightening future delinquents may be one of the sociocultural motives for this particular type of storytelling, but the artistic effect here is nothing short of inspiring; history has already been made, no matter what — including nothing — Merritt does next.

IFC Midnight Acquires Bel Powley's Fantasy Horror 'Wildling' Ahead of SXSW

Matthew McConaughey 'Making Noises' Supercut May Be the Best Thing You See All Day (Video)

Matthew McConaughey Goes Shirtless Again in 'Serenity' Thriller Trailer (Video)

Matthew McConaughey Delivers 4,500 Turkeys to Families in Kentucky on His Birthday (Videos)

The formidable Jennifer Garner has already shouldered her fair share of badass characters, so the toughness required of her character here is entirely believable. But a script that seems to have been assembled by algorithm, plus routine direction by “Taken” helmer Pierre Morel, hobbles what might have been a moderately rousing (if in no way original) transformation story.

Garner plays Riley North, a vigilante carving a path of destruction across southern California motivated by the deaths of her husband Chris (Jeff Hephner, NBC’s “Chicago Med”) and Carly (Cailey Fleming, Young Rey in “The Force Awakens”) five years earlier at the hands of drug lord Diego Garcia (Juan Pablo Raba, “Narcos”). Furious at the inactivity and indifference of a legal system unwilling to prosecute the men responsible, Riley targets not only the criminals but also the attorneys and judges whose delinquency enabled the killers to go free.

Watch Video: Jennifer Garner Tries to Outdo 'American Pie' With Her Own 'One Time at Band Camp' Story

Vanishing from her old life — from any activity that could identify her to authorities — Riley conspires to exact her own brand of justice, even as police detectives Stan Carmichael (John Gallagher Jr.) and Moises Beltran (John Ortiz) are reluctant to pin a series of brutal murders on a grieving housewife. But when FBI agent Lisa Inman (Annie Ilonzeh, “Person of Interest”) shows up with incontrovertible evidence of her ongoing vendetta, Carmichael and Beltran race to apprehend her before she kills again, even as a possible mole in the police force working for Garcia threatens to undermine their investigation.

The movie opens on the rooftop of a downtown Los Angeles parking deck where, through some clumsy misdirection, a brutal fight in a car between Riley and one of her family’s killers initially looks like a couple making love, complete with fogged-up windows. It’s not clear why this choice was made, but then again, it’s not especially clear why any of the ones in the script by Chad St. John (“London Has Fallen”) were. Everything — including the action sequences, flashbacks and even the twists — feels half-considered, like somebody thought they could make a dumb story smart, or was forced to do the opposite.

Also Read: That 'Love, Simon' Crucial Mother-Son Coming-Out Scene Almost Didn't Happen

Take Riley’s grease-monkey husband, for instance; it’s his potential involvement in a robbery that leads Garcia to their door, but after explicitly turning down the gig, exactly how and why does Garcia find out who he is to exact his retribution? Not to mention Riley’s entire journey from Devastated Mother to Expert Fighter, Shooter and Thief: that’s the movie to make, not one that focuses almost exclusively on the set-up of her vendetta, skips ahead five years and then haphazardly shuffles through some but not all of the people she blames for the crime and its irresolution.

Meanwhile, is it a good idea in 2018 for almost every one of the villains in the film to be written as and portrayed by Latinos? Probably not, but it’s easy. Of course, that could very easily be the guiding principle of the entire production, given that “Peppermint” glosses over everything that might actually be interesting about its central character and her journey to provide the quickest and most superficial gratification to audiences intrigued by its premise.

Morel, whose movies are brisk, stylish and mostly stupid, grafts late-era Tony Scott style onto Riley’s experiences (complete with double-exposure, speed-up-slow-down transitions) that lack his predecessor’s panache and, with the exception of a handful of hard-working performances, Scott’s compassionate eye behind the camera.

Also Read: David Tennant Joins Jennifer Garner on Lena Dunham HBO Series 'Camping'

Garner, of course, is the film’s anchor, and she slogs through its brutality with as much dignity as it ever might possess; Riley is predictably superhuman, but the actress’ instincts to pause occasionally for reflection in the midst of the mayhem — a glimmer of her character’s residual humanity — give the story a vestige of dimensionality. On the other hand, John Ortiz, a stalwart character actor deserving of better challenges than he’s given here, contributes a quite frankly remarkable performance in the face of insurmountable jaded-cop-roused-to-care boilerplate.

The irony of their genuinely good work is that I’d eagerly watch a prequel about either of these two characters — her hardening her resolve, him losing his idealism — but the present-day action of Morel’s film does neither of them justice. But that idea, good or bad, would probably be harder to pull off than to saddle them with routine fight choreography and cliché-laden dialogue, which is why, rather than a fresh, female-driven alternative to all of those “angry man seeks vengeance” movies, “Peppermint” ultimately possesses the stale predictability of an unwrapped candy discovered at the bottom of a purse.

'Destroyer' Film Review: Nicole Kidman Is Repulsively Brilliant in Hardcore Action Flick

'Star Wars' Female Action Figures Are 'Flying Off Shelves' Despite #WheresRey Outrage, Retailers Say

Activists, Experts in Hollywood Demand Action to Achieve Greater Gender Equity

'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' Film Review: Chloë Grace Moretz Plays a Rebellious Lesbian Teen

On film, it has all of the weird, irresponsible potential of a “Boondock Saints” franchise, insisting that there’s something substantial, cultural climate be damned, in its punky adolescent fantasy about an orphaned black kid who finds a laser pistol. Featuring Dennis Quaid, Zoe Kravitz and Carrie Coon in roles that define “thankless” as Jack Reynor (“Sing Street”) and newcomer Myles Truitt (“Queen Sugar”) soldier bravely through misshapen rhythms of quasi-futuristic fraternal bonding, “Kin” feels like a level up for its co-directors from a short film that was too ambitiously envisioned as a franchise.

Truitt plays Elijah Solinski, the adopted son of Hal (Quaid) and brother of Jimmy (Reynor), an ex-con whose recent stint in prison racked up $60,000 in debt to Taylor Bolek (Franco), a local gun runner. Suspended from school for fighting, Elijah earns money stripping wiring from the walls of local buildings, where one day he finds what looks like a laser pistol, and only he seems to be able to operate it.

Also Read: Jack Reynor Joins Ruth Bader Ginsburg Biopic 'On The Basis of Sex'

Hal finds out and goes apoplectic; he doesn’t want his adopted son to follow Jimmy’s path, and he’s replaced tenderness and understanding with strict discipline in the wake of his wife’s death. But while doling out a life lesson to Elijah in the hopes of keeping him on the straight and narrow, Hal intercepts Jimmy and Taylor stealing from his safe, and in an ensuing firefight Jimmy, gets out — but Hal doesn’t.

With Taylor hot on their heels, Jimmy tells Elijah that they’re going on a family vacation, and Hal will join them later. Making off with his father’s money, the two of them head towards Lake Tahoe and begin to bond, simultaneously crossing paths with Milly (Kravitz), a stripper happy to liberate herself from an unhappy job. But as the authorities begin to investigate the robbery at Hal’s office, Jimmy grows less and less sure how to tell Elijah that their father is dead, especially given the fact that Taylor is determined to kill them even if they aren’t apprehended by police.

Also Read: 'Big Little Lies': Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz to Return for Season 2

But after Elijah uses the laser pistol to get the trio out of a jam, it alerts two mysterious leather-clad strangers to their location, leading to an intense confrontation — between the three fugitives, Taylor and his crew, the cops, and these new pursuers — that has ramifications far deeper than Jimmy, or especially Elijah, could ever imagine.

Notwithstanding the questionable optics of a 14-year-old black kid wielding (what looks like) a toy gun while cops chase him across the country, most of the race-related issues in “Kin” are either driven by naïveté or overshadowed by much more significant narrative or performance problems. Primarily, there’s the issue of an adopted kid, Elijah, whose birth parents he never knew, raised by an adoptive mother who died and a father who seems pathologically incapable of compassion, who them himself dies. Jimmy is one of those movie screw-ups where everything he does is really not so bad, uh, except for getting their father killed, and then deceiving his little brother about it for several days, not long after his mother died.

The movie at least acknowledges that this is big news, but first-time writer-directors Jonathan and Josh Baker scarcely seem aware of the larger psychological repercussions of either Elijah’s background or his current circumstances, and they handle Jimmy’s revelation in such a cowardly way that somehow, by comparison, Taylor is the only character in the ensemble who emerges with any dignity.

Also Read: HBO 'Felt Comfortable' Proceeding With 'The Deuce' After Reviewing James Franco Accusations

After “Transformers: Age of Extinction” and “Sing Street,” Reynor has peaked as an actor playing ne’er-do-well characters we’re supposed to love, and here he just seems like a complete a-hole: after being directly responsible for Hal’s death, he steals his money, spends it until he gets in trouble, steals some more, and shepherds Elijah through an odyssey of trouble for which he is not in any way ready, laser pistol or no.

Truitt demonstrates a quiet intensity that audiences will immediately identify with, and which promises terrific things from the young actor, but he’s forced to make believable a sequence of events that barely seem interconnected; the Baker brothers want this to be both a gritty family drama and a sci-fi-laced adventure, but through no fault of Triutt’s — and in fact, despite his admirable effort — the underlying emotions simply do not track. Meanwhile, there’s little else to do while Kravitz is on screen than wonder why someone as talented as she sought the role of a stripper-turned-babysitter whose biggest scene involves taking a personal inventory of abuse to bond with a teenager.

Then of course there’s the Daft Punk duo, mysterious individuals riding motorcycles like a couple of maniacs and whose involvement in Elijah’s journey hints at a wild and operatic future storyline should this first film be a success. But much like Carrie Coon, who shows up as the film is ending to provide one female character who isn’t either dead, a stripper or a junkie, the Bakers seem to have telegraphed their expectations of a bigger and more impressive ending without thinking enough about the journey to get there.

Ultimately, “Kin” probably could have worked as a straightforward drama about two troubled brothers and the parental deaths that bonded them, or maybe it would have succeeded as a “Flight of the Navigator”-style road trip that slowly and skillfully takes on mythic sci-fi proportions. But its chocolate-and-peanut-butter combination of the two feels disjointed and unsatisfying, mostly because it never feels complete or thought through enough, either as a story or more crucially, an emotional experience — which is exactly what audiences would need in order to want to see more.

For the record: A previous version of this story misspelled Myles Truitt’s name.

Seth Rogen on James Franco After Misconduct Accusations: 'Yes' I'll Still Work With Him

Zoe Kravitz on 'Mad Max' Desert Set Infighting: 'You Go Crazy' (Video)

Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones Together Again for Amazon's 'The Aeronauts'

David Harbour Teases 'Stranger Things' Season 3 Challenge 'More Terrifying Than Any Demogorgon' (Video)

Reversing idea of the original — she’s a struggling single parent, he’s a spoiled playboy — Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez (“How to Be a Latin Lover”) lack the instant chemistry of their predecessors, but a game ensemble of supporting players bring the silly story to surprisingly vibrant life after stumbling awkwardly through a preposterous convergence of circumstances required for its premise to feel remotely believable.

Faris plays Kate, an Oregon widower preparing to be a nurse; she supports her three daughters by delivering pizzas and working for a cleaning service. Leonardo (Derbez), the irresponsible heir to a construction supply empire, lives out Hugh Hefner fantasies aboard his $60 million yacht while his sister Magdalena (Cecilia Suarez) tries to wrest control of the family business. After refusing to pay Kate for scrubbing his boat of evidence of his latest bacchanal, Leonardo falls overboard and washes up on the shores of her small seaside town with no memory of who he is or where (or how much money) he comes from.

Watch Video: Anna Faris Fakes a Marriage With Eugenio Derbez in First 'Overboard' Remake Trailer

Frustrated at her ne’er-do-well brother, Magdalena pretends Leonardo is dead, leaving him in the hospital so she can claim their father’s company. Meanwhile, Kate discovers his plight when it’s reported in the local paper; she allows herself to be persuaded by best friend Theresa (Eva Longoria) to exact revenge on her pompous former employer by pretending Leonardo is her husband, enabling her to force him to cook, clean and tackle household chores while she’s busy studying.

With the help of her daughters and a community of friends and co-workers only too happy to lie for her, Kate convinces Leonardo to come home with her, and the two soon settle into an unexpectedly harmonious partnership as he begins to discover the meaning of real responsibility and to learn the value of a family bound together by love instead of money.

See Photos: 12 Movie Remakes With Gender-Swapped Leads, From 'His Girl Friday' to 'Overboard'

Greenberg’s background is mostly in sitcoms (“Scrubs,” “How I Met Your Mother”), which may account for how broadly and clumsily the set-up portion of this story is handled. Without quite needing to consult actual reality, one might think that Greenberg and his co-screenwriter Bob Fisher (working from Leslie Dixon’s original concept) might have updated, or at least refined, some of the foundational ideas that were scarcely convincing three decades ago. In fact, acknowledging the previous movie as inspiration for the characters in this one might have been a better way to justify what sounds by any definition like a wildly inappropriate criminal act, even if Kate’s gaslighting of Leo feels vaguely like a subversive gesture in the #MeToo era.

The problem is that Kate is written far too appealingly, and Faris is just too loveable to pull off the kind of grand manipulation that might have turned this rom-com scenario into an act of political vengeance. Fundamentally — and I mean this as a compliment — Faris lacks the righteous anger required for this long-suffering blue-collar worker and single parent to perpetuate the kind of deception into which she settles so easily.

Similarly, Derbez throws himself into playing an insufferable prick in the first act, but it takes little more than a scene or two for him to recognize the challenges of manual laborers who use his company’s products and to begin to respect the efforts of the people who actually have to prepare food and clean up after themselves and others.

See Photos: 'Overboard' Star Eugenio Derbez StudioWrap Portraits (Exclusive)

That said, there is a truly magnetic couple in this film sidelined by all of this plot: Longoria’s Theresa and her husband Bobby, played by “Last Man on Earth” secret weapon Mel Rodriguez. Maybe it’s because they come to Kate’s aid so naturally, but they truly feel like a duo capable of the kind of manipulation required to yank a rich jerk out of his or her life and give him the kind of wake-up call to reality that would put him through ridiculous humiliating paces and make him grateful — and even fall in love — by the end of it.

Aside from casting the massively popular Mexican star Derbez, the movie additionally wears its multilingual intentions on its sleeve in multiple scenes where, delightfully, Leonardo’s family members speak to one another exclusively in subtitled Spanish, and later, his construction-worker colleagues make a few pointed jokes at the expense of the privileged white dudes who hire them to dig out their pools.

But even as a welcome offering to audiences from a broad variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds, “Overboard” ultimately feels like one of the dinners that Kate assigns Leo to cook for his newfound family — a good effort with a few new surprises to spice up a familiar dish, but nothing special enough to truly transform it into more than a routine meal.

'Overboard' Star Sets Out to 'Break Stereotypes' in Goldie Hawn Role (Exclusive Video)

Anna Faris Says Director Sexually Harassed Her on Set: 'It Made Me Feel Small'

Anna Faris Oddly Graces 'Live Happy' Magazine Cover After Chris Pratt Split

'Avengers: Infinity War' Expected to Assemble $100 Million During 2nd Weekend

A methodical look at Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the latticework of criminality that has enveloped governments worldwide, Jack Bryan’s documentary enlists a who’s-who of high-profile experts and insiders — including Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and more — for a brutal dressing-down of worldwide, metastasized corruption that falls short in laying out straight its particularly slippery bag of snakes only by suggesting the solution is to cut off their tails, not their heads.

Opening with a brief but potent biography of Putin and winding through an abridged but detailed list of transgressions to which his administration is connected, Bryan’s film explores the often intangible but wildly destructive tactics hostile governments employ as “active measures,” including propaganda, cyberattacks and agents of influence. Murdering journalists, opponents and in some likely cases, allies and even innocent civilians, Putin consolidated power under Boris Yeltsin before claiming the mantle of leadership over post-Soviet Union Russia, developing strategies (that would later be used to undermine the U.S. election) against newly-liberated countries like Georgia.

Also Read: Trump Ignores Advisers' Subtle Message About Putin: 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE'

Bryan and his co-writer Marley Clements connect the dots with methodical precision, and minimal sensationalism, although they hardly need to overdramatize connections between Putin and notorious Russian mobster Semion Mogilevich, especially given the numerous flunkies (and their various criminal acts) who overlapped the pair’s Venn diagram of manipulation and malfeasance.

Putin and Mogilevich’s relationship to Trump’s mysteriously indefatigable gift for failing upward is easy to track, though the filmmakers possibly overemphasize the current president’s ability to foresee the many ways he was being manipulated, or maybe just the distance at which Putin and co. recognized he even could be a potential leader. Certainly, and with the added benefit of recent comments made by Forbes reporters about Trump’s obsession with their annual list of power players, the film makes an effective case for the abject corruption of Trump’s dealings in the 1980s, when Trump Towers served — in several cases, according to successful criminal prosecution — as “a money-laundering paradise” for shell companies to buy and sell condominiums without identifying themselves. Later, Deutsche Bank, a company with significant ties to Russia, supported many of Trump’s endeavors long after they imploded or otherwise failed.

Watch Video: Stephen Colbert Congratulates Putin for His Win 'by the Most Made-up Votes'

Most damning, though, is the sophisticated way that Bryan and Clements lay flat the history of technological attacks launched against oppositional regimes, and how brutally impactful they were because of attackers’ profound understanding of the psychologies of the sociocultural ecosystems into which they were released. Footage from a Cambridge Analytica presentation, paired with interviews from experts on Russia’s history of cyberattacks, elucidates the depths of attackers’ knowledge about the way that various cultures work, and in particular, how the unrelenting onslaught of fake sites and phony Facebook posts (among other disseminated stories) preyed upon our specific vulnerabilities as Americans to disseminate materials that would fundamentally undermine our trust in particular candidates, our government and the system as a whole.

