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It’s a cliché to say that acting is prostitution, though both are asked to mimic love for pay. Still, for both, it’s rare to believe it—even if just for 90 minutes. Nicholas Sparks, the John Grisham of romance novelists whose books seem to be optioned before they leave Microsoft Word, has had great luck getting Hollywood to cast leads who sizzle. Chemistry—not plot—made The Notebook a guilty modern classic. And director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) has graced him with Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, two very pretty twentysomethings who enter this movie from opposite directions, connect like magnets and spin out of control. Seyfried plays a South Carolina undergrad who’s just nearly too perfect. The third time they meet, Tatum—a laconic Army Special Ops man—calls the charming, teetotalling shampoo commercial out for having no faults. Tatum doesn’t seem like he’s acting. The first few scenes he’s a strong and silent statue—clearly Seyfried sees something in him that we don’t. But what makes Dear John unusual is that we do learn to understand him when we meet his dad (Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins) who Seyfried quickly pegs as mildly autistic. Dear John’s first half works because the characters’ lives feel rich and full: these aren’t two rom com workaholic Manhattanites. And under the golden glow of their first two weeks together, we see Tatum open up and Seyfried deepen. After love, however, is when things get tricky. Set in the spring of 2001, this is a period piece from our new past. When the Twin Towers fall, Tatum feels pressure to reenlist. After his first leave, Hallström fumbles the our sense of time, making a year and a half feel like months and making the characters’ painful decisions feel rushed and arbitrary. When movie mechanics wedge into their romance, we check out. But there’s enough love in this love story to make us feel for a son and his father, and Tatum’s attempts to connect with his dad—so disconnected from everyone—are heartbreaking.

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What do you get when you cross a kangaroo, a dolphin and a human? Sexy horror, at least to director Vincenzo Natali’s thriller about a pair of scientists and long-time lovers (Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley) who create the daughter they never wanted in an experiment in “multi-specied morphism” that their bosses hope will cure cancer. Despite an A-list star and a high-tech plot, the film itself feels like a hybrid of silly science tingler and moral philosophy with a straight-to-video sheen—which is likely where their larger profit margins lie.

When we meet Brody and Polley they’ve just been slapped on the cover of Wired for creating a DNA smoothie that spawned two slug-like beasts named Fred and Ginger. The only missing ingredient is human chromosomes, and while Polley is reluctant to bear Brody’s love child, she races to the lab to add her own genes to the mix. The result is Dren (spell it backwards), a moppet who looks like a hairless otter-kangaroo, except for the toxic stinger at the end of her prehensile tail. (Surely nothing bad can come of that.)

Dren awakens Polley’s maternal instincts, and when she blossoms into a rabbit-legged supermodel with amphibious lungs she awakens something else in Brody’s pants. Say what you will about the derivative elements of Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor’s script: this is the first flick I’ve ever seen with two counts of simultaneous incest-bestiality.

But despite Brody and Polley’s reasonable efforts, they can’t compensate for a script that undermines its curiosity about humanity, responsibility and guilt with silly loose ends about Polley’s troubled childhood and odd flourishes like making Brody’s lab technician his clueless brother. In steadier hands, this techno-drama could be a fascinating mutant, but not when we’re asked to believe that it only takes two sexy scientists and one day to make “biotechnology’s most startling breakthrough in decades.”

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In fall 2005, a race riot exploded in Paris that burned for 20 days. When the smoke from the 8,973 destroyed cars settled, the French government came down hard on its Arab and African immigrants, debating the revocation of their citizenship and deeming their rappers a state menace. Six months later, Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel unleashed District 13, an cartoonish stunt about a cop (Cyril Raffaeli) and an urchin (David Belle), both parkour champions, who team up to save a government-made ghetto from destruction. After they save the day, Paris pledges to rebuild the block. This inferior sequel, District 13: Ultimatum, growls that they haven’t. Worse, a special division called the Department of Internal State Security is trying to trigger a race war so they can convince the president to flatten the hood and replace it with condos built by a contractor called—wait for it—Harriburton. Luc Besson and new director Patrick Alessandrin approach politics like an Axe commercial, introducing us to the District with a three-minute montage of all things manly: weight-lifting, lip-snarling, drug-slanging, gun-toting, facial-tattooing, outrageous mustache-grooming. Like a cocky 14-year-old, it’s all bluster when we want grownup charm and menace. This would be half-forgivable if we at least got to geek out on some incredible parkour, but Alessandrin has nervously edited his film into a frenzy; when you chop up a balletic stunt into half-second bites, you serve up less, not more. Still, Raffaeli and Belle—both athletes first, actors second—enjoy their scenes together and make up for some of the ridiculousness with raw power. We meet Raffaeli wearing a chainmail thong and wig (don’t ask) and fending off two dozen baddies while protecting a €500 million Van Gogh and using the painting as a weapon. But we’re most impressed when he leaps into a car feet first through the closed window, as neatly and destructively as a shark. Belle’s exhausting rooftop to rooftop chase is a master class stunt—you can’t make much out of here, but after the credits, you’ll want to pull him up on YouTube.

