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 | A Life of Quiet Desperation Revealed Gus Van Sant has made his mark as a mainstream filmmaker with the crossover success of [b]Good Will Hunting[/b] and, rather astonishingly, the shallow melodrama [b]Finding Forrester[/b], but lately he has returned to his independent roots with a series of moody, minimalist experiments. In 2003’s [b]Elephant[/b], he offered a chilling recreation of a Columbine-style massacre, offering little explanation for his gunmen’s motives save for some sociopathic sense of restless misanthropy. Two years later, he contemplated the suicide of Kurt Cobain in [b]Last Days[/b], the tale of a fictional singer who reduces his life to a drug-induced fog beforeMore |  | Revisiting the Slums of Brazil [b]City of God[/b] may not have been perfect, but try telling that to its cultish followers, who have voted it the 16th best film of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Six years and one acclaimed television spinoff later, director Paulo Morelli has returned Acerola (Douglas Silva) and Laranjinha (Darlan Cunha), best friends first introduced in the 1997 novel by Paulo Lins, to the screen for another harrowing tour through the gang-infested slums of Brazil.More |  | A Rollicking R&B Fantasy Set in Harmony, Alabama, on the eve of the civil rights movement that would transform the politics of the rural South if not its economic landscape, Honeydripper is a good-natured comedy with a rhythm-and blues-soundtrack that boasts more energy, at times, than its easygoing script. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.More |  | An Uneasy Tale of Two Siblings Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson couldn’t look less alike as Anne and Mary Boleyn, the upwardly mobile sisters at the center of [b]The Other Boleyn Girl[/b], but there’s a reason for that. Despite their family ties, strained to the breaking point by their tempestuous dalliances with King Henry (Eric Bana), they are dramatically differentiated foils.More |  | Fables of the Reconstructions [b]Be Kind Rewind[/b] is a playful conceit, smart and sweetly nostalgic in its simplicity yet inescapably slight. It does have a certain one-note charm: Jack Black and Mos Def play amiable types who film crude reconstructions of Hollywood blockbusters to save their friend’s video store, hastily reinventing the works of Brett Ratner and Paul Verhoeven with the sensibilities of junkyard auteurs. The trailer-length, YouTube-style shorts that follow display a guerrilla approach to filmmaking liberated from big budgets and massive star egos. They reflect the naïve joy of neophytes whose inexperience is both comic and endearing.More |  | A Forgettable Freak Show [b]Jumper[/b] is a mess of hasty exposition and arbitrary plot twists, slapped together in a superhero movie that lacks any sense of wonder. It was inspired -- if that is the word -- by Steven Gould’s popular science-fiction novel about a teenager who escapes his abusive father by teleporting around the globe, engaging in petty mischief and robbing his way into a Manhattan penthouse. It is an ability that Doug Liman’s film never really explains, though it must have made for an exotic shoot.More |  | Muck of the Irish There is nothing new under the sunless sky in [b]Shrooms[/b], which opens with five American teenagers embarking on a trip into an Irish forest overrun with hallucinogenic fungi and inbred yokels. Once there, the movie settles into a slow, sadistic groove. Screenwriter Pearse Elliott establishes his cast of pretty young things with broad, unsophisticated strokes -- they indulge in perfunctory conversation, cavalier drug use and passionless sex until the blood begins to flow.More |  | Bizarre Love Triangle [b]Over Her Dead Body[/b] is less about characters than one-note stereotypes, thrust into a plot whose mechanics settle into a slow, predictable grind soon after the opening credits. The movie is flawed on a fundamental level, forgetting that romantic comedies require some degree of emotional investment. If the people on screen can’t commit to the story, how can we?More |  | Rumble in the Jungle It’s easy to forget that the story of John Rambo began 36 years ago with a novel by Canadian author David Morrell, whose distaste for the Vietnam War fueled his vision of a shell-shocked veteran on a murderous rampage in the Kentucky backwoods. Morrell painted Rambo as a merciless killer whose harrowing tours of duty had left him despairing and emotionally comatose. He was a menace, a savage unleashed on a hostile society, and in the end he took his own life.More |  | Monster Mash [b]Cloverfield[/b], which takes its name from the Santa Monica boulevard where producer J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company is based, is a sleek, silly product of green filmmaking: It recycles old ideas and molds them into a lean, briskly paced thriller that owes much to both classic monster movies like [b]Godzilla[/b] and ambitious, gimmick-driven misfires like [b]The Blair Witch Project[/b].More |
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