(The extra chill comes when an interviewee points out that literally nothing has been done to slow the spread of this attack since Trump took office.)

Also Read: Joe Scarborough: Republicans 'Doing the Bidding of Vladimir Putin and His Intelligence Agencies'

At 110 minutes, the film’s laserlike focus keeps its talking heads from droning on too long, but also from relaying some of the anecdotal details that are probably juicier than they are relevant. (One that makes the cut is Clinton’s observation that Putin likes to manspread, one of the very few instances where she digresses in any way from essential information.) But like with many other documentaries attempting to chronicle our turbulent recent history, we seem to have moved beyond an era when such thing as a clean or definitive ending exists; at the very least, we’re not yet at anything that resembles one.

Not that the film doesn’t try: Citing semi-successful examples in Georgia and Russia, the filmmakers end with a call to arms that suggests the divided electorate, the citizenry of the U.S., rise up and demand change, for our officials to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable and to do something to secure free and fair elections. If there’s anything that “Active Measures” does most effectively, it’s to demonstrate the depths and the breadth of the corruption, the criminality, the immorality operating in contemporary politics — and after seeing what we’re up against, the last thing people may want to do is to get more involved.

McCain: Trump's Congratulations to Putin 'Insulted Every Russian Citizen'

Instagram Bows to Russian Censor's Demands Against Anti-Putin Politician

Vladimir Putin Writes Op-Ed for Bloomberg — No, Really

Hillary Clinton Accuses Putin of 'Manspreading' During Meetings (Video)

Writer-director Deon Taylor (“Meet the Blacks”) touches upon some interesting and even occasionally relevant ideas in his film about an investigative reporter and the biker gang that will stop at nothing to protect its secrets, but even the fierce dedication of Paula Patton and Omar Epps doesn’t make those ideas coalesce into more than window dressing for the tawdry thriller they’re hung upon.

Patton plays Brea, an investigative reporter who learns on her birthday that the story she’s been working on for months was scooped by a fellow reporter at the behest of her editor, and subsequently she may soon lose her job. “Nothing takes months,” argues Mr. Waynewright (William Fichtner).

Also Read: Amy Schumer's 'I Feel Pretty' Braces for Ugly Box Office Debut

John (Epps), her mechanic boyfriend, attempts to divert her attention by planning a weekend getaway at a palatial chateau in the mountains for the two of them, where he plans to propose. En route they stop at a gas station where Brea encounters a mysterious young woman named Cara (Dawn Olivieri, “Bright”) in the bathroom, while John has a violent encounter with some bikers that’s thankfully interrupted by the arrival of the local sheriff (Missi Pyle).

Shaken by their experiences but thrilled at the prospect of some alone time, Brea and John arrive at the house, and John plots the right moment to pop the question. But not long after christening the infinity pool, they’re joined by The Worst Friends In The World, Malia (Roselyn Sanchez, “Devious Maids”) and Darren (Laz Alonso), who crash their romantic getaway, and thanks to their own relationship problems, instigate a rift between the two lovers.

Before peace can be restored, however, Brea discovers a satellite phone in her bag containing dozens of photos of young women. Recognizing the images as evidence of human trafficking, Brea insists they call the authorities; but when Cara turns up at the front door of their house, backed by some of the bikers and asking for the phone, the vacationers are forced to work together to escape the clutches of their invaders before becoming the next victims in what they soon discover is a multifaceted network of criminal activities.

Also Read: Paula Patton Dumps Primary Wave After Ex-CEO David Guillod Accused of Rape (Exclusive)

It’s kind of hard to know where to begin with what’s wrong in “Traffik,” a movie where every scene takes about twice as long as it feels like it should, and the characters far too often make an escalating series of implausible and/or stupid decisions. Brea certainly wins audience (or at least reporters’) sympathies early by clashing with her editor over journalistic integrity at the possible cost of her job, but how then can she be so naïve, not to mention inert, when a very clearly drug-addled woman looks plaintively at her during a fleeting moment of privacy between them that gets interrupted by a menacing biker? “I didn’t want to butt in” is her later rationale, but the scene goes on far too long for it not to be abundantly clear what this poor woman needs, much less for her not to even ask, “Are you OK?”

Meanwhile, even if John feels like a perfectly understated partner for her, why in the hell are they friends — like, “go out together for Brea’s birthday dinner” friends — with Malia and especially Darren? In less than two minutes, he denigrates John’s job, almost spoils his surprise proposal, and defends openly ogling the waitress to John in front of his own wife.

And that’s before he shows up at their vacation house a day early, accuses Brea of wanting to report the phone to the authorities “to get a scoop,” and then inexplicably dredges up some old romantic business that occurred before she ever met John. Alonso is a charismatic actor, but there’s rakish and there’s just being an asshole, and as the unfortunate catalyst for a lot of superfluous drama, Darren is unmoored from anything remotely believable, or likable.

Also Read: Robin Thicke 'Kicked, Pushed and Hit' Paula Patton, Court Papers Claim

Patton serves double duty as a producer on the film and it’s clear she believed in this story, or at least what telling it could do for her credibility as an actor. But evidenced both by her successes (“Déjà Vu,” “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”) and failures (“Baggage Claim”), she needs a strong director who will shape her deep feelings into something compelling and coherent, and Taylor seems either preoccupied by the importance of his story, or so wowed by the volume of what she is doing on screen that he never bothers to do more than sort of watch, astonished.

It isn’t that Patton doesn’t deliver something interesting, it’s that it’s assembled so clumsily that all of her shivering and hesitation dominates the moments of decisiveness and strength that should have made an impression.

Any good reporter knows not to come up with a thesis and then look for evidence to support it, but rather to follow a story and see where it leads you. Like Brea’s, Taylor’s heart is in the right place, but they both need to learn how to focus, and both could probably also use a better editor. But then again, who can blame Taylor for luxuriating in the dynamic, nightmarish images he captures with the help of the great cinematographer Dante Spinotti? The two of them work effectively together to create a sense of ominousness and vulnerability that lifts the film more than it deserves.

That said, those imaginative flourishes don’t always match with the performances, or the musical choices — including a gobsmacking use of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” during a scene of human trafficking — but Taylor definitely has an eye for intriguing juxtapositions. It’s just a shame that too many of them in “Traffik” are bad ones.

Omar Epps Stiffed His Nanny, Lawsuit Clams

Faith and Family Films Gain Prominence as TD Jakes' Megafest Matures

Trevor Noah Jokes That Black People Should 'See How Far We Can Push Starbucks' (Video)

Spike Lee's Fact-Based 'BlacKkKlansman' Gets August Release Date

Danika Yarosh (“Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”) plays Caroline “Line” Found, an effervescent, beloved, boundlessly energetic senior at Iowa City West High School. As captain of the women’s volleyball team, she led them to victory as a junior, and considers back-to-back championships an inevitable fulfillment of their athletic destiny, especially after dedicating their season to her ailing mother, Ellyn (Jillian Fargey, “Bates Motel”).

But when Line dies in a scooter accident the night after their first game, her best friend, Kelly (Erin Moriarty, “Captain Fantastic”), and the rest of the team are devastated, and not even Kathy “Coach Bres” Bresnahan (Helen Hunt), their stern, no-nonsense coach, can rekindle their love for the game.

Also Read: 'Mad About You': Paul Reiser, Helen Hunt in Talks for Revival Limited Series

Coach Bres eventually tasks Kelly with the responsibility of rallying her teammates, despite Kelly’s reservations over whether she can fill Line’s shoes as team captain. But after scoring their first victory, the team decides to dedicate its season to her and to follow through with their tribute by overcoming those early losses to win another state championship on her behalf.

Movies like are typically so saccharine that audiences end up with a cavity by the final scene, but the only way in which “The Miracle Season” distinguishes itself is by being so clean-cut and wholesome that it makes a Noxzema commercial seem gritty by comparison. (It features possibly the only scene in movie history where a group of otherwise unsupervised teenagers are actively disappointed that the only attending parent, who was performing magic, no less, decides to turn in for the night.)

Also Read: Marlee Matlin Accused William Hurt of Rape in 2010 Memoir

McNamara, who directed “Soul Surfer,” exerts a light touch on the spiritual themes — worry not, those of ye who are uncertain whether Line’s father, Ernie, played effortlessly by William Hurt, will reconcile with God after losing his daughter and his wife within two weeks of one another — but in this case, that’s a bad thing: There are no other themes to replace them, leaving only the wheezing machinery of a sports underdog story in which the team is comprised of title-winning athletes.

Portraying a real-life teenager, much less such a revered one as Found, was no doubt a challenge for Yarosh, but I’m not fully sure her “more is more” approach to the role turns the character’s charm offensive into actual charm. Moriarty, on the other hand, wrestles with more emotion than her co-star, but despite the appealing balance of reluctance and determination she brings to Kelly, she occasionally seems adrift in the formulaic adversity thrown into her path to make their journey seem not quite as predestined from the first frame.

Meanwhile, Hunt throws her all into the coach who learns how to feel again by coaching these grieving young women to victory, but Midwest mannerisms (like repeatedly calling Line, and later Kelly, “cap’n”) disrupt what never seems to settle into a consistent take on the character. Does Bres struggle with literally any emotion? Did Line’s death specifically affect her? Or is there an additional or other back story, hinted at in her opening scene, that we don’t know about?

And as Ernie, Hurt supplies unsurprising volumes of gravitas and vulnerability, but the work is all so simple and surface-level for a guy capable of such powerful depths that none of it resonates particularly deeply.

See Photos: 10 Highest Grossing Christian-Themed Movies, From 'Passion of the Christ' to 'War Room'

There’s also a love interest for Kelly, a hunky Anson Elgort type played by Burkely Duffield (“Warcraft”) who, in an almost refreshing reversal, has literally nothing to do except look good and blandly support his lady. But otherwise, the film isn’t interested in challenging conventional expectations, or much of anything else; last year’s nonfiction “Step,” by comparison, chronicled the adversity of a group of reigning champions with much more complexity, and consequently, emotional heft.

Ultimately, “The Miracle Season” mistakes an inspiring true story for one that needs or deserves to be told cinematically; it isn’t awful, but it’s not a film, it’s a tribute, and unfortunately, one to the memory of a young woman who would be better honored by people actually “living like Line” than watching a formulaic, fictionalized retelling of her community learning what that means.

Sean Hannity Goes Hollywood, Plugging Faith-Based Kevin Sorbo Movie He Produced (Video)

'I Can Only Imagine' Film Review: Christian Pop Megahit Becomes One-Note Redemption Tale

Imagine Dragons' Dan Reynolds Talks Confronting Mormon Suicide in 'Believer' (Video)

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Embraces #MeToo Era

Soderbergh, working fast and aggressive but perfectly in control, recruits “The Crown” star Claire Foy for an intimate, disturbing psychological thriller that deftly transcends its cheapie backstory and dingy look to explore the fortitude required to survive an insidious, traumatic encounter in a world that doesn’t believe, or understand, how much pain they can cause.

Foy plays Sawyer Valentin, a skilled but troubled businesswoman who makes no room — and has no time — for ambiguity, professionally or personally: at the office she earns top marks treating clients with ruthless honesty, and then utilizes dating apps at night to instigate hookups where she guarantees action but makes it absolutely clear there’s no romantic future.

Also Read: Steven Soderbergh Wants to Only Shoot Movies on iPhone Now: 'This Is the Future'

Realizing that she is still haunted by the face of David Strine (Joshua Leonard), a man who once stalked her, Sawyer investigates a nearby facility that offers support groups for victims like herself. But she inadvertently commits herself to their care after filling out what she thinks is routine paperwork, landing in a ward alongside Nate Hoffman (Jay Pharoah), Violet (Juno Temple) and others with more severe mental disabilities.

When Sawyer’s efforts to prove her mental well-being seem to be interpreted repeatedly as acts of hostility, she prevails upon Nate to call her mother Angela (Amy Irving) for help. But just as her mother shows up to seek her release, Sawyer is confronted by a vision of David inside the facility, working as a member of its staff. Desperate to leave the asylum as the faculty increasingly ignore her pleas for help, Sawyer plummets into a downward spiral of fear and self-doubt, further challenging her to question what about her experiences, and even her memories, is and is not real.

Also Read: 'The Crown' Producers Apologize to Stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith Over Pay Gap 'Media Storm'

There’s something sort of exhilarating about the epiphany that the movie arrives at, oh, halfway or so through regarding Sawyer’s treatment; whether or not it’s all in her head, co-writers Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer skillfully pinpoint the feeling that women must experience in dealing not just with harassment but also the institutions that are supposed to protect them from it, and then transpose that directly upon the audience. But rather than driving viewers mad with anticlimactic ambiguity, Bernstein and Greer resolve that central mystery so that the film can deal with her circumstances in a more direct and realistic, yet terrifying way.

(It bears noting that the writing here represents a giant leap forward from the team’s previous screenplays, including “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” and the Jackie Chan vehicle “The Spy Next Door.”)

Watch Video: 'Godless:' Watch the Trailer for Steven Soderbergh's Netflix Western Series

Unlike too many other times when filmmakers mistook a story’s narrative quandary for its message and its ultimate meaning, Soderbergh acknowledges the “is this happening or not” business as a necessary hook for trailers and general intrigue but discards it to look more deeply into a culture of toxicity with regards to the treatment of women by men.

What eventually unfolds is a dialectic, really, between a damaged but resilient woman and a world unable, or unwilling, to come to terms with her true pain. As Sawyer, Foy draws an astute distinction between rationally understanding herself and how her behavior comes across to others, most notably the staff at the institution, and the vulnerability of dealing with emotional injuries that do not and will not easily heal.

It’s her candor about what she deals with on a daily basis that lands Sawyer in the asylum, but the response by the staff is largely one of indifference; prescriptions and platitudes quickly take the place of deeper and more substantial investigation into her traumatic past. Not only are her more immediate claims about David in the asylum dismissed, their root causes — the events that initially drove her to seek help — are never investigated, metaphorically and literally reducing another woman’s feelings to sensationalistic hysteria.

Also Read: 'The Crown' Producers Apologize to Stars Claire Foy and Matt Smith Over Pay Gap 'Media Storm'

Suffice it to say that the “no duh”-ness of these ideas might make “Unsane” a more obviously unpleasant experience for some viewers, but even without those thematic underpinnings, Soderbergh crafts an unsettling, top-notch cat-and-mouse game from minimal elements, including, yes, the iPhone upon which he apparently shot the film. (Mileage may vary on the effectiveness of its murky, deep-focus cinematography, but it feels all of a piece with the subject matter and locations.)

Notwithstanding a possibly credulity-stretching lack of supervision by the asylum staff, the slow escalation of Sawyer trying to be heard, and getting ignored and abandoned to deal with one triggering event after another, becomes positively maddening the longer she spends among people who are ostensibly there to help her — and with or without David there to dredge up a terrifying experience she moved 450 miles to escape.

Foy brings a knowing precision to her performance, giving Sawyer the bluntness, and clarity, of a person who for her own sake cannot afford vagueness or, perhaps more accurately, a margin for error. Simultaneously mature and self-aware and desperately vulnerable, Foy’s performance recognizes the character’s need for help is sufficient that she unwittingly leads herself into a dangerous situation with the institution.

As David, meanwhile, Leonard oozes a homicidal creepiness that feels even ickier when he’s being nice; the actor seems to completely understand the character’s pathetic delusions about their relationship, and never sacrifices believability for the sake of emphasizing an unease that already exists simply by virtue of the persistence and intractability that Sawyer ascribes to him in her characterizations of the limited relationship they once shared.

This film follows “Magic Mike,” “Side Effects” and “Logan Lucky,” a chain of films by Soderbergh where he seems to alight on a genre, or an idea, but instead of just following it to a conventional end, resolves that hook early and then delves into the typically unexplored aftermath, or maybe just something more interesting. This is the closest that the filmmaker has thus far delved into horror, but his aptitude for building tension, and his sensitivity to characters too often defined by the world’s perception of them, has only appreciated with time, making it add up to something more than the component parts of any particular genre.

In which case, whether shot on an iPhone or just screened on one, “Unsane” effortlessly flexes Soderbergh’s skill as a storyteller and a technician, injecting the atmosphere and mechanics of a creepy scenario with a substance that deepens and elevates it to the stuff of a harrowing, intimate reality.

Adam Sandler Touching Claire Foy's Knee 'Caused No Offense,' She Says

Claire Foy Set to Play Lisbeth Salander in Sony's 'The Girl in the Spider's Web'

Claire Foy Talks 'The Crown' Feminist Backlash, Queen Elizabeth's Drinking Habits

Inside Steven Soderbergh's Plan to Make Hollywood Studios Obsolete

Deutch, winning in a lot of films unworthy of her (“Why Him,” “Dirty Grandpa,” “Vampire Academy”), commands the screen as if the quandary doesn’t matter, while Winkler and co-screenwriters Alex McAulay and Matt Spicer construct a story that lurks somewhere between “Sixteen Candles,” “Palo Alto” and “Fish Tank” but without the humor, insight or poetry needed to match her fearless, irresistible talent.

Deutch plays Erica Vandross, a San Fernando Valley teenager trying to earn enough money to spring her estranged father from jail by seducing local sleazeballs and then shaking them down for cash. Though she’s stayed willfully oblivious to the relationship her frazzled bohemian mom Laurie (Kathryn Hahn) starts with a kind-hearted square named Bob (Tim Heidecker), Erica finds her life turned upside down after his troubled son Luke (Joey Morgan, “Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse”) arrives fresh and vulnerable from rehab.