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So what was Pierre Morel doing while Alessandrin’s sequel squandered his original? Shooting his own competing Parisian shoot-em-up, also produced and written by the inexhaustible Luc Besson. A salute to the ’80s buddy cop movie, From Paris With Love is the McDonalds of French action flicks, right down to the Royale with Cheese feasted on by star John Travolta. Even before Travolta cracks open that infamous Styrofoam shell, it’s clear he’s gunning for a Pulp Fiction comeback. And this film wants that Tarantino magic, wedging in scenes where Travolta debates the origins of egg foo yung and sings “Mrs. Jones” to his pistol. Like the mindless thrillers of yore, this is all brains and no bullets. When Travolta partners with a greenhorn secret agent (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who has a great bit of slapstick while planting a bug in the Foreign Minister’s office), they’re on a whirlwind two-day mission where their enemy is “terrorists.” Though they’re killing an average of one guy an hour (a stat Morel slaps up as a joke), there’s not even a specific evil plot or villain until the last reel. From Paris is all bravado and it nearly works. Travolta is squat, bald and unhinged; in one scene he peer-pressures Rhys-Meyers into snorting coke from a Ming Vase in a crowded Eiffel Tower elevator. But the flick’s insistence on playing dumb, on shooting suspects before interrogating them and explaining anything, puts your brain on autopilot. What breaks through the clatter is Kasia Smutniak’s turn as Rhys-Meyer’s fiancée, a gorgeous girl strong enough to whip out a jewelry box and do the proposing. When Rhys-Meyers smashes in the face of a gangster who dared to steal his engagement ring, we don’t blame him a bit.

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Adam Green’s sparse drama about three college kids abandoned in a blistering ski lift is a chillingly real look at spur-of-the-moment survival instincts that struggles to fill its feature length running time. Genre prospects are lukewarm for a flick that blazes its own path, shunning guts and inglorious deaths (mostly) for a measured, moderately effective look at three kids staring down their own doom.

Childhood best friends Dan (Kevin Zegers) and Joe (Shawn Ashmore) have set off on a skiing adventure to get away from it all, only part of what Joe wants to get away from—Dan’s tagalong girlfriend, Parker (Emma Bell)—is along for the ride. Frustrated after a day spent encouraging her down the bunny slope, Joe goads the trio into taking one final tear down a real trail. In a rush of closing time camaraderie, they convince the lift operator to allow them to take the last bench up of the night. But human error—a force as deadly and merciless as any serial killer—strands them a bone-breaking height above the hard-packed snow. And the slopes aren’t reopening for five days.

What works in Green’s script is the naturalism, a new move for the gore-tastic director of Hatchet (he’s now working on Hatchet 2): throughout, we know nothing more than the doomed trio. We don’t know if there’s a groundskeeper coming by in the morning. We don’t know if the overnight forecast is fatal. We don’t know whether to jump or wait. We’re caught between likely death and unlikely survival. In those moments when we (and the characters) are paralyzed between bad decisions, we’re as stiff with tension as an icicle.

The problem is, even though we empathize with their predicament—and it plays out realistically—the threesome is so impractical that we’re distracted by our own (better) escape routes. But then again, who doesn’t think they can outsmart a foolhardy frat guy when they’re in a warm theater with a bucket of popcorn? Zegers plays a stock alpha male with attitude, yet he’s redeemed as the film’s bravest character. As his girlfriend and hopeful wife-to-be, the spunky Bell turns weepy and weak quick, but it’s uncharitable to assume we’d be less obnoxious. Ashmore’s Joe is the least-drawn character; he’s clearly got a heart, but we never believe that a guy who loves his best friend would pick on his girlfriend mercilessly even when they’re cozy in the ski lodge. And when their numbers are whittled down and the survivors unleash their panic on each other, the emotional digressions feel like filler for a thriller struggling to be full length. Give Green credit for not padding it with a second villain—say a bear with attitude—but there’s really only enough drama here for a good sixty minute TV special.

Click here for Frozen in Boxoffice Magazine

Rodrigo Cortes’ sparse thriller plays as if the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock dared him to one up Lifeboat. Set in a coffin hidden several feet deep in the Iraqi sand, Cortés‘ flick sticks to the constraints of Chris Sparling’s script; lighting every scene with whatever sole star Ryan Reynolds’ kidnapped truck driver digs up in his living tomb. Lionsgate snatched up the picture at Sundance and there’s no doubt everyone behind this minimalist stunt will make their money back from those curious to see how well they pulled off the feat. (Answer: reasonably.) 
Buried pins us in Reynolds’ perspective from the start: the screen is black, the sound is hushed. We hear Reynolds wake up in the dark, his shallow sleep breathing turning into panic and hyperventilation as he beats the ceiling and walls of his box. Together, we discover his horror. And when he finds a Zippo in his pocket—the film’s MVP—we get weak yellow light that splays across the cheap wooden boards. Reynolds has been gagged and bound. But freeing himself is still just a marginal improvement.