Also Read: 'Flower' Tribeca Review: Zoey Deutch Stars in a Toxic 'Juno' Knock-Off

At Laurie’s urging, Erica and Luke form a tenuous bond largely built on the few semi-friendly exchanges they share when she isn’t being mercilessly blunt. But after learning that much of Luke’s pain comes from an unresolved claim that he was sexually assaulted by Will (Adam Scott), a former teacher who still lives in their community, Erica recruits high school cohorts Kala (Dylan Gelula, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) and Claudine (Maya Eshet, “Teen Wolf”) to avenge her future step-brother, unleashing a chain of events that forces them to deal with the very adult consequences of their teenage games whether they’re ready to or not.

The reason that so much of “Flower” works as well as it does is because it’s anchored so deeply by Deutch’s performance, which effortlessly dances on that razor’s edge between sympathetic and insufferable. There’s something identifiable and occasionally even charming about Erica, who is savvier and more streetwise than any of her adult counterparts, but she’s driven by a desperate absence of guidance — an almost clichéd need for some kind of structure or limitations — that leads her to suitably misguided choices.

Also Read: 'Big Little Lies': Adam Scott to Return for Season 2

As a teen trying to navigate her way through not one but two fractured parental relationships, Deutch imbues Erica with an agency that feels at once wildly unseemly, perversely appealing and utterly believable, the precise sort of preternatural maturity that would ensnare susceptible men not just against their better judgment, but hers as well.

The remainder of the cast bring their characters to vivid, believable life, from Gelula and Eshet’s dopey, media-saturated teenage wokeness as Erica’s partners in crime to Hahn’s apologetic, perfectly scattered take on Laurie’s laissez-faire parenting. For a comedian exceptionally skilled at going broad, and weird, Tim Heidecker offers a skillfully understated take as the uncool suitor who wins Laurie’s heart (and shows her firebrand daughter uncommon, and largely undeserved, patience), while Adam Scott manages to be convincingly skeptical — if not quite heedless enough — in his dealings with Erica, particularly as a man living in the shadow of an appropriately insurmountable accusation.

Watch Video: Kathryn Hahn Hails the Female 'Roar' of Vulnerability in 'I Love Dick'

Unfortunately, Winkler and his co-screenwriters further muddy the intriguing moral complexity of Erica’s cycle of seduction and exploitation, as well as Luke’s molestation claims, first by interjecting her burgeoning feelings for Will into their pursuit of “justice,” and then by turning the story upside down with a series of events that feel increasingly implausible and “movie-ish,” maybe unless John Hughes was writing them three or more decades ago.

The nuanced character development of early scenes is replaced with a cartoonish sort of escalation of stakes, not to mention some improbable choices, including a disastrously-timed confession of feelings, that would have been rightfully, perhaps satisfyingly called out by the characters had they maintained the wry self-awareness that initially made them so complex, unique and interesting.

Further, and even without conversations in the zeitgeist providing an unflattering context for the events in the film, there’s a reasonable question whether, even if only incidentally, “Flower” devalues the claims of real victims by suggesting they’re lying, enticing perpetrators or otherwise complicit in the power dynamics that lead to assault and molestation. Certainly, the movie sides with the teens, and Winkler’s portrayal of these awful acts offers little sympathy for those who seem to need little encouragement to take advantage of others.

But using these crimes as little more than a plot device ultimately feels like a distraction, and a sleazy one, from the pain and loneliness that drives the teens on screen to try and reclaim their power in such wrongheaded, and eventually, much more destructive ways — at least, if the movie didn’t try to wrap everything up in a shockingly tidy, counterintuitive bow.

“Flower” marks Winkler’s second feature after the 2010 comedy “Ceremony,” which felt to Noah Baumbach what this film does to Gia Coppola’s “Palo Alto,” or Sofia’s “Bling Ring”: a counterpart or alternative mining similar territory but trading substance for effervescence. With a different beginning, “Flower” could have paid cheerful tribute to the liberating powers of teenage romance; with a different ending, it could have captured the melancholy fragility of teen self-discovery.

Instead, audiences get a collection of great performances, led by a truly exceptional one, in search of a script that’s worthy of them in a movie with so much to offer that disappointingly, but bafflingly, seems determined to add up to less than the sum of its parts.

'Love, Simon' Film Review: Cute Coming-Out Tale Gives Gay Teens Their John Hughes Moment

Will 'Tomb Raider' Be the Movie to Finally Knock 'Black Panther' From Box Office Perch?

'Melrose Place' Star Jamie Luner Accused of Drugging, Filming Sex Act With Teenager in '90s

All Viacom Networks to Go Dark to Support National School Walkout

Suffering under a tirelessly “hip” script by Gluck (2014’s “Annie”) and Rob Lieber, not to mention James Corden’s typical desperation to please in the title role, poor Peter is only slightly less appealing than “The Simpsons”‘ focus-grouped pup Poochie, and destined for an imminent journey back to his home planet while human star Domhnall Gleeson recovers from an exhausting battery of “Itchy & Scratchy”-style abuse.

Narrated by Margot Robbie, who also plays the voice of Flopsy, “Peter Rabbit” follows the misadventures of Peter, his three siblings Flopsy, Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki) and Cottontail (Daisy Ridley) and their cousin Benjamin (Matt Lucas) as they try to steal vegetables from cranky old Mr. McGregor (Sam Neill) without finding themselves cooked in a pie. After McGregor suffers a heart attack, he bequeaths his farm to his fussy nephew Thomas (Gleeson), who knows little about gardening but harbors aspirations to sell the land in order to raise money for his own toy store.

Watch Video: James Corden's Parents Did a Better Job Hosting the Grammys Than James Corden

Before Thomas can fully appraise the farm’s value, however, he finds himself waylaid: first by Peter and his animal friends, who feel entitled to share in the spoils of the McGregor garden, and then by Bea (Rose Byrne), a cheerful, slightly daft artist who lives next door, and encourages him to take a more bohemian approach with the local fauna. Soon, Thomas and Peter find themselves in a showdown for both the farm and for Bea — who the rabbit sees as a surrogate mother — turning the bucolic landscape of these two country homes into a battleground where the winner takes all, at all costs.

A big part of the appeal of Potter’s source material was that she anthropomorphized Peter and his kin with clothes and a humanlike home but still made them subject to their animal instincts; drawn from a ground-up perspective, there was an irresistible vulnerability that made them sympathetic even when getting into trouble. Gluck’s film wants to have its (carrot) cake and eat it too, classifying certain behaviors as naively animalistic (such as a rooster whose morning crow is, amusingly, a reflection of marveling at another new day) while transforming Peter and company into a willful, clumsy, obnoxious pack of mischief-makers.

Also Read: 'The Cat in the Hat' Animated Movie to Kick Off Dr Seuss Franchise at Warner Bros

Whatever argument the film hopes to make about the coexistence of man and animal feels repeatedly undermined when the bunnies not only pillage McGregor’s land of its vegetables but also make a mess of Thomas’ house and, eventually, attack him in his own bedroom.

Unfortunately, Gluck and Lieber “update” Potter’s timeless, unassuming tale by acknowledging many — too many — of the conventions and storytelling devices they’re otherwise shamelessly exploiting in their adaptation, pausing repeatedly to point out character flaws one by one, or articulating the emotional stakes of a moment in ways that even children will find on the nose.

But in trying to think through, and verbalize, every objection an audience member might have (from not giving Peter pants to making fun of a blackberry allergy), they undercut anything that could actually make the movie interesting, kowtowing to the broadest possible appeal by being conspicuously bland and safe.

Also Read: 'The Boss Baby' Gets Oscar Nod, Twitter Shakes Head: 'What Have You People Done?'

There’s scarcely a moment that passes without the most obvious possible song playing, but Gluck goes the extra step and enlists everyone from Fort Minor to Vampire Weekend to re-record their lyrics to suit the characters, who sometimes sing their own story. The movie’s self-awareness eventually comes destructively full circle when the animals are called upon to actually communicate with the humans, and Gluck is either unsure or refuses to choose whether or not they can actually speak, further confusing the foundations of a story that really did not need to be this complicated.

As an actor, Corden has all of the appeal of late night’s least interesting talk show host — all enthusiasm, no nuance — and he delivers every one of Peter’s lines with the same energy and inflection: “Aren’t I as adorable as I think I am?” (He isn’t.) Much like with his “Carpool Karaoke” segments, where he makes the mistake of thinking he’s as interesting as the person in the passenger seat, he somehow steamrolls through each scene until his co-stars’ performances all run together, wasting the considerable charm and personality of three of Hollywood’s most gifted young actresses.

Only Byrne and (especially) Gleeson emerge with some sense of personality and dignity intact, owning Bea and Thomas’ one-dimensional quirks and turning their fledgling romance into a genuine emotional journey that becomes the film’s brightest spot.

Will Gluck isn’t a bad filmmaker, but by accident or design he seems to have catapulted himself into Hollywood’s family-filmmaker rotation with 2014’s “Annie” and cannot get himself unstuck. (At least he gives Byrne something to do this time, and finds her a co-star with some chemistry.) Beatrix Potter would likely have melted down at a version of her stories (and her hero) this crass and rambunctious, but the problem with Gluck’s adaptation is, ironically, that it’s too safe, splitting the difference between a loving tribute to a classic work of children’s literature and an irreverent piece of family-friendly entertainment.

“Peter Rabbit” feels obligated to point out all of the clichés that it’s rehashing, in the mistaken belief that doing so absolves itself from coming up with anything better to replace them.

Move Over 'Lady Bird' – 'Paddington 2' Is Now Best-Reviewed Movie on Rotten Tomatoes

'She-Ra' Reboot, 'Boss Baby' Score Netflix Series Through DreamWorks Animation

Women Animators Pen Open Letter on Sexual Harassment: 'This Abuse Has Got to Stop'

Disney Cancels 'Jack in the Beanstalk' Animated Film 'Gigantic'

Working from a script he co-wrote with Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio, director Eubank cleverly assembles a scrappy sci-fi adventure out of familiar horror-movie parts. But a game performance by Brenton Thwaites (“Maleficent”) in the lead role eventually outpaces the provocative central mystery, stylishly driving the audience toward a resolution that lacks equivalent substance.

Also read: ‘Pretty Little Liars’ Creator to Adapt Horror Novel for Lionsgate

Thwaites plays Nic Eastman, a computer-whiz MIT student who’s driving his girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke, “Bates Motel”) across the country, with his pal Jonah (Beau Knapp) along for the ride. In between awkward conversations about the future of his relationship with Haley, Nic discovers the whereabouts of Nomad, a mysterious hacker who nearly got him and Jonah expelled.

But after taking a detour to expose their online adversary, their search is interrupted by an unseen assailant whose attack lands them in the custody of Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne), a doctor who seems to offer more questions than answers.

Despite Beau Knapp’s best efforts to deliver expository dialogue about Nic’s relationship with Haley in a conversational way, the opening of “The Signal” feels too much like what it is: a set-up for what’s to come. Even when Nic and Jonah venture into a dilapidated hovel to search (with a dodgy flashlight, of course) for the guy they’ve threatened online, these seemingly obvious creative choices are merely misdirection, a prelude before the script’s “real” ideas kick in.

Of course, the relative originality of those ideas may or may not be any more appealing to audiences than what preceded them, but at the very least those early moments of “oh, I know what kind of movie this is” from viewers are eventually proven false.

See video: ‘X-Men’ Trilogy Honest Trailer: Brett Ratner Blamed for Ruining a Franchise (Video)

As a director, Eubank (whose previous feature was the low-budget “Love”) has a natural gift for composition and utilizes a clean, vivid color palette that amplifies the bumps and bruises that the characters endure as they fight for their freedom inside the nondescript, clinical walls of the facility where they’re being held.

Simultaneously, he uses his actors either imagistically or metatextually: the three leads embody their respective roles — hero, girlfriend, sidekick — almost deliberately as archetypes, while Fishburne trades on the gravitas of his past performances to offer a clear-eyed, authoritative counterpart who, perhaps not unlike Morpheus in “The Matrix,” challenges their naive ideas about the world around them.

Also read: Angelina Jolie’s ‘Maleficent’ Tracking for $60 Million-Plus Box-Office Opening

Although the film’s ultimate payoff feels a little too big, and too insufficiently explained, to justify all of the obfuscation that led up to it, the script keeps the audience engaged and guessing right up to the end. Eubanks’ skill as a filmmaker seems commensurate with the impact of his story; his work here is higher-minded than mere low-budget viscera, but not as thoughtful, or thought through, as the material of budding auteurs like Neill Blomkamp or Rian Johnson.

Nonetheless inspiring, even as its reach ambitiously exceeds its grasp, “The Signal” is a calling card heralding the arrival of a promising new talent who offers a welcome rejoinder to small-scale formula; it’s consistently engaging genre fare, especially when it keeps you guessing which genre it’s exploring.

Robert Pattinson Advises Child Stars to Seek Therapy, Thinks Justin Bieber's 'All Right'

Good Morning Cannes, Day 7: In First Film Since 'The Artist,' Michel Hazanavicius Gets Booed

Cinedigm Acquires North American Distribution Rights to Family Film 'The Stream'

Flanagan, expanding his own 2006 short film to feature length, finds both humanity and horror in the story of two siblings who reunite to exorcise a possessed mirror, but the film’s uneven metaphorical core and a decidedly incomplete mythology prevents “Oculus” from reflecting anything truly haunting.

See video: ‘Oculus’ Trailer Features Brenton Thwaites, Karen Gillan Battling Haunted Mirror

Karen Gillan (TV’s “Doctor Who”) plays Kaylie Russell, a young woman who reunites with her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) upon his release from criminal institutionalization in order to make good on a promise they made to one another as children. Returning to their childhood home for the first time in 11 years, they set up a barrage of cameras and other accoutrements in order to capture proof that a malignant force in an antique mirror is responsible for the deaths of their parents Marie (Katee Sackhoff) and Alan (Rory Cochrane).

Despite their meticulous precautions, alarms and fail-safes, Kaylie and Tim quickly start experiencing strange visions that not only don’t reflect reality, but also undermine their efforts to obtain objective evidence of supernatural forces. But after they find themselves unwittingly reliving the dysfunction and violence that led to their parents’ murder, Kaylie and Tim begin questioning whether or not they can go through with their plan — or even survive the night.

Combining the adult Kaylie and Tim’s current endeavor with a flashback narrative that leads up to the murder for which Tim was institutionalized, Flanagan expertly creates a web of mystery that drives the audience towards a genuinely terrifying climax. Although the present-day story guarantees that the duo survives the flashback story, it manages never to undermine suspense, especially as their grown-up selves begin questioning whether ghosts and spirits were to blame, or they’ve merely concocted the mirror story to ignore the harrowing truths about a painful childhood trauma.

Thankfully, the movie more or less validates their supernatural phobias from the outset, both providing a detailed history of the mirror’s destructive path and creating an escalating series of horrors that rely liberally upon both classic scare tactics and subtler mind games. From the wincing pain of pulling off a fingernail to the looming presence of glowing-eyed specters, “Oculus” pulls out all of the stops to keep the audience on its toes.

Also read: ‘Afflicted’ Review: Clever, But Not Enough to Overcome Two Tired Horror Sub-Genres

Even with a litany of marital problems beleaguering the increasingly troubled parents, however, the film never quite pulls off the notion that all of Kaylie and Tim’s fears, revisited and re-experienced, are manifestations of the adolescent turmoil created by their subconscious a decade earlier. Maintaining the constant battle between the siblings to explain or refute supernatural occurrences happening around them, Flanagan and co-screenwriter Jeff Howard‘s efforts to provide a psychological foundation for their characters’ behavior too often comes across as a stilted debate between two first-year psych majors trying to out-diagnose one another with information gleaned from WebMD searches.

That said, both pairs of actors playing the siblings are pretty remarkable, especially Annalisse Basso and Garrett Ryan as the younger Kaylie and Tim. Witnessing the deterioration of not just their parents’ marriage but also their sanity, Basso and Ryan avoid being either overly petulant or precociously mature, regarding the vagaries of the adult world with an appropriate, and resonant, mixture of bewilderment and terror.

As their elder counterparts, Gillan plays Kaylie’s determination so rigidly and intensely that it feels like she should have been the one institutionalized, while Thwaites offers the right amount of incredulity (and later, irrefutable acceptance) that they’re confronting forces more powerful than they can control.

Also read: ‘Dom Hemingway’ Review: Jude Law Goes Full Character Actor in This Hilarious but Hollow Gangster Comedy

Although there are several bone-chilling scares, some supernatural and others frighteningly corporeal, the film doesn’t pay off strongly because it never explains the “motives” of the evil force within the mirror nor establishes what it means if that force succeeds (or fails) in manipulating its owners into committing murder. Do those things matter? Maybe or maybe not, depending on if you merely want to be shaken up or truly disturbed.

“Oculus” might be successfully unsettling and claustrophobic as it unfolds, but Flanagan’s film still leaves us with more questions than answers; this movie is no “Death Bed,” but the one Flanagan forces audiences to lay in nevertheless isn’t made quite as well as it needs to be.

'American Horror Story: Coven' Cast Pick the Seven Wonder They Want to Master (Video)

'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' Reviews: Does Marvel's Latest Land a Punch?

Why Summer Movie Season Is Kicking Off in April With 'Captain America' Sequel

Wisely avoiding the impulse to deconstruct or diagnose the origins of his lifelong support for organized labor, director Diego Luna instead focuses on Chavez’s creation of the National Farm Workers Association and the establishment of his guiding principles as an activist and organizer. Bolstered by quiet, convincing performances by Michael Peña, America Ferrera and Rosario Dawson, “Cesar Chavez” offers a proletariat fantasy made more powerful by the fact that it’s mostly true.

Also read: President Obama Introduces ‘Cesar Chavez’ Movie With ‘Y Tu Mama Tambien’ Joke

Peña (“American Hustle”) plays the title character, a lifelong migrant worker who dropped out of school in the seventh grade, spent two years in the Navy at the age of 17, and at 27 went back to the fields to fight for the rights and the safety of the laborers alongside whom he worked. With the support of his wife Helen (Ferrera) and fellow activist Dolores Huerta (Dawson), he quickly establishes the National Farm Workers Association, much to the chagrin of growers like Bogdanovich (John Malkovich) and his son (Gabriel Mann), not to mention white townspeople afraid of seeing people of color assembling.

Advocating a strict program of nonviolence, Chavez builds support for the NFWA, and joins with Filipino unions to stage a protest in Sacramento to force the government to aid their cause. But when Bogdanovich and his cronies break the strikes with scabs and broker deals to sell their crops internationally, Chavez’s resolve is tested when he and his fellow activists are forced to take more dramatic action without violating the principles of their movement.

Where most biopics tend to psychoanalyze their subjects, “Cesar Chavez” refreshingly focuses on what the activist did, leaving only a few potent bits of exposition to provide sufficient motivation for his lifelong crusade for workers’ rights. Luna, working from a script by Keir Pearson (“Hotel Rwanda”) and Timothy J. Sexton (“Children Of Men”), adds few flourishes to Chavez’s campaign, instead letting the activist’s actions speak for themselves. (Luna does intermittently apply a level of 16mm grain to the images for period authenticity.)

In fact, the only time the film’s lack of speculation falls short is in its chronicle of the troubled relationship between Chavez and his son Fernando (Eli Vargas), whose youthful rage clashes with his father’s nonviolent approach. Although Cesar’s wife Helen tries to get him to reach out to Fernando, he never seems willing, and if there’s a deeper rationale — e.g., letting him be his own man — we never fully understand what it is.

Also read: Can ‘Cesar Chavez’ Finally Make Hollywood Pay Attention to Latino Audiences?

That said, the film seldom digresses far enough into Chavez’s domestic problems for them to take away too much of the focus on his efforts as an activist, and Luna mostly handles those potential clichés (like, say, Helen’s potential concerns about spending enough time with his family) with a light touch.

As the iconic labor union champion, Peña makes the most of a rare leading-man role, ably demonstrating how people often demonstrate greater strength by not showing it off. A remarkably versatile actor, Peña demonstrates Chavez’s authority without sacrificing his humanity and showcases the sincerity and conviction of his efforts without reducing him to a cipher.

Meanwhile, as the women in his life, Ferrera proves a formidable, thoughtful companion for Cesar as Helen, while Dawson’s Huerta feels brilliantly utilitarian, a figurehead for the NFWA whose partnership with Chavez speaks quietly, but constantly, to the kind of humane equality and respect that the activist was trying to achieve.

Also read: Michael Pena Confirms Potential ‘Ant-Man’ Role (Exclusive)

Although it’s probably more effective as a promotional tool for unionized labor than as a truly insightful portrait of the movement’s pioneer, Luna’s film mostly achieves its desired effect: namely, offering an oral history of the plight of farm workers and inspiring the outrage of its inevitably liberal-minded audiences.

But even if its finely-constructed talking points strike a stronger rhetorical note than an emotional one, that still feels like a victory, because if nothing else, “Cesar Chavez” embodies the quiet efficacy of its namesake without resorting to the bombastic theatricality he himself avoided.

'Noah' vs. 'God's Not Dead': It's David and Goliath at Box Office

Pantelion Films Taps Auri Maruri as Director of Production and Development

'Captain America: Winter Soldier' Storms Europe – Is 'Avengers' Effect Still in Play?

Villenueve, reuniting with his “Prisoners” star Jake Gyllenhaal for a character study equal in intensity and ambiguity to, say, the first 90 minutes of their previous collaboration, adapts Jose Saramago’s 2002 novel “The Double” into a riveting and provocative look at what defines us — and what doesn’t.

See video: ‘Enemy’ Trailer Finds Jake Gyllenhaal’s Doppelgänger on the Loose

Gyllenhaal plays Adam, a history teacher whose mundane life is thrown into disarray after he sees an actor in a movie that looks exactly like him. Hunting down the young man, whose name is Anthony (also Gyllenhaal), he tries to arrange a meeting, in the process unsettling the actor’s wife Helen (Sarah Gadon). But in spite of his initial trepidations, Anthony eventually agrees, and the men soon discover that they share seemingly everything in common, at least physically.

Unnerved by the experience, Adam vows to never contact his counterpart again, and tries to return to his normal life. But the rendezvous continues to haunt the actor, prompting him to propose a sort of “exchange” — his wife’s discomfort in exchange for a night with Adam’s beautiful girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) — which exposes the differences between the men, even as it reveals the impact of those differences on each other’s lives.

In spite of its deliberate pacing, moody tone and dreamlike imagery, what’s most interesting about “Enemy” is how its premise changes as the film progresses. The initial idea is at once promising, and terrifying: What if I’m not as unique as I thought? But that notion soon shifts into something more existential, as Adam and his doppelgänger begin to wrestle with precisely what it is that makes them unique, even when there’s somebody standing across from them who looks identical.

Adam is introspective where Anthony is impulsive, compassionate where his counterpart is self-absorbed, and so on. But unlike, say, the twins played by Jeremy Irons in “Dead Ringers,” these two men have no prior knowledge of one another, growing into themselves without a mirror image. Even their meeting means different things to each of them, undermining Adam’s sense of individuality while emboldening Anthony to use Adam’s insecurity to his advantage.

Also read: ‘Prisoners’ Director Denis Villeneuve Eyed for Female-Driven Crime Drama ‘Sicario’

Gyllenhaal expertly distinguishes Adam from Anthony, creating two distinctive personalities that overlap just enough to unnerve the audience as much as it does the characters themselves. Looking at the actor’s turn as the investigating detective in “Prisoners,” Villenueve seems to bring out great things in Gyllenhaal, empowering him to make choices that avoid flash but remain effective for the character and story.

Laurent brings an alluring aloofness to Mary, a woman vaguely searching for a deeper commitment from Adam, but one inured to the absence of the kind of intimacy that leads to it. As Helen, on the other hand, Gadon plumbs stunning depths as the character views the two men’s mutual discovery as a symptom of much larger and more terrifying things going wrong, perhaps in the universe, even as it underlines the qualities that she wants, and finds absent, in her relationship with Anthony.

There’s also some recurring business about spiders, which the film deftly avoids explaining with any clarity while still milking for maximum dramatic effect. Perhaps the most chilling notion in Villenueve’s adaptation is the idea that we actually can and inevitably will be different from everyone else, while still finding ourselves conforming into the same humdrum routines.

Also read: Jake Gyllenhaal in Talks to Star in Former Eminem Boxing Movie ‘Southpaw’ (Exclusive)

Ultimately, Villenueve’s latest is a Möbius strip of a movie, a portrait of self-examination projected onto the canvas of a psychological thriller in the frame of a character study; as such, viewers will mostly likely get out of it dramatically and emotionally exactly they you put in. Whether or not that’s a good thing is, as with the characters themselves, a matter of personal definition.

While arachnophobes should probably stay far away from “Enemy,” it’s otherwise intriguing enough to allow yourself to be caught in its web.

'Le Week-End' Review: Can the City of Lights Save This Marriage?

'Need for Speed' Review: Aaron Paul Can't Get This Vehicle Off the Lot

'Veronica Mars' Ultimate Review: TheWrap's Movie Critic and Senior TV Writer's Dual Takes (Video)

Directed by Jen McGowan from a script by Amy Lowe Starbin, the film takes a familiar scenario — two uncomfortable people find comfort from each other — and renders it in sensitive, human dimensions. And with the help of terrific performances by Juliette Lewis  and Jonny Weston (“Chasing Mavericks”), “Kelly & Cal” never fails to recognize that the solutions to life’s problems are usually as unglamorous as the circumstances that make them necessary.

Also read: SXSW Women’s Filmmaker Award Won By Lena Dunham Gets Revamp

Lewis plays Kelly, a new mom struggling with the challenges of taking care of a baby, a task made all the more difficult due to the grinding work schedule of her husband Josh (Josh Hopkins of TV’s “Cougar Town”). After trying and failing to make friends with some of the other moms in her neighborhood, Kelly crosses paths with wheelchair-bound teenage neighbor Cal (Weston), who’s feeling his own sense of constraint.

The two oddballs strike up an unusual camaraderie; Cal provides her with a reminder of her younger, wilder days, and Kellay offers him with much-needed, unsentimental companionship. As they grow closer, however, Kelly begins to realize that her flirtation with youthful irresponsibility actually has consequences, and she soon finds herself juggling the responsibilities of a fragile marriage she wants to preserve and a tenuous romance she wants to revert to a friendship.

The idea of new parenthood is hardly a novel subject for a movie, nor is the disillusionment of adulthood, although typically these challenges are foisted on poor young husbands rather than their mostly-capable, put-together wives. First-timers McGowan and Starbin literally flip the script, making Kelly a female manchild, nostalgic for her reckless, “fun” adolescence, emotionally unprepared for parenthood and completely lost amidst the mundane duties of child rearing.

Also read: 15 Movies We’re Dying to See This Spring, From ‘Noah’ to ‘Divergent’

Lewis is ideally cast in the role, bringing her own eclectic history as an actress along with the substantive loneliness she gives the character, an island of rock & roll cool in an ocean of suburban affluence. The evolution of her attraction to Cal — mostly platonic but, starved for attention from her husband, occasionally flirtatious — never overshadows the truth that she is married and wants to stay that way.

As Cal, meanwhile, Weston skillfully avoids sentimentality, even amidst the laundry list of his achievements prior to the accident that cost him the use of his legs. A kid just smart enough to get himself into trouble and just desperate enough to interpret Kelly’s friendship as something more, Weston makes Cal a fully dimensional counterpart, especially once he starts choosing inappropriate ways to express his interest in his lonely neighbor.

See photos: The Faces of Pilot Season 2014

At precisely the moment when the audience might be asking why Kelly can’t just talk to Josh, she thankfully starts wondering that too. McGowan and Starbin never let either of them skate past their problems with an easy turn of phrase or superficial solution, which is ultimately why “Kelly & Cal” ranks among the more honest films about adulthood, much less parenthood, made in recent years.

It’s a film that takes its characters and their crises seriously, allowing them to fully explore their situation before providing them (and the audience) a genuine roadmap for finding their way through.

SXSW Film Lineup: Zac Efron, Nicolas Cage and Wes Anderson Movies on This Year's Docket

Why SXSW Is Bringing TV Premieres to Its Film Festival

Working from a script by the original “300” team of Frank Miller, Kurt Johnstad and Zack Snyder, director Noam Murro (“Smart People”) inherits the first film’s gold-dipped, speed-ramped camerawork and its penchant for heroic largesse. But “Rise of an Empire” lacks director Snyder’s shrewd deconstruction of cartoonish hagiography, undermining the glorious, robust escapism of testosterone-fueled historical reenactment with an underdog story that feels almost too reflective to be rousing.

Watch video: Eva Green, Sullivan Stapleton Mix Business With Pleasure in New ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ Trailer (Video)

Taking place concurrently with the first film, “Rise of an Empire” stars Sullivan Stapleton (TV’s “Strike Back”) as Themistocles, an Athenian general who resorts to battling Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his conquering Persian armies only after exhausting all efforts to unite Greece as a democratic nation. Refused help from Sparta by Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), Themistocles assembles a small army of free men and employs naval strategy to impede the Persians from striking land.

But after finding his ranks decimated by the sheer volume of forces being controlled by Queen Artemisia (Eva Green), Persia’s most formidable general, Themistocles begins to reconsider the actual cost to his men – and to his country — of pursuing a so-called noble death.

The great thing about the first film is that it never lets you forget you’re hearing a story – a kind of übermensch myth-making that excites soldiers and inspires nationalism regardless of the odds that are being faced.

Indeed, it’s only because of the fire in the few survivors’ bellies at the end of the first “300” that the film feels remotely like a triumph: sure, 299 of their best men got slaughtered, but now their lesser-trained backups are super pissed-off, readying themselves to fight and, if necessary, to die in defense of their country. As told by Dilios (David Wenham), the term “dramatic license” doesn’t begin to cover the level of hyperbole he applies to King Leonidas’ defense of Sparta.

But even if the events of “Rise of an Empire” take place at virtually the same time as those in “300,” they’re being regaled to audiences seven years later — and to present them with a similar kind of propagandistic zeal might seem irresponsible given the seemingly inexhaustible supply of America’s real-world conflicts. As such, Murro presents Themistocles’ wartime position as a counterpoint to Leonidas’, as he champions democratic ideals, agonizes over the prospect of sending free men to war, and sees little glory in their deaths.

Oddly, the very respectability of that narrative choice tends to undermine the gritty enjoyment of watching people get dismembered in spectacular slow motion. When we’re meant to, like, care about the fact that these people are human, it’s not as fun.

Also read: Miley Cyrus, Will Smith and Zack Snyder Make GQ’s List of Least Influential People

That said, Murro hasn’t turned fans’ beloved “300” into some kind of solemn eulogy for antiquity’s lost soldiers; far from it. In fact, he matches Snyder’s sense of bloody camp blow for cringe-inducing blow, expanding the first film’s meat-and-potatoes combination of sex and violence into a full-blown smorgasboard, thanks to an ass-kicking centerpiece sex scene between Themistocles and Artemisia that’s sort of hilariously “empowering” as a portrait of two equals competing to show who possesses more testosterone.

But the broader edges of Snyder’s tale, which was populated by giants, monsters and mystics, have been pared away to focus on the mettle of “real” men making the ultimate sacrifice, as awesomely as humanly possible, on behalf of their country.

For better or for worse, Stapleton is a star in the same way that Gerard Butler was one when he starred in “300,” and it remains to be seen whether Hollywood figures out how best to utilize him elsewhere. But he’s a formidable presence on screen, and there’s an appealing consciousness behind his eyes that elevates him above the ranks of the industry’s aspiring action heroes; he’s a next-gen Russell Crowe without quite the same depths of simmering intensity.

Otherwise, “Rise of an Empire” is all Eva Green’s show, and she clearly relishes the opportunity to not only match but exceed her male counterparts’ supposedly indefatigable toughness. Though Green sees more action in this film than Headey’s Queen Gorgo did in “300,” the earlier heroine offered a promising template for female leadership, commanding respect while always remembering her place in this man’s world. But Green demolishes the era’s gender dynamics with a performance that plays like an act of revenge upon all of the b.s. love-interest roles she’s ever been offered.

Also read: ‘Penny Dreadful’ Trailer: Josh Hartnett and Eva Green in a World of Sex, Blood and Monsters

That Artemisia is Themistocles’ story-assigned opponent offers a welcome change in action-movie formula; that Green makes her a convincing adversary (physically as well as emotionally) is a testament to the actress’ talent and commitment.

Meanwhile, Murro’s only crime is failing to show any hint of directorial authorship; his considerable control of the form and structure of the narrative notwithstanding, it’s unclear what ideas or message he wants to impose upon material Snyder made his own. But given that the movie’s priority as a whole seems to be to replicate the style and impact of its predecessor, his imprint might simply be fidelity.

In that regard he’s entirely successful, which is why “300: Rise of an Empire” is a worthy companion piece to the first film; even though its message may emphatically support democracy, its director seems to be a puppet installed by a dictator.

OscarWrap's Complete Coverage of Awards Season – From Jared Leto to 'American Hustle' and Matthew McConaughey

'Hannibal' Returns: 5 Reasons Why Season 2 Is Getting Off to a Great Start

Joseph Gordon-Levitt Looks Pissed in 'Sin City: A Dame to Kill For' (Photos)

Nevertheless a movie primarily distinctive as a jacob’s ladder of choices that make less and less sense, McG’s latest is an ambitious disaster that tries to be two things at once — an action movie and a domestic comedy – but does neither well.

Costner (“Jack Ryan”) plays Ethan Renner, a CIA “lifer” who is forced into retirement after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. With just months left to live, Ethan sets his affairs in order and tries to make peace with his his ex-wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and daughter Zoey (Hailee Steinfeld). But just as he insists that his work is no longer a distraction from his familial responsibilities, CIA operative Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) makes him an offer he can’t refuse: kill a high-risk target in exchange for an experimental drug that may prolong his life.

See video: Kevin Costner Uses Gun to Get Spaghetti Recipe in ‘3 Days to Kill’ Trailer

Before long, Ethan is racing back and forth from assassinations to after-school meetups with his daughter, and trying to finish assignments in time to fix their supper. But as he becomes more emotionally involved in Christine and Zoey’s lives, Ethan begins to question the value of extending his life, especially when it seems to be for the purpose of inflicting more death.

Superficially, the notion of a covert operative trying to balance his professional and personal lives is one ripe with potential – and which has been explored to mixed effect already in movies like “True Lies,” and of course “This Means War.” But screenwriters Adi Hasak and Luc Besson, who previously worked together on “From Paris With Love,” have zero sense of how to combine humor with pathos, instead opting for a dizzying tone that whips haphazardly from goofy dunce-dad scenarios to brutally violent shootouts to tearful reconciliations to vampy surrealism.

Also read: ‘This Means War’ Review: Spy vs. Spy Love Triangle Makes Peace With Its Frothiness

It’s bad enough that the basic concept doesn’t make a damn lick of sense: Vivi gives Ethan a drug that gives him debilitating hallucinations, and then leaves him alone to kill a mysterious and incredibly dangerous criminal. But the characters are written with such disregard for anything resembling normal human reactions – such as when Zoey is angry at Ethan for not being angry at her – that their emotional non sequiturs actually conceal a few of the film’s many, many logical flaws.

But not all of them, starting with the “Magical Negro” family that lives in Ethan’s Parisian apartment and is helpless to evict because of laws that protect squatters. Or why Amber Heard is a buttoned-up desk jockey in the opening scenes of the film, but then transforms into a cross between Angelina Jolie in “Wanted” and a slightly less believable version of Dennis Rodman in “Double Team,” complete with scene-to-scene changes in hair color.

See photos: 2014 Movie Preview: 60 Upcoming Winter & Spring Films – From ‘Paranormal’ Sequel to ‘Transcendence’

You can’t help but feel bad for Nielsen, a formidable actress whose character here is relegated to pooh-poohing her husband’s unreliability, and then forgiving him unequivocally for showing mild interest (at best) in her and Zoey. But Steinfeld may have it worst of all, playing a character that even a teenage girl would think is mercurial – like when Zoey loses her temper at Ethan for saving her from a sexual assault she barely remembers, and immediately agrees to learn how to ride the bicycle she has told him repeatedly she hates.

What’s worse is the notion that Christine and Zoey have simply been waiting for Ethan to re-enter their lives, and Ethan merely needed to show up – always late, and never fully invested — in order to secure the domestic bliss that completes his life. But then again, that almost serves as a metaphor for Costner’s career of late: all he needs to do is make a demonstration of effort in a few high-profile projects, seem to care, and we’re ready to re-anoint him a movie star.

Admittedly, the actor’s recent turns in “Man of Steel” and “Jack Ryan” were perhaps deservedly acclaimed, if also in movies whose overall merits they overshadowed. But if numbskull dreck like this is exemplary of the kind of entertainment we get in return for that renewed adulation, I’ll say no thanks. Ultimately, “3 Days to Kill” is almost crazy enough to be appealing as camp, and certainly has enough leftfield one-liners to keep midnight moviegoers shouting dialogue for years; but as anything remotely serious or engaging, the only thing the movie actually kills is the time and money you spent watching it.

An update of Edward Zwick‘s 1986 film of the same name — itself an adaptation of David Mamet‘s play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” — Steve Pink‘s version (with a script by Leslye Headland, “Bachelorette”) maps a mundane but never boring blueprint for just the sort of middle-of-the-road, healthy but realistically complicated couple that audiences will undoubtedly recognize.

But in the few moments when Pink overreaches into melodrama, he and Headland plumb screenwriting formulas more clearly than they do relationship woes, undermining an otherwise smart and sensitive take on modern romance.

Michael Ealy (“Think Like A Man”) and Joy Bryant (TV’s “Parenthood”) play Danny and Debbie, the best friends of a pair of sex-positive horndogs, Bernie (Kevin Hart) and Joan (Regina Hall), who can’t seem to decide whether they love to hate or hate to love each other. Awkwardly thrown together as referees for Bernie and Joan’s full-contact style of dating, Danny and Debbie share a one-night stand, not expecting it to go any further. But their initial attraction develops into something more, and before long they’re fumbling through the paces of falling in love and moving in together.

Simultaneously, Bernie and Joan go through an acrimonious split, jeopardizing the harmony of the quartet’s social interactions. But even without their buddies testing their loyalty and undermining their confidence, Danny and Debbie begin to succumb to the pressure of a committed relationship, and soon find themselves wondering – together and individually — if they are truly meant to be together.

The worst that can be said about the relationship between Danny and Debbie is that it’s a little bit boring – albeit in the exact way that pairings unlike Bernie and Joan’s typically are. Their evolution from honeymoon-phase exuberance to long-term complacency feels entirely believable, and mostly sympathetic, although they both seem more occupied by the inevitability of their relationship failing than actually just dealing with each problem as it comes and recognizing, quite clearly, that they love one another.

Bernie and Joan, meanwhile, provide both a narrative counterpoint and a welcome alternative to Danny and Debbie’s domestic partnership, showing that the definition of “normal” and “happy” in a relationship is entirely subjective. From their opening duel – a breakdown of their first date (and sex) to their respective buddies – the characters share a similar, go-for-broke passion, and you can actually understand why Danny and Debbie keep them around, both as individuals and a couple: they always make a scene and usually cause trouble, but they’re essentially good people who, just like them, want happiness for themselves and their friends.

Watch video: Kevin Hart Gets Lucky with Regina Hall in ‘About Last Night’ Trailer (Video)

In fact, Hart is so good in the role he plays it actually makes up for his turn in “Ride Along,” highlighting his strengths by shaping his manic energy into a character with whom we can identify and about whom we can care. Not unlike Charlie Day, Hart has a dog whistle-sort of comedic style that some love and others loathe; both performers flourish with strong material and direction, and Hart certainly does so here.

As his chicken-mask-wearing lover and occasional adversary, Hall is equal to the challenge of making Joan’s attraction to Bernie reciprocal, and further, her personality complementary to his as well. After four “Scary Movie” installments and “Superhero Movie,” she’s more than paid her dues as a comic performer, and Hall makes the most of a meaty, interesting character who dives headfirst into the kind of crazy that’s both overwhelming and oddly irresistible.

Also read: Romany Malco Cast in Kevin Hart’s ABC Comedy Pilot

Meanwhile, Ealy and Bryant are solid as the “serious” lovers to whom all of the meat-and-potatoes relationship problems occur. But when Headland’s screenplay veers into, well, movie territory — such as when Danny “chivalrously” brings home his troublesome ex (Paula Patton) to sleep off her drunkenness on the one night when Debbie is out of town — the performers seem slightly lost, as if in shock that the film temporarily abandoned its intelligence and subtlety in favor of the sort of boringly obvious rom-com conflict that hack screenwriters concoct when their story stalls.

Also read: Kevin Hart, Romances and ‘Robocop’ Hit Box Office – But ‘Lego Movie’ Will Get Last Laugh

Nearly perfectly balancing the humdrum normalcy of Danny and Debbie and the comic volatility of Bernie and Joan, Pink’s film really feels like a grown-up movie that hits all the bases — funny enough to keep things interesting,  yet serious enough to keep them compelling. Not to sound like a blurb-generator, but “About Last Night” makes for a pretty terrific date movie, whether it’s your first with a new special someone or the first in months for you and your long-term partner, because it demands only a commitment to be entertained, but still manages to make you consider what it means to be in a relationship.

'Robocop' Tops 'Lego Movie' in Debut as Storms Whack Box Office

Kevin Hart Leads Battle of the Sexes Through Las Vegas in 'Think Like a Man Too' Trailer (Video)

Trio of '80s Hit Movie Remakes Put Valentine's Day Box Office in Time Warp

The latest in a seemingly infinite line of Young Adult fantasies trying to command the attention – and disposable income — of tween girls, director Mark Waters‘ adaptation of the first novel in Richelle Mead’s best-selling book series is, like its predecessors, a hodgepodge of sci-fi/monster mythology stitched awkwardly to the banal melodrama of adolescent romance.

Zoey Deutch (also of 2013’s YA dud “Beautiful Creatures”) plays Rose Hathaway, a half-human/half-vampire known as a Dhampir, who is training to be the guardian of her best friend Lissa (Lucy Fry), a Moroi princess and heir to the throne of Dragomir. Despite their best efforts to hide out among the mortal population, the duo are brought back to St. Vladimir’s Academy, where cell phones and internet are replaced by chapel services and weapons training.

Recognizing her scrappy resilience and learning of the rare psychic bond that allows her to know Lissa’s thoughts, guardian Dimitri Belikov (Danila Kozlovsky) agrees to mentor Rose in her training. But when Lissa becomes a target for threats from an unknown adversary at the school, the bond between Moroi and Dhampir is tested even as Rose attempts to uncover the culprit and protect Lissa from danger.

Watch video: The Weinstein Company Releases First ‘Vampire Academy’ Trailer (Video)

Cinematically speaking, “Vampire Academy” exemplifies the pointlessness of trying to drive a square peg into a round hole. Waters, perhaps best known for the watershed teen comedy “Mean Girls,” seems to innately understand the complexity of girls’ feelings about boys, other girls, school, and growing up. But the screenplay by Daniel Waters (the director’s brother, who knows a thing or two about mean girls himself as the author of “Heathers”)  is so preoccupied by the machinery of vampires and witchcraft and ancient hierarchies and secret societies that it fails entirely to create a coherent mythology for any of the neck-biting hocus-pocus that’s supposed to be going on.

Admittedly, vampire lore has been steadily diluted since the emergence of “Twilight,” which seemed to dictate that henceforth bloodsucking means being alternately dreamy and tortured. But despite the film’s nonstop barrage of expository dialogue (“You know it’s been two years since the crash,” etc.), not to mention Rose’s constant Juno-on-Jolt-Cola meta-commentary, it’s totally unclear why these characters even call themselves vampires, except when Lissa needs to take a bite out of her BFF’s shoulder for a 5-hemoglobin pick-me-up.

Also read: ‘Vampire Academy’ Star Zoey Deutch Lands Female Lead in Gregg Allman Biopic

The bigger problem, however, is that St. Vladimir’s Academy is populated entirely by white, privileged a-holes whose affluenza has fully metastasized, making none of them — other than Rose, sort of — remotely interesting or likeable. If it weren’t for homophobia, slut-shaming, rumor-mongering, victim-blaming and bullying, they would apparently have nothing to do at all; meanwhile, aside from Dimitri, none of the faculty members do more than wag their finger disapprovingly at their students, and seem about as mature as the teenagers they’re supposed to be in charge of.

As Rose, Deutch gives a fussy, animated performance that too often overshadows her undeniable charisma. Burdened with the challenge of establishing the stakes (no pun intended) of the story while simultaneously taking the piss out of them, she ably if inconsistently juggles sincerity and self-awareness. Meanwhile, Fry delivers a one-dimensional portrait of alpha female self-indulgence, struggling to deal with tousle-haired dreamboats who throw themselves at her feet while petulant social climbers nip at her heels.

Also read: Bravo Developing Next-Generation ‘Heathers,’ 4 Other Scripted Projects

Playing their adult counterparts, Olga Kurylenko vamps (again, no pun intended) her way through a schizophrenic, disastrous performance as headmistress Kirova, while Gabriel Byrne does his best impression of Lloyd Bridges in “Hot Shots” as the feeble, benevolent Victor Dashkov. Unlike them, relative newcomer Kozlovsky tries to do more with less as Dimitri, but he ends up underplaying so much that he barely registers — a significant problem for a film where he’s meant to be an irresistible love interest.

About the only thing that remotely rescues “Vampire Academy” from total, discombobulating misguidedness is a feeble acknowledgment (long overdue in movies like this one) that the most important thing to the main character isn’t all of the ass she can kick or the lessons she’s learned, but whether or not the cute boy she’s, like, totally been crushing on the whole time actually likes her back. Ultimately more “Meaningless” than “Mean Girls,” “Vampire Academy” is a busy, overcomplicated empowerment fantasy with more hormones than brain cells, from a director seemingly eager to adopt the ethos “better clever than smart” without achieving either.

ABC Orders Drama Series 'Astronaut Wives Club' From 'Gossip Girl' Producers

SXSW Unveils Midnight Movies, Music Videos and Shorts Slate

'Smash' Alum Jack Davenport Cast in ABC Pilot 'Sea of Fire'

A raunchy but admittedly earnest imitation of “Bridesmaids” and “Bachelorette,” the project marks the first “original” project from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the consistently untalented purveyors of spoof movies like “Date Movie,” “Vampires Suck” and “The Starving Games.” But where the movies that inspired it at least managed to be funny, “Best Night Ever” is painfully bereft of laughs, much less a story, sympathetic characters or basic cinematic proficiency, reinforcing the unspoken Hollywood axiom that imitation is the most shameless – and disappointing – form of commercial desperation.

Desiree Hall (TV’s “Teen Wolf”) plays Claire, a bachelorette headed for Las Vegas with her sister Leslie (Samantha Colburn) and friends Zoe (Eddie Ritchard) and Janet (Crista Flanagan) to celebrate her impending nuptials. Arriving to discover that identity theft has made it impossible for Leslie to foot the bill for a penthouse suite, the foursome finds decidedly seedier digs at a nearby fleatrap. But after being ejected from a male strip club, their itinerary breaks down, they get robbed, and soon find themselves lost and broke in the back alleys of Sin City.

Desperate for cash, Janet leads them to a bar where she hopes to score $500 bucks wrestling in Jello. But as their problems multiply and the effects of a night of drinking and drug use begin to take its toll, Claire and her friends succumb to their desires and insecurities, jeopardizing not just the trek home, but the relationships that await them there – that is, if they don’t turn on each other first.

Since Friedberg and Seltzer don’t understand comedy, it stands to reason that they also don’t understand exactly what “found footage” means as a technique – meaning, when people have one camera that’s running constantly, you cannot cut to someone’s reaction shot, every single time, when someone makes a joke. That said, when you’re writing dialogue that’s a spectacularly unfunny as what the four actresses have to work with, I suppose it’s reasonable to want to alert audiences to the fact that they are supposed to be laughing.

At a svelte 82 minutes, it seems like it would be almost impossible not to find enough hair-raising scenarios for four trouble-seeking women to get into. And yet, the movie drags like it’s got the corpses of the filmmakers it’s copying tied to it. In one scene, the girls leap into a dumpster in order to avoid discovery by the cops, and while I’m not actually sure how long the one-take scene goes on, it involves a protracted freakout by Zoe that culminates in an almost complete performance of 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up.” And later, there’s a mistaken-identity chase scene that goes on so long it cuts away to the next day, and then back again, when the characters decide to rewatch the footage of their misadventures.

Since 2002’s “The Sweetest Thing,” Hollywood has been trying to achieve some kind of perverse gender equality by suggesting that women can be as raunchy and stupid as their male counterparts – and having met one or two in real life, I can attest that’s true. But excepting “Bridesmaids” and “Bachelorette,” which imply far more than they actually show in terms of grossout gags, none of these efforts have even come within the solar system of being as good as the absolute worst of the “boy” movies that inspired them. And when you’re watching a movie where it feels like the filmmakers watched “The Hangover Part III,” and said, “THAT! That’s the kind of movie I want to make,” it’s not merely unfunny or disappointing, it’s demoralizing as a viewer, much less a consumer.

Ultimately, “Best Night Ever” feels more like “worst movie ever” – it’s so anti-funny, it’s toxic, almost ruining your memories of the movies that it stole its ideas from. This is mean-spirited antagonism of moviegoing audiences, a showcase for what a filmmaker can subject them to, if they can do it cheaply, and profitably enough. And what the actresses in the film go through feels like abuse, because no one should have to endure what they do in order to score a screen credit.

But you know who I feel most sorry for? Friedberg and Seltzer’s friends and loved ones. Because even if the duo famously avoids press and ignores reviews, those closest to them have got to watch this garbage at some point – and anyone who can sit through the whole thing and smile approvingly afterward gets my sympathy, and also probably deserves some kind of award for delivering a performance more convincing than any ever seen in one of their films.

Joe Lynch’s “Knights of Badassdom” does little to further its cause, but that may be because the producers took the film away from him, editing it down to a one-note joke and a whiff of a story that fails to offer a single reason – literal or metaphorical – why dressing up as a fictional character is enjoyable or rewarding.

Ryan Kwanten (HBO’s “True Blood”) plays Joe, a mechanic and sometime doom-metal musician whose girlfriend Beth (Margarita Levieva, TV’s “Revenge”) dumps him for not doing more with his Communications Studies degree. Retreating to the literal castle he lives in with his LARP-obsessed buddies Eric (Steve Zahn) and Hung (Peter Dinklage), Joe reluctantly agrees to join them for a weekend getaway where they don costumes and square off against other geeks under the watchful eye of game master Ronnie (Jimmi Simpson).

Also read: ‘Devil’s Due’ Review: Found-Footage Horror Conceit Is Visually Ambitious – And That’s Not a Compliment

But after Ronnie demands that his teammates “bring Joe back to life” with a conjuring spell, Eric accidentally resuscitates a bona fide demon. Teaming up with a handful of misfits including Lando (Danny Pudi), Gunther (Tom Hopper) and Gunther’s comely cousin Gwen (Summer Glau), Joe soon finds himself facing off the otherworldly beast, which to complicate things further has disguised itself as Beth, his ex.

There are lots of great angles to approach LARPing from, particularly for audiences who are perhaps less sympathetic to twenty- and thirtysomething neckbeards who pepper their conversations with Anglo-Saxon language. It could be empowering where people feel victimized in reality. Formal and poetic where real life is casual and crude. A unique form of performance art. Or even just a desperate form of escapism from the routine of blue-collar responsibility.

“Badassdom” takes none of these, instead reducing the entirety of LARPing to one repetitive joke – self-serious old English, immediately undercut by anachronistic slang or some modern reference. Moreover, the movie barely even bothers to address the problems Joe’s confronted with at the beginning of the film – his heartbreaking split and his general irresponsibility – instead halfheartedly trying to assemble all of the best gags from a talented ensemble while maintaining the pretense of a story about a real demon and the phony magicians and warriors who must stop it.

Also read: ‘The Legend Of Hercules’ Review: Kellan Lutz’s Beefcake Saga is One Messy Myth (Video)

Particularly once the games begin, Kwanten feels like the “hero” only because he’s the most conventionally handsome, even though he’s by far the least interesting character. He’s got a remarkably naturalistic presence on screen, but his lack of magnetism isn’t his fault – it’s the script’s, which offers Joe no emotional substance, and nothing interesting to do. That the movie seems as content as Joe is for him to work as a mechanic and dream of a rock & roll career undermines Kwanten’s ability to make us care.

Meanwhile, the rest of the movie’s ideas feel like desperate homages/ ripoffs that someone got afraid of, legally speaking, at the last minute, such as an opening credits sequence designed to look this close to the prologue of “Evil Dead 2.”

All of which begs the question: What this movie was meant to be in the first place, even under Lynch’s auspices – a midnight movie? A tongue-in-cheek celebration of geek culture? Or something honest and genuinely affecting?

As the latter, and in this form, “Knights of Badassdom” is a complete failure. But quite frankly, for the producers to miss the target of either of the other two quite so broadly is shameful. Because when “Role Models” offers a more flattering portrait of LARPing – which it is literally always making fun of – it exposes this movie that’s actually about LARPing for what it is: a sophomoric distraction designed to prolong careers.

Although the film justifies its characters’ constant documentation about as effectively as any of these plausibility-stretchers ever will, the feature-length debut of two thirds of the directorial troupe Radio Silence scrambles to find any excuse to cut to a new angle or shoot traditional coverage while debasing a potentially compelling story with every found-footage cliché in the book.

Zach Gilford (“Friday Night Lights”) plays Zach, a newlywed who decides to document every minute of life with his wife Samantha (Allison Miller), starting with their wedding. After a drunken night of partying with locals on their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Zach and Samantha return home to the normalcy of their regular lives. But after Samantha discovers she’s pregnant, they eagerly prepare for the challenges of parenthood.

Also read: ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’ Review: Chris Pine Reboots Tom Clancy’s Hero in a Slight But Spry Spy Game

Before long, Samantha starts to worry there’s something wrong with the baby after she experiences odd pains – and displays unusual behavior. When they notice strangers watching their home, and a local priest (Sam Anderson) has a bizarre encounter with Samantha, Zach begins to realize something is really wrong – and even if he figures out what that is, it may already be too late.

Generally speaking, I have no problem suspending disbelief in order to enjoy found-footage horror – of course there’s no good reason for them to film all of the time. But “Devil’s Due” distinguishes itself, much to its detriment, by making a huge show of the characters’ reasoning, and then packaging their entirely self-sustaining “home movies” in between recordings of a police interrogation of one of the survivors.

And the fact that the police don’t seem to believe the suspect, despite what is very obviously a mountain of footage evidencing their innocence, suggests that they didn’t find, or see, the material we’re watching. So how exactly can you have a found footage movie, if no one finds it?

Also read: ‘G.B.F.’ Review: Gay Teens Become Hot Accessories in This Sweet-Natured Comedy

Meanwhile, the filmmakers either had no confidence or no patience for the limitations of found-footage movies – which typically involve one camera, or two, maybe, if, say, someone were to give the protagonist a GoPro as a wedding gift. Halfway through the film, no fewer than 15 cameras are installed in Zach and Samantha’s house, effectively eliminating the need altogether for the technical conceit, particularly since the remainder of the film regularly cuts from a variety of angles (and even external cameras) to document what’s happening.

Worse yet, even with an omniscient viewpoint looming over everything, the film still can’t muster any suspense, unless waiting for the inevitability of a one-second jump scare counts. There isn’t a single set piece or scare in the film that hasn’t been done before, multiple times, and better, in one of the “Paranormal” films or their knockoffs.

Suffice it to say casting one of the stars of “Friday Night Lights” in a main role and hiring hugely recognizable character actor Sam Anderson (“Lost,” “WKRP”) further undermines any sense that this is real, much less believable. But ultimately, “Devil’s Due” is so preposterous and numbskulled that their actorly theatricality – by which I mean commitment to making stupid decisions — is all that’s left to hold onto. Because by the time the film comes back around to that bookend interrogation footage, the only thing you can think about is what else you’ve seen them in before – especially since it’s where you will undoubtedly prefer to be.

Regardless, the film answers the defiant question “Are you not entertained?” (asked by Maximus in “Gladiator”) with a resounding “Not especially.”

The once-mighty Harlin, hovering in C-grade limbo after a lackluster horror sequel (“Exorcist: The Beginning”), a steroid-pumped “Die Hard” knockoff (“12 Rounds”) and a would-be prestige picture (“5 Days of War”), yields fully to the motion-cranked, bleach-bypassed aesthetic of the last decade-plus of sword and sandal films, offering an addition to the genre that opts for familiarity over originality, and momentum over meaning.

Kellan Lutz (“The Twilight Saga”) plays Hercules, a demigod birthed to Queen Alcmene (Roxanne McKee) by Zeus in order to bring peace to her warmongering husband Amphitryon’s (Scott Adkins) kingdom. Estranged from his father and reluctantly locked in competition with his older brother Iphicles (Liam Garrigan), Hercules grows up knowing nothing of his true birthright, instead focusing his efforts on winning the hand of Cretan princess Hebe (Gaia Weiss).

But after Amphitryon arranges for Iphicles to marry Hebe despite Hercules’ objections, the king sends Hercules to war with the expectation that the warrior will soon fall prey to the military forces of Egyptian warlord Tarak (Jonathon Schaech).

Also read: ‘Hercules’ vs. ‘Hercules': 6 Box-Office Battles Between Movies That Were Awfully Alike

Instead, Hercules teams up with a disgruntled commander in Amphitryon’s army named Sotiris (Liam McIntyre), and the two men hatch a plan to return to Greece, overthrow the king and reunite with their loved ones – if they can survive the gladiatorial arenas, where they are pitted against the toughest and most fearless men from around the world.

Overstuffed with narrative and stylistic hallmarks from virtually every one of its sandal-clad predecessors, “The Legend of Hercules” is desperately short on new ideas, unless you count the actual legend of Hercules. Though the character’s mythic backstory provides a loose framework for his adventures, the only sorts of labors endured in the film are those by the audience, who are forced to slog through its cheap, mind-numbing set pieces and unimaginative hero’s journey.

Also read: ‘Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters’ Review: The Silly, All-Ages Fun of an Old Steve Reeves ‘Hercules’ Movie

That said, if there’s one unique quality that this film does possess, it’s the inexplicable ability to make every scene seem both massively important and incredibly rushed at the same time. “Hercules” is the sort of movie where in one scene, a man can discover that his wife has been murdered, and in the very next one, he’s smiling again; indeed, the drama is so briskly rendered, it actually makes one long for the overwrought fascism of “300,” much less the cartoonish self-seriousness of “Gladiator.”

As Hercules, Lutz unquestionably has the physique of a demigod, but the film offers little evidence that he possesses the substance to wrestle the character’s transformation from lovelorn exile to populist revolutionary. Where the “Twilight” series expertly utilized his undeniable physicality and goofy, earnest charm, Harlin’s film flirts with offering Lutz dramatic challenges – A loved one dies. Go! – but its machinelike momentum never offers an opportunity to showcase either his charisma or his (potential) acting chops.

Also read: ‘Twilight’ Star Kellan Lutz in Talks to Join Sylvester Stallone in ‘Expendables 3’ (Exclusive)

That said, at least Lutz seems to be trying to create a character from whole cloth; by comparison, almost all of his co-stars are at best aping their predecessors – Gerard Butler‘s growling conqueror in “300,” Joaquin Phoenix‘s venal successor in “Gladiator,” etc. – without matching their performances.

Given the collective lack of originality here, one supposes the best anyone involved with “The Legend of Hercules” could hope for was to evoke something someone already liked, since the only marginally fun part of the film is trying to figure out what inspired it – or more likely, what it ripped off.

Watch the video below:

'Lone Survivor' Set to Ambush 'Frozen' at Top of Box Office

Fox Shifts 'Dawn of Planet of Apes' Release to 'Fast and Furious 7' Date in 2014

'Homeland' Star Rupert Friend in Talks to Replace Paul Walker in 'Agent 47' (Exclusive)

A movie designed expressly for the music star’s fans and spun directly from the success of its pop-biography predecessor, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” Jon M. Chu’s follow-up documentary aims to look inside Bieber as his success grows and the singer comes of age. But it’s a microscope of which the young star is all too aware, and there’s simply too much lacquer on his image to get through to who Bieber is or how he actually feels. “Believe” feels earnest but superficial, a next-chapter look at a star who hasn’t come enough to terms with where he’s come from to contemplate where he is, or where he’s going.

Shot concurrently with Bieber’s 2013 “Believe” tour, the film presumes that you know the singer’s backstory, not to mention his personal peccadilloes over the past year or two. Contrasting footage from the tour with fan tributes, collaborator interviews and reflections from Bieber himself, Chu makes this second doc an examination of a phenomenon in motion, commenting on the great opportunities – and, sure, occasional challenges – that come with international superstardom.

See video: Justin Bieber Addresses Being a Possible Train Wreck, Fights Gravity in First ‘Believe’ Trailer (Video)

It’s easy to judge Bieber’s immaturity and his misbehavior – and to chortle at his insistence that he can handle the prospect of never being told “no.” But there is a bona fide truth in Chu’s observation that the singer is going through typical adolescent experiences, including being a jerk and making mistakes, that few of us ever had to do with the media scrutiny that Bieber constantly endures.

For example, Bieber appears unquestionably ridiculous mad-dogging UK paparazzi after they threaten to give him a beating. But how many young men have been forced to deal with people with cameras following their every move, and antagonizing them at every opportunity in the hopes of provoking a tantrum? The film never makes Bieber a martyr or seeks the audience’s pity, but it fairly acknowledges he is dealing with a kind of attention most will never face.

See video: Justin Bieber Reveals Secret Talent at Laugh Factory Gig: I F— ‘Bitches’ (Video)

Although there are no moments like Chu’s sublime slow-motion shot of Bieber’s hair-flip in “Never Say Never,” the director doesn’t shy away from making light fun of the singer’s hallmarks, and even a handful of his misdeeds. (He includes a sequence from Zach Galifianakis‘ “Between Two Ferns” with Bieber, which culminates in the comedian whipping the singer with his belt.)

That said, Chu underscores the appreciation and reciprocity that Bieber and his team show the fans by capturing impresario Scooter Braun as he hands out tickets to fans waiting for the show. And in one genuinely poignant sequence, Bieber breaks down as he recalls his experiences with 6-year-old Avalanna Routh, dubbed “Mrs. Bieber,” for whom he performed before she died of cancer.

See video: Justin Bieber Addresses Anne Frank Comments with Zach Galifianakis (Video)

Far from being a somber tribute to the people whose lives he’s touched, however, “Believe” captures some dynamite concert footage, and Chu’s own maturity behind the camera is self-evident as he not only films the action, but also coordinates it to maximize its impact cinematically. Indeed, even if some of Bieber’s songs remain unappealing, Chu chronicles their performance during the tour with a vividness and excitement that often feels infectious.

Ultimately, it’s hard to look at the film from any sort of non-fan perspective and not see it as less than hagiography – a tribute to Bieber’s success, and a complimentary portrait of how well he’s supposedly dealt with it. But even if the sort of documentary to allow its subject to describe without irony the intimate moments that he has “when I’m on that crane,” “Believe” is probably as personal as Justin Bieber circa 2013 is going to get – not because, given the ubiquitousness of the media coverage of his rise to stardom, he won’t open up, but rather that he probably can’t.

Justin Bieber Crashes Crowded Christmas Day at Box Office

Justin Bieber Levitates Over Great Wall of China in Latest Amazing Feat (Photo)

Despite trumping that film in 1999, and on the small screen even, with the documentary miniseries “Walking With Dinosaurs,” BBC Earth decided to follow in Disney’s footsteps – including the missteps – with “Walking With Dinosaurs 3D,” an insufferable family adventure whose impressive animation is consistently undercut by cartoonish self-awareness.

Bookended by the contemporary story of a teenager named Ricky (Charlie Rowe), who thinks science is for losers, the film stars John Leguizamo (“Kick-Ass 2,” the “Ice Age” series) as Alex, a prehistoric parrot who tells the story behind a gorgosaurus tooth given to Ricky by his paleontologist uncle, Zack (Karl Urban). Alex explains that the tooth was knocked out by Patchi (Justin Long), the runt of a litter of pachyrhinosauri, who comes of age during his family’s annual migration ritual.

Also read: ‘Frozen,’ ‘The Croods,’ ‘The Wind Rises’ Top Oscar Slate of 19 Animated Films

Struggling to assert himself beneath the dominant influence of his alpha-male brother Scowler (Skyler Stone), Patchi falls in love with a fellow pachyrhinosaurus named Juniper (Tiya Sircar) as he learns about the bigger challenges of the world around him. But when the herd is threatened by a gorgosaurus determined to turn their migration into a buffet, Patchi is torn between staying loyal to his brother and exploring his own burgeoning leadership skills.

The decision to use a framing device for this story is both crass and condescending, suggesting that “kids today” couldn’t possibly think paleontology is cool, and then assuming that their version of what dinosaurs probably went through is awesome enough to sway even the most disaffected teenager. In spite of the kid’s “too cool for fossils” disposition, Urban does his best to make the job look compelling, but he’s hopelessly outclassed by the dinosaurs, who get about 20 times as much screen time as he does.

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: ‘Epic’ Director Chris Wedge Calls Animated Filmmaking a ‘26.5-Mile Sprint’

As superfluous as that framing device is, however, it at least provides a respite from the dopey voice acting that Leguizamo and Long bring to these prehistoric characters. Spouting clunky dialogue about alpha males and laws of nature in between freeze-frame title cards announcing the species of each new dinosaur, the “name” actors and their costars avoid anything resembling nuance or dimensionality, even as writer John Collee (“Happy Feet”) confuses Darwinian principles with character loglines.

As pathologically annoying as Leguizamo can be, Long is by far the worst offender, if only because his scrappy delivery is never ingratiating, always irritating. But given conflicts that would feel clichéd to kindergarteners, the inevitability of a happy ending seems even more imminent than the extinction of dinosaurs, and as a consequence, there’s no one for whom to root or about whom to care. (It definitely doesn’t help that there are about five poop jokes within the first 15 minutes of the film, either.)

Also read: ‘Walking With Dinosaurs': Fox’s Latest Stone Age Kids Movie Has BBC Pedigree

Ultimately, other than a few moments of unexpectedly brutal violence, “Walking With Dinosaurs” just coasts inexorably towards a dead end – not so much for the characters as the audience’s interest level.

Pixar Cuts Staff After 'Good Dinosaur' Delay

Academy Overhauls Animated Nominations — But Who Will Benefit? (Exclusive)

'Rio' Director Carlos Saldanha in Talks to Replace Joe Cornish on Fox's 'Rust' (Exclusive)

“There was a huge sort of drug culture that I was really sort of impressed by when I started to go out,” Andrade told TheWrap’s Steve Pond. “And it seemed like a metaphor for something that was lacking. And I thought, if I could make a film about corruption, it would be an interesting place to start with personal corruption, and then expand that idea of corruption to the political and social arena.”

Freebase isn’t a drug that’s frequently discussed in the United States, but Andrade said it was remarkably commonplace in his native country, particularly among teenagers.

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: Georgian Oscar Hopeful ‘In Bloom’ Mixes Pubescence With Post-Soviet Politics

“Freebase was in a way what was expected for kids to do,” he revealed. “So I figured I could take these characters and explore this world and this idea of a rite of passage with them and see how it would play out dramatically.”

Andrade spoke about the process of channeling his personal experiences growing up in Ecuador into “Porcelain Horse” after an awards-season screening Wednesday night.

“In terms of trying to think of a first thing to write, I thought it would be easier if I talked about something I knew very well, the places and people and characters,” he admitted.

“So I decided to do something about my homeland, and then I remembered a story,” he recalled. “It’s very loosely based on a real story that happened when I was a teenager where there was a murder around where I lived.”

“I lived in a very peaceful, very posh area,” Andrade continued, “and this was sort of a traumatic experience for the neighborhood. These kids had died and their mother had gone away, and … the kids misbehaved so much and were addicts and whatnot.”

“So I thought that would be an interesting dramatic conceit to make a first film – it was like cheating by writing something I know.”

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: Felicity Jones on Why She Gave Ralph Fiennes the Dickens Over ‘Invisible Woman’

Far from glorifying the behavior of his protagonist, Paco, and his younger brother Luis, Andrade offers an often harrowing look at their addiction, which seems to poison not just their bodies but their very lives, and their relationships with others. Although he always intended for his main character to survive the ordeal, Andrade said that he wanted to use that structure of spiraling corruption to eventually land him in a place that was, in its way, worse than before.

“When I had written the structure of it, I knew the end of it,” Andrade explained. “Paco would survive this event and then he would change. But I was like, what can he change into that would be worse? And then I was like, he has to become a politician.”

Andrade ultimately only touches on the larger cultural forces that set Paco and his brother on this destructive journey, focusing largely on their day-to-day lives. But the filmmaker said that he feels that “Porcelain Horse” asks questions – and finds some unflattering answers – that reverberate in places other than Ecuador.

“What did we do as a country to produce these people?” he asked rhetorically. “In many ways to me, it was a mixture of privilege and nihilism, and the idea of there’s no future, really, so why don’t we make this little thing we have the best for us, and screw everybody else.”

“[But] I guess we can ask that of every country in the world, you know,” he observed. “What happens in society that produces these people?”

During his 40-odd years as an actor, Geoffrey Rush has worked opposite a spectacular array of performers, from Johnny Depp to Colin Firth to Salma Hayek. But in discussing his acting challenges opposite 12-year-old Sophie Nelisse in the Holocaust drama “The Book Thief,” he revealed that there’s apparently only one former costar he might not like to team up with again.

“I knew she could act,” Rush said of Nelisse. “There was no question of going on this film thinking, is it going to be like the monkey in ‘Pirates’?”

Speaking to TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman at a screening of the film Thursday evening, Rush said that the young woman’s poise and talent made him feel like his decades of experience were superfluous, even when acting in such weighty material.

“To suddenly work opposite someone who is 12 who was just mind-blowingly focused, graceful, effortless, disciplined, deeply moving, I found it shifted the goalposts for me for what I thought acting was about,” he revealed. “She had a purity of just being on screen, and there were times shooting those emotional scenes that I found so profoundly and deeply annoying. Why did I do all of that?” he laughed.

Also read: ‘The Book Thief’ Review: Death and Plucky Tween Find Their Voice in Holocaust Tale

In the film, Rush plays Hans Hubermann, a German painter who adopts Nelisse’s character Liesl just as World War II breaks out. He indicated that the two of them got along immediately, but a change in the shooting schedule helped them bond as an on-screen family.

“We hit it off really well,” Rush said. “[But] we had a very lucky break in that it was the coldest winter in 60 years or something – it was so cold that the paint on the set was just constantly peeling off. So we ended up shooting all of the scenes in the kitchen, which was a studio set.”

“So we absolutely got to tell that story from that intimate domestic hub of the Hubermann household that she enters into as an illiterate, grief-stricken young girl at the beginning.”

Also read: Starring Death and Nazis, ‘The Book Thief’ Is Not Your Typical Young Adult Movie

In terms of her performance, Rush credited Nelisse’s first ambition for the focus and intensity of the work that she did. “I think a lot of that came from the fact that she was training to be a gymnast,” he said. “She was doing 35 hours a week. Her goal, her dream was to go to the 2016 gymnastics in Rio.”

In fact, Rush said that it might have actually been Nelisse’s preoccupation with gymnastics which eventually landed her the role. “She said, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever get this part’,” he remembered.

“They looked at a thousand girls all over the world, and she had her heart set on going to the Olympics. And she said she went into the audition completely in a playful, open way.”

See video: Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson Raise a Book Worm in Nazi Germany in ‘The Book Thief’ Trailer

According to Rush, director Brian Percival indicated that even though she might not have given one the best auditions that he saw, she demonstrated qualities that he felt were essential to playing Liesl effectively. “[Brian] said, out of all of the people he saw, this is the only girl who sort of threw the audition away, but revealed that she had the feistiness, the vulnerability, she had the secretive life that was going to be [necessary].”

“You know – she’s going to be in 97 percent of the film,” Rush observed. “If that doesn’t work, you’re not going to have a very good story.”

Watch the videos below:

TheWrap Screening Series: How Brie Larson's Roulette Career Landed on 'Short Term 12' (Video)

TheWrap Screening Series: 'Epic' Director Chris Wedge Calls Animated Filmmaking a '26.5-Mile Sprint'

TheWrap Screening Series: How Scott Cooper Hooked Casey Affleck With 'Out of the Furnace'

Eschewing the kitchen-sink minutiae of the first installment (or maybe just having used all of it up) Peter Jackson creates a rousing, immersive sequel that offers the same sort of sweeping action — and more crucially, emotional engagement — that helped the “Rings” films become a cultural phenomenon, regardless whether or not you were familiar with the source material.

Picking up more or less immediately where the last one left off, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and the band of dwarves led by would-be king Thorin (Richard Armitage) continue their journey to the Lonely Mountain. On the run from Azog (Manu Bennett), an Orc with a bloodlust for Thorin’s head, they flee into Mirkwood, where they are attacked by giant spiders until elves Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) intervene and subsequently imprison them.

See video: ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’ Trailer: Dragons and Dreamy Orlando Bloom

Despite long-unresolved animosity between most dwarves and elves, Tauriel discovers an unexpected bond with one of them, Kili (Aidan Turner), even as Bilbo plots an escape. Advancing closer to the Lonely Mountain with the help of a boatman named Bard (Luke Evans), Thorin hurries the group toward their destination, hoping to unlock its secrets and restore him to the throne. Meanwhile, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) visits Dol Guldur to get a closer look at the mysterious Necromancer (Benedict Cumberbatch), only to discover an army forming to unleash the latter’s evil upon Middle Earth.

While the specificity of these destinations probably doesn’t mean much if you’re unfamiliar with Tolkien’s book — admittedly, I had to look a few of them up even after watching the film — Jackson unveils the second chapter in his trilogy with a clarity that should restore fans’ faith in his storytelling. As compelling as its mythology was, the “Lord of the Rings” films really found their footing when they uncovered the universal, relatable emotions that the characters experienced, and then applied that to the story and the action.

Also read: ‘Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ Review: Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen Burns Brighter Than Ever (Video)

Where the first “Hobbit” was an expository slog that, quite frankly, failed to distinguish the dwarves from one another in the way it hoped to, this one narrows its focus on the “important” ones – Thorin and Kili – and establishes stakes that make us care as the rest of them fill in the background.

Additionally, Jackson (with co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro) creates a new character especially for the series, Tauriel, who might seem like one too many – especially given the indistinguishability of the dwarves. As it turns out, Tauriel gives the film an emotional core that reminds the audience that, even among dragons and elves and Orcs and dwarves, all of their feelings are completely human.

Of course, Jackson also stages the action in the film with considerable flair and imagination, creating in “Smaug” some of the best set pieces of any of his Tolkien adaptations. The centerpiece barrel chase is by far the most thrilling of these sequences, in which the dwarves flee their elven captors only to encounter Orcs, but in all of them Jackson finds time to include character details – such as the elf-hating Thorin saving Legolas’ life – that enhance their dramatic impact.

See photos: Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly Prepare for Battle in 7 New ‘Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug’ Character Posters

Then of course there’s Smaug himself, a spectacularly-rendered creature with more than enough gravitas to give this film’s final act real impact. In fact, the film’s only real shortcoming is its acquiescence to middle-chapter-itis; like “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” “The Desolation of Smaug” ends abruptly at the exact moment when you most want to see what happens next.

Nevertheless, it’s triumphantly engaging in a way that rivals Jackson’s magnificent “Two Towers” — and best of all, it makes you eager to see the next film in a way that “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” didn’t. Powerful and provocative, “The Desolation of Smaug” not only surpasses its predecessor but also stands on its own; where “Journey” took material audiences thought they knew and made it feel foreign, this one creates a uniquely original experience that also feels securely familiar.

Orlando Bloom Admits Girls Were More Important Than Reading 'Lord of the Rings' (Video)

The Aviation of Smaug: Air New Zealand Dragonizes a Boeing to Promote 'The Hobbit'

'The Hobbit' Trailer: Smaug is King Under the Mountain

Mostly told in flashback, the film stars Penélope Cruz as Gemma, who brings her son Pietro (Pietro Castellitto) to Sarajevo to see photographs taken by his long-deceased father Diego (Emile Hirsch). Despite her hopes that the trip will heal a growing estrangement with Pietro, Gemma soon retreats into her memories of Diego, remembering how they met on the eve of her marriage to another man but helplessly fell in love anyway.

Gemma goes through with the wedding, but one dispassionate glance between her and her husband later, she is divorced and back in Diego’s arms — much to the delight of her father Armando (Luca de Filippo). But their hopes of having a child together are dashed when Gemma learns she’s barren, prompting them to recruit a musician named Aska (Saadet Aksoy) as their surrogate mother.

Also read: Penelope Cruz in Play for ‘Gucci’ Film (Exclusive)

As Sarajevo comes crumbling down around them, Gemma and Diego attempt to flee to her native Italy, hoping to raise Pietro safely and to leave behind the struggles of both their relationship and the country. But as their trip reunites Gemma with old acquaintances like Gojco (Adnan Haskovic), who once shared in the couple’s triumphs and tribulations, she soon realizes that there’s even more to the story of their survival than she knew, and much more to heal than just her relationship with Pietro.

Like the film’s depiction of the war in Sarajevo, the two characters at the center of this love story are thinly drawn and lack any larger real-world context. While bombs symbolically explode Kurt Cobain posters, Gemma and Diego seem to do little else than talk about having a baby, and both events beg the same question – why?

Admittedly, Diego has a day job — posing with his hand wrapped around a camera lens in the guise of a “great” photographer — but Gemma literally has no identity except through Pietro’s existence,  even before he exists. Meanwhile, a tragic war unfolds in the background of these scenes, but the complexity of its purpose or politics amounts to “bombs are bad,” and it only becomes significant when it intersects with the machinery of Castellitto’s story. (The filmmaker is best known in the U.S. for his work as an actor in films like “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian” and “The Star Maker.”)

Also read: Emile Hirsch to Play John Belushi in Indie Biopic

Cruz does her best to bring to life a dimensionless character whose sole value in the world is derived from the children she raises, but Gemma never self-actualizes as the mom she hoped to be, nor resolves her pointlessly volatile relationship with Pietro. As Diego, Hirsch feels like the last man on earth who still thinks that “every day will be a party” is an appealing lifestyle, and the young actor acquiesces readily to using a totally clichéd kind of unpredictability as a defining trait.

Ultimately, their characters bellow and whinny with outrage at what’s going on around them, and there’s mention given to handing over money to help the less fortunate. But the only thing either of them really do is indulge themselves, absorbing the tragedy around them as a secondary undercurrent for all the pain they’re feeling from having a lover’s quarrel, or ending another conversation about wanting a baby without an actionable plan to engineer a child.

Also read: Random Media Launches First Slate With Christina Ricci, Emile Hirsch

Suffice it to say “Twice Born” underwhelms with its drama, but at more than two hours in length, and featuring a third-act “twist” that abruptly shifts focus away from Gemma and Diego to actual victims of the war, it’s an overbearing mess.

Werner Herzog, Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff Discuss Brotherhood and Americana (Exclusive Video)

'SNL': Sofia Vergara Covers 'The Hunger Games' as Newbie Kate McKinnon Does Penelope Cruz (Video)

Oscar's Foreign Language Chair Promises Big Changes After This Year's Awards

From “The United States of Tara” to “21 Jump Street,” “Scott Pilgrim” to “Rampart,” Brie Larson seems impossible to pin down as an actress. But despite the outward schizophrenia of her choices, the actress insists that she knows immediately when she finds something she connects with, as she did to profound effect with the acclaimed independent film “Short Term 12.”

“I read so many scripts, and it’s just certain things that make sense to me when they’re on the page,” Larson explained Wednesday night at TheWrap’s awards-season screening of the film. “And Grace was that for me – there was never a moment when I didn’t know how to approach a given scene. (Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton) put these things on the page, it made so much sense to me.”

Larson plays Grace, a supervisor at a foster-care facility for at-risk teenagers who as an adult is still dealing with her own traumatic adolescence. As enthusiastic as she was about playing the role, Cretton revealed that he was equally certain that she had the qualities that were most important for audiences to see in Grace.

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: ‘Epic’ Director Chris Wedge Calls Animated Filmmaking a ‘26.5-Mile Sprint’

“I think there’s something about (Brie) that’s extremely strong, very, very strong,” Cretton said. “And strong enough to also be vulnerable, which I think is pretty difficult, and requires quite a bit of maturity. And that was a balance for Grace I think she did as well.

When Cretton adapted his own short film of the same name into a feature, the central character was a man. When he decided to transform the character into what would become Grace, Cretton admitted it took him a while to understand that writing for a female character was not as daunting a task as it initially seemed.

“I initially felt very underqualified to write from a female voice,” Cretton said. “But this process has kind of made me see how in a lot of cases, there’s not much difference. All humans go through the same emotions, and I completely relate to everything that Grace goes through in this movie.

“I didn’t feel like I was writing from a foreign point of view. But I also have three sisters to check things on,” he added, laughing.

Meanwhile, Larson underwent her own preparation in order to fully inhabit Grace, not just as a single role but as a vocation, and further, a disposition, that demands much from those who choose it. “I was trying to get of understanding how someone gets through a day at the job, and what brings them back to that job every day,” Larson said.

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: How Scott Cooper Hooked Casey Affleck With ‘Out of the Furnace’

“The woman that I got to shadow was so incredible, and I learned so much, so many valuable things from her, not just that I brought to Grace, but to my own life.”

Having released the film to widespread critical acclaim, not to mention a Gotham award for Larson’s performance, Cretton and Larson earned the right to celebrate their achievement. But Larson said that the greatest thing she hopes to accomplish with the film is sharing its optimism and positivity with audiences.

“I believe in film so much, and I believe in it as being an experience that’s more than myself,” she explained.

“This script was everything – it’s so surprising and unexpected, and it takes you to these places that are really emotionally devastating. But there’s always hope at the end,” she observed. “And I love the fact that this movie had the potential when I read the script that as much love as we put into it, it can kind of be sent off.”

Describing the origins of his fiction debut “The Rocket,” Mordaunt revealed that the Laotian locations where he shot the film were littered with the same kinds of explosive devices that his characters encounter.

“In terms of the big bombs you see here, it really is like that,” he said Monday night at TheWrap’s awards-season screening of his film. “These bombs hit soft ground and they went deep under the ground, and every time you get a flood and the topsoil gets washed away, another bomb appears. And it looks like they were dropped yesterday, aside from a bit of rust.”

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: How Oscar Isaac’s Incredible Luck Made Him the Serially Unlucky ‘Llewyn Davis’

Inspired by his experiences shooting the documentary “Bomb Harvest,” Mordaunt’s film focuses on a young boy named Ahlo who becomes determined to win the Laotian Rocket Festival after losing his mother and being forced to move from his family’s native village.

“In the documentary there was a sub-narrative in there about kids who collect the bomb scrap metal, and it was really working extensively with the Laos kids when I was making the documentary that was kind of life-changing,” he revealed to Wrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman.

“Their imaginations were so pure, so alive, that I thought, if I make another film, I want it to be about these kids.”

As easy as it was for Mordaunt to conceive of the tragedies that befall young Ahlo, finding the right child actor to portray the character’s toughness and fearlessness was another challenge entirely. But the director said that he knew 10-year-old Sitthiphon Disamoe was right for the role as soon as he walked through the door to audition.

Also read: TheWrap Screening Series: How Scott Cooper Hooked Casey Affleck With ‘Out of the Furnace’

“He’d been a street kid for a couple of years,” Mordaunt said. “He came in and he had this little walk of his and he said he could do anything. I said to him, ‘Can you swim?’ and he said, ‘I can hold my breath under water for half an hour.’ But he actually couldn’t swim at all.”

Although the film focuses primarily on Ahlo and his family, Mordaunt said that he wanted to highlight the resilience of the people of Laos as a whole, who are still dealing with the repercussions of the Laotian Civil War almost 40 years after it ended. That said, he indicated that it was the reaction from Laotians to “Bomb Harvest” that galvanized his focus for what would become his fiction debut. “The response to that documentary was, it’s a terrific film, but why can’t it be a Laos protagonist, and why can’t it be in Laos,” he remembered.

Which is perhaps why the reaction from the Laotian community seems more important to him than even his native Australia’s decision to submit “The Rocket” as its entry for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.

“The thing they like most about it is that it doesn’t fall into that cliché that legacy of war where people are sitting around moping,” he said. “Laos just isn’t like that. People are trying to get on with their lives, they’ve got this great spirit.”

“We really wanted to put that spirit of the Laos people in the film,” Mordaunt continued. “They’re trying to break cycles of hatred, they don’t want that any more, and they want to turn what is a very dark history into something positive and beautiful.”

TheWrap Screening Series: How Scott Cooper Hooked Casey Affleck With 'Out of the Furnace'

How Bruce Dern Found Redemption With Alexander Payne in 'Nebraska'

TheWrap Screening Series: How Belgium Produced the Century's Second Great Bluegrass Movie (Video)

Josh Brolin plays Joe Doucett, a boozy ad executive who scuttles a make-or-break deal after propositioning his client’s wife. Commemorating his failure with a drunken bender, Joe passes out in the street, only to awaken in a hotel room he soon discovers is inescapable. With no outside contact other than the mysterious person who delivers his meals, Joe soon begins reflecting on his wasteful self-destruction and decides to turn his life around.

But after he is unceremoniously released back into the world some 20 years later, Joe struggles to reacclimate himself, eventually crossing paths with a benevolent physician named Marie (Elizabeth Olsen). Enlisting Marie’s help, Joe sets out to find his captors, to find out not just why he was imprisoned but, perhaps more crucially, why they decided to let him go.

Also read: Josh Brolin Is Motel-Bound for 20 Years in Spike Lee’s ‘Oldboy’ Trailer (Video)

Although he eventually incorporates his trademark dolly shot into Joe’s disoriented navigation of the world, Spike Lee feels mostly like a director for hire on “Oldboy,” at least in the sense that neither the material nor his approach indicates a deep level of personal investment. Lee vacillates between cinematic cool and visceral brutality with the characters and the action, indulging in theatrical flourishes — such as, well, pretty much everything Sharlto Copley (“Elysium”) does as Joe’s adversary — that bounce awkwardly off of the rest of the story’s physical and emotional rawness.

Part of the problem is that Mark Protosevich’s script does little to convey the duration – and significance — of 20 years’ imprisonment, with Brolin’s performance doing even less. Brolin gamely gains and loses weight as a signifier of his physical transformation, but other than the circumference of his gut, Joe seems scarcely 30 days older at the end of his imprisonment than at the beginning.

Moreover, there’s an absence of insight – of some crucial epiphany – that drives his post-release choices. Self-improvement, depicted here as physical conditioning, trains the body but leaves the mind unaffected, and Joe’s sense of revenge overshadows anything resembling an actual new outlook on life, or at least a meaningful level of compassion that he may have lacked prior to being imprisoned.

Also read: Josh Brolin Bakes a Pie in ‘Labor Day’ – The Sexiest Movie Scene Since ‘Ghost’?

That said, Brolin’s complete embrace of Joe’s single-minded vengeance makes for some electrifying fight sequences, especially a centerpiece showdown with a small army of assailants. It effectively reworks the side-scrolling action of Chan-Wook’s hammer fight as a more modern video game brawl, as Joe squares off with bad guys wielding knives and 2x4s as he climbs down from the top floor of a fortress-like building to the ground.

But when the film’s focus is meant to be more on the emotional than physical repercussions of revenge, such set pieces ultimately fall short of reinforcing real ideas, other than “getting whacked with sticks and boards sure does hurt.”

Also read: Spike Lee on George Zimmerman Tweets He’s Being Sued Over: ‘I Did a Stupid Thing’ (Video)

The idea of being driven insane by betrayal – or even by avenging betrayal – is recurrent in the film, and it’s provocative enough for at least two films, even two based on the same material. But Lee’s failure to choose between movie-ness and deeper meaning leaves the concept under-explored, which is why his version of “Oldboy,” in part and as a whole, is momentarily gobsmacking but never quite as resonant as it should be.

Josh Brolin on Spike Lee's 'Old Boy': 'It's the Most Difficult Thing I've Ever Done' (Video)

Josh Brolin Eyed for Lead Role in Universal's 'Jurassic World'

Sigourney Weaver Joins Hugh Jackman in Neill Blomkamp's 'Chappie'

The advantage Frank Pavich’s documentary has over its counterparts, however, is that the truth behind Jodorowsky’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel is genuinely stranger than fiction, a tapestry of before-their-time ideas, cartoonish star wattage and just enough genius-level insanity to almost – almost – pull it off.

A riveting chronicle of “the greatest movie never made” and a great tribute to a golden age of auteur filmmaking, “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is catnip for cinephiles that doubles as a showcase for a kind of batshit creativity that was all but completely drummed out of Hollywood after the 1970s.

Featuring interviews with Jodorowsky himself, “Alien” concept artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud and many others, the film explores the history of the “El Topo” director’s efforts to adapt Herbert’s book, which many considered “unfilmable” – and given the success of subsequent tries, many still do. Recruiting a dream team of some of the greatest artistic talents in the world, Jodorowsky scared up the resources to make the film and assembled an international cast that included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali, only to find himself stymied by the straitlaced appetites of the studio system.

Also read: ‘Ender’s Game’ Review: Complex Sci-Fi Adventure That Appeals to Children’s Inner Adults

In a lot of ways, it’s totally understandable why Jodorowsky’s film never happened; no studio was ever going to bankroll a 14-hour movie in which, among many other things, a sperm navigates its way through a woman’s vagina to conceive mankind’s messiah. But the collective enthusiasm of Jodorowsky and his collaborators makes you believe that it could have happened, and more importantly, it would have been brilliant. Crazy, indisputably, but brilliant.

Supplementing the tale of the film’s development are interviews with critics like Devin Faraci and Drew McWeeny and filmmakers like Richard Stanley (“Hardware”) and Nicolas Winding Refn (“Drive”). They gamely enhance the project’s legend, not only by championing its bizarre imagination but placing it in historical context where even incomplete, it influenced generations of directors, some perhaps without them even knowing it.

Also read: ‘Nebraska’ Review: Bruce Dern, Alexander Payne Deliver Nuanced Portrait of Small-Town Life

Jodorowsky’s passion for the project, even now, is positively infectious, even when remembering the two years of six-days-a-week physical preparation that the filmmaker subjected his son Brontis to after casting him as Paul Atreides. Like all great artistic pursuits, the film demanded a certain kind of obsession from its makers, and decades later, their memories of failed ambition have a cheerful sort of resignation, if only because they all felt they were part of something truly special.

Evidence of the film’s impact on subsequent films feels slightly anecdotal – “Dune” certainly employed some of Hollywood’s best and brightest, but not all of them by a long shot, and it’s possible a few not involved came up with similar ideas on their own. But as a reminder that filmmaking is a collaborative art, not one driven by committee, “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a tribute to the idiosyncrasies of truly gifted minds, and a glorious reminder for filmmakers to dream big – whether or not they all come true.

Approaching its subject with the same sort of emotional detachment that Armstrong brings to his confessions, “The Armstrong Lie” is generously unbiased, chronicling the events in the racer’s life with the contrition of a transgressor who expects absolution without actually earning forgiveness.

See video: Lance Armstrong Comes Clean in ‘The Armstrong Lie’ Trailer

Initially enlisted to document Armstrong’s 2009 comeback, Gibney plays the cyclist’s No. 1 fan, betrayed by revelations of drug use and malfeasance, who reconnects to confront his admitted “hero” for lying to him. That Armstrong agreed to be interviewed again initially seems like a testament to his shame, but it eventually proves to be another forum for him to shape his narrative – a mea culpa to point at on the road to inevitable redemption.

Gibney juxtaposes Armstrong’s post-scandal interview with a mostly straightforward chronology of his early years, his rise to fame and his repeated triumphs competing in the Tour de France.

But like Nicholson Baker’s novel “Mezzanine,” footnotes and revelations eventually overshadow the poetic narrative of his accomplishments, and Gibney juxtaposes the boastful victor with interviews detailing not only his repeated drug use, but his relentless lying, and the denigration of anyone interested in questioning his bona fides.

Also read: Filmmaker Alex Gibney Accuses Pope: ‘Sexual-Abuse Scandal Goes to the Top of the Vatican’

But the “humbled” Armstrong too easily manages to step outside himself to acknowledge his wrongdoing and seldom expresses any compelling sincerity or remorse. Moreover, the film seems complicit in his “don’t hate the player, hate the game” attitude about doping, which personal opinions aside, fails to justify his own metastasized dishonesty, and especially the vindictiveness with which he destroyed the lives and livelihoods of his opponents.

There’s a broader critique made in the film about the worldwide deification of athletes and the lengths to which those athletes – and their benefactors — will go to protect that larger-than-life heroism. But Gibney’s personal disappointment, and his focus on the hows rather than the whys of Armstrong’s deceit, eventually undermines the possibility of finding an answer to the film’s fundamental question – namely, what drove Armstrong to mount the comeback that effectively toppled his mythic success.

See video: Lance Armstrong Facing $12M Lawsuit Over Doping Admission

Even without a personal axe to grind, it’s hard to hear the cyclist’s story and not think him a total villain, but the film miraculously – almost irresponsibly – ends without offering much judgment. Because if there is a “real” Armstrong, he remains as on-message, in control, and enigmatic at the end of the film as he did at the beginning, his motivations safely ascribed to obvious patterns of behavior, and a “we’re as responsible as he is” atmosphere of competition.

Here They Are, All 151 Oscar-Qualifying Documentaries (Exclusive)

20 Movies We're Dying to See This Fall

Directed by Gavin Hood (“X-Men Origins: Wolverine”) from his own adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s novel of the same name, it sacrifices none of the source material’s complexity in chronicling the eponymous hero’s journey from trainee to commander of Earth’s armies. In doing so, he’s successfully crafted an allegorical film designed to attract large numbers of kids — even if many of them will miss the intricacies of its underlying message.

Asa Butterfield (“Hugo”) plays Ender Wiggin, a military trainee in a futuristic society where adults enlist children as the first line of defense against an imminent alien invasion. Chosen by Col. Graff (Harrison Ford) for Battle School because of his penchant for strategic thinking, Ender quickly rises through the ranks, but not without creating a few enemies and generally alienating himself from the others.

See photos: ‘Ender’s Game’ Stills: Harrison Ford, Hailee Steinfeld, Asa Butterfield

After proving himself in the academy’s zero-gravity war simulator, Ender is promoted to Command School and put through rigorous training to learn how to control entire armies in combat situations. But as the stakes for his simulations intensify, he begins to question whether the complete and total destruction of his enemies – even if it’s to eliminate future conflicts – is truly the best strategy that he can use.

Although it utilizes the same hero’s-journey boilerplate that provided the foundation for everything from “Star Wars” to “Harry Potter,” “Ender’s Game” seems to come by it honestly, at least insofar as Ender goes through real tribulations, physical and philosophical, to earn his spot as “The One.”

See video: Harrison Ford Introduces First ‘Ender’s Game’ Footage

Ostracized for being the third kid in a world that mandates two per family, he embodies the balance between his brother Peter’s aggression and sister Valentine’s compassion, and Graff repeatedly tests not only his body, but his problem-solving abilities, and perhaps most importantly, his resolve in the face of adversity.

Thanks to Hood’s sophisticated adaptation of Card’s source material, there’s much topically to appreciate from an adult perspective, not the least of which being the questionable morality of a pre-emptive military strike. But like a disillusioned adolescent discovering that his parents lie, Ender experiences a powerful epiphany when he discovers that his superiors’ efforts to protect him from the repercussions of his actions have made him blind to the moral and emotional weight of his sacrifice-for-the-common-good strategies.

Also read: ‘Ender’s Game’ Author Orson Scott Card Responds to Boycott: Calls Gay Marriage Issue ‘Moot’

Reunited with cinematographer Don McAlpine, with whom he collaborated on “Origins,”  Hood seems more confident tackling this big-budget opus than his previous one, skillfully navigating his character through the grown-up complexities of training exercises which outwardly seem like child’s play. That said, those deeper themes occasionally make the film feel like a bit of a joyless slog, and even at two packed hours, some of the mythology of this kid-based, futuristic world feels rushed.

As a young man placed in charge of responsibilities much bigger than himself, Butterfield struggles with his character’s destiny about as well as a child actor can, lending him the right notes of naiveté when necessary without undermining his believability as the most formidable military mind in the seventh grade.

Meanwhile, Ford offers a perfect foil in Graff (more like gruff!) for Ender’s developing maturity, applying the stick and the carrot in equal measures to simultaneously build confidence and nurture his leadership skills.

See video: ‘Ender’s Game’ Trailer: Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld Are a ‘New Kind of Soldier’

Bolstered by solid performances and a clean, elegant visual style, Hood ultimately delivers a film that actually earns the distinction of being for audiences of all ages.

But he accomplishes this insurmountable task not by successfully tapping into his adult viewers’ inner children but by appealing to children’s inner adults — not quite asking them to grow up, but just begin to consider the more complicated world that lurks out on the horizon.

Ultimately as much a polemic as tentpole entertainment, “Ender’s Game” is a rare example of filmmaking with a scalpel at a scale that usually demands a hatchet.

5 Breakout Movie Stars of Fall

Fall Movie Preview: 'Hunger Games,' 'Thor' Shoot for Record-Breaking 2013 at the Box Office

The story of an aging alcoholic who enlists his son to help him retrieve $1 million in prize money, Alexander Payne’s latest meets at an unexpectedly powerful crossroads between hazy optimism and clear-eyed nostalgia. Alternately a poetic tale of personal affirmation and a plainspoken metaphor for tenacity in the face of meager hope, “Nebraska” is not just a beautiful or great film but an essential one for our time.

Bruce Dern (TV’s “Big Love”) plays Woody Grant, a boozy retiree who becomes obsessed with going to Nebraska after a sweepstakes letter arrives in the mail announcing that he’s won a million dollars. His son David (former “Saturday Night Live” player Will Forte) eventually volunteers to drive him from Montana, if only to stop him from trying to walk there on his own. But after Woody drunkenly injures himself, David makes a detour to their home town so that Woody can recover before the company’s home office reopens on Monday morning.

Also read: 20 Movies We’re Dying to See This Fall

See video: Reuniting with friends and family for the first time in decades, Woody becomes an overnight celebrity when he announces his winnings. But after his father gets besieged for handouts from the locals, David scrambles to protect him while contemplating how much longer to indulge his delusions of grandeur.

If there’s no one skeleton key that unlocks a child’s understanding of his or her parent, “Nebraska” suggests that there’s at least a sort of road map that leads towards key moments and formative experiences in Mom and Dad’s lives. Unsurprisingly, Payne handles the Grants’ dyspeptic interactions with typical sensitivity, indulging the humor of small-town sensibilities without judgment or condescension.

For example, beyond its immediate comedic dividends, there’s something deeply recognizable about the notion of a family reunion two decades in the making that culminates in a dinner where no one has anything to say. Meanwhile, the inevitable emergence of longstanding grievances and lurking resentments both supplies the film with drama and bolsters its real-world authenticity.

As Woody, Dern delivers an utterly convincing performance that’s equal parts stubbornness and senility, conveying a distant sense of awareness that he’s undertaking a fool’s errand, but also a desperate, possibly drunken hope that inspires his perseverance. Meanwhile, June Squibb plays his long-suffering wife, Kate, with a honey badger’s disregard for propriety, a spitfire who’s unafraid to tell it like it is whether she’s condemning Woody’s pointless quest or scolding his greedy relatives.

See video: Bruce Dern Thinks He’s a Millionaire in ‘Nebraska’ Trailer

David, on the other hand, understands both Woody and Kate, and Forte strikes an effortless balance between their opposing viewpoints feels like a natural byproduct of their parental influence. Despite being a performer whose comedic roles often tap into a sort of frenzied desperation, Forte is delicate and understated under Payne’s direction, slowly appeasing the character’s muffled unhappiness as he begins to find common ground with his estranged father.

Employing the same road-trip structure of his earlier films “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” Payne utilizes the rolling vistas of the Midwest as a canvas for his father and son’s tumultuous interactions. But the filmmaker’s contemplative approach never turns mournful or mawkish, and he consistently downplays the story’s larger symbolic implications by keeping his focus on the behavior of the characters.

In so doing, Payne crafts a film that skirts the extremes of a parochial existence – neither the Bedford Falls of “It’s a Wonderful Life” nor the North Texas wasteland of “The Last Picture Show” – in favor of an appropriately nuanced portrait of small-town life. Ultimately an intimate tale whose larger ramifications lurk just beyond the horizon of Woody’s immediate priorities, “Nebraska” sets its goalposts at poignancy rather than profundity, and achieves emotional transcendence precisely because its victories prove just enough for one man.

20 Movies We're Dying to See This Fall

Watch Will Forte and Bruce Dern Bond over Beers and Family Secrets in 'Nebraska' Clip (Video)

Mikael Hafstrom’s containment thriller acknowledges the two stars’ advancing age, even as it appropriately celebrates their genre bona fides with a muscular, nostalgic adventure. But “Escape Plan” also serves as its own kind of movie jail for Stallone and Schwarzenegger, because it’s precisely the kind of B-grade hell that underscores their outdated appeal in an era where heroes no longer need to be larger than life.

Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a security expert who specializes in exposing the weaknesses of maximum-security prisons. Recruited by CIA agent Jessica Miller (Caitriona Balfe) to test a top-secret facility, Breslin adopts the identity of a Spanish fugitive and soon finds himself shipped off to parts unknown.

See video: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone Duke It Out in New ‘Escape Plan’ Clip

But upon arrival at the mysterious prison, he discovers that the safeguards he and his partner Lester Clark (50 Cent) installed to ensure his safety have been eliminated, and warden Willard Hobbs (Jim Caviezel) is indifferent to his claims of being innocent.

Teaming up with another inmate named Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) who is as eager to escape as he is, Breslin systematically begins testing the facility’s procedures and searching for weaknesses. But when they discover that the prison is located in a place that makes escape virtually impossible, the pair launch a desperate plan that seems likely to have only one of two outcomes – freedom, or death.

If Stallone has an edge over Schwarzenegger as a star, much less actor, it’s thanks to his (relative) humility. When Stallone launched a comeback in 2006 with “Rocky Balboa,” he eschewed all of the character’s ’80s largesse in favor of an understated art-imitates-life story about a former champ who’s past his prime. Since then, and even in stuff like “The Expendables,” he always seems like the hardest-working actor on screen, and the one who’s unafraid to show vulnerability – or maybe just his age.

Also read: Sylvester Stallone Rips Bruce Willis as ‘Greedy and Lazy’ Over ‘Expendables 3’

In “Escape Plan,” he’s admittedly tougher and more polished than audiences have seen him play in a while, and certainly holds his own against his co-star. But Stallone maintains the same sort of quiet authority here that he used seven years ago to reconnect with audiences, and his performance as Breslin helps make the epic scale of the rest of the film feel believable.

Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, feels like he’s still in superstar mode, almost winking at the camera with a performance that’s bigger than his “Conan”-era muscles. But while there’s undoubtedly something exciting about watching him in action again, opposite the other iconic action star of the 1980s, there’s nothing to his character but charisma, making him almost a comic counterpoint to Stallone’s comparative gravitas.

See video: ‘Escape Plan’ Trailer: Stallone and Schwarzenegger Team Up to Break Out, Break Skulls

Character actors in supporting roles – especially Amy Ryan as Abigail, Breslin’s colleague, and Jim Caviezel as the fastidious warden – hint at Hafstrom’s more serious ambitions for the film. But the prison itself looks like something out of Stallone’s “Demolition Man,” rebuilt inside a giant warehouse, or more likely, soundstage. It’s impossible to take “Escape Plan” seriously beyond the glib excitement generated from Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s years-in-the-making collaboration.

Ultimately an effort that ranks above the machinelike, self-glorifying “Expendables” films but below Schwarzenegger’s wild, underrated “The Last Stand,” Hafstrom’s film seems likely to satisfy each of its stars’ fans. But for two guys who have both fought their way out of tougher, stupider, higher-concept ideas than this one, and looked better while doing it, “Escape Plan” suggests they may be trapped more by the past than any sort of tangible prison.

Ex-'Terminator' Arnold Schwarzenegger to Play Exterminator in 'Toxic Avenger' Remake

6 of Fall's Most Intriguing Box-Office Face-Offs

Robert De Niro Can Still Throw a Punch in New 'Last Vegas' Trailer (Video)

Sylvester Stallone Movie 'Reach Me' Boots Kickstarter for Indiegogo (Exclusive)