When your only character is helpless and set-less, there isn’t much your movie can do. Reynolds can’t even stand, and to the film’s credit Cortés doesn’t sneak in any flashbacks or dream sequences. Reynolds can only do one thing: make calls on the Arabic cellular planted by his captors. A whole genre of horror flicks has found ways to block their victims from calling 911. Reynolds can make all the 911 calls he wants—the operators can’t and won’t help this crazy crackpot who claims he’s trapped in a coffin.

The best parts of Sparling’s script play like an absurdist snuff film. Reynolds’ truck driver isn’t smart—watching him make one dumb move after another is agony. But when one stateside dispatcher after another puts him on hold or treats him like a crank, we wonder if the terrorists’ torture plot is to make him dependent on the kindness of American strangers. Even when he calls his employer, he’s shunted to an answering machine. (That’s one way to make your point about dispassionate bureaucrats.)

Yes, this is a film where every plot point is a phone call. When Reynolds’ cell loses a bar of power its like a bomb detonated. But by that point, an hour in, our energy’s flagging like his reception and the flick fumbles its attempts to give us any juice. The melodramatic score is overkill and in one scene Cortés invents a new meme: “jumping the snake.” We’re intimate with Reynolds’ stubble and the nervous sweat beading on his chest. But there’s just enough bleak humor to keep us on the hook. There are bitter giggles at his captor’s demands for “Five million money,” and the quick beat when Reynolds wonders if its okay to bill him 25 cents for the operator to automatically connect his call. We slowly realize that Cortés is willing to take us as morally (and politically) dark as we dare. The FBI asks Reynolds not to call the media and create an international incident. Should he trust them? Do we? Like him, we can’t see out of his box—we can’t see the big picture of the struggle in Iraq. We only see one man’s fear, and ultimately, that’s what wars are made of.

Click here for Buried in Boxoffice Magazine

First: Imagine Tolstoy. Not Leo, his wife Sofia. At 19, she married a promising writer nearly twice her age. She bore him 13 children, eight of whom survived, and still found the time to recopy his War and Peace by hand six times. But just when the very bright woman settled into the delights of a large family, a large estate and a grand romance with one of the greatest novelists in history, her Leo snapped. Suddenly, he was an anti-material monk, an ascetic who preached celibacy, vegetarianism, political resistance and poverty. The soft comforts of their life were shunned, at least half-heartedly. He didn’t give up their estate but he did invite his followers to move in, a host of idealists, flatterers and kooks that Sofia saw as a pestilence. In turn, they saw her as a threat—especially when she became publicly furious at his pledge to leave all of his money to the movement. The Tolstoys were the Soviet turn-of-the-century Brangelina. Everyone scribbled about their squabbles, especially Leo and Sofia, in diaries still sold in bookstores. Novelist Jay Parini thought to combine their diaries with comrades like political leader Vladimir Chertkov and naive secretary Valentin Bulgakov in a multi-angled portrait that reads like Rashomon for a marriage. And this film, adapted and directed by Michael Hoffman, stages it with whimsy that turns into pathos. As Bulgakov, who here serves as our most trusted eyes and ears, James McAvoy is charming, awkward and slowly soured on seeing Leo (Christopher Plummer, imperious) as a living saint. His acolyte’s maturation is the film’s anchor, even if he’s wholly focused on spying on the couple for Chertkov (Paul Giamatti). While their tabloids and our history books haven’t been sympathetic to the stubborn Sofia, Hoffman’s stacked the deck in her favor by casting the divine Helen Mirren. She captures her pride, intelligence, temper and vulnerability, navigating the mishmash of emotions far better than the film surrounding her, which tends to veer from froth to tragedy. Though the cast is fantastic, this won’t be the definitive take of the Tolstoys’ marriage—but whose could ever be?

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt dominates this slight, worth-a-watch dramedy about an anarchic headbanger who invades the home of a grieving widower, grandmother and son like a bear claiming a cave. With tattoos of a middle finger on his back and a dead stick figure on his chest, Gordon-Levitt’s Hesher is raw destruction, and aggro comedy writer/director Spencer Susser even punctuates his one-liners with a blast of crunching metal. (”Ever been skull-f–ked?” DURNAdurnDURN! “Would you like to be?”) He’s a can’t-miss attraction in a movie that goes nowhere, and with the odds high that the Sundance flick will get swooped up for an indie release, odds are he’ll be a cult hero for a new generation, assuming badass audiences can get past all that killjoy plot about grief.

Young T.J. (Devin Brochu) meets Hesher when the boy shatters a window at his squat. Hours later, he spots him in a hallway at school smoking cigarettes with impunity. (Granted, this school might not be too sharp—no one seems to notice that T.J. looks four years younger than his classmates.) Hesher seems too bold to be true. Cruising around their small town in his battered black van, he’s like an apparition from the gods of metal—we’re waiting for the tyke to discover that he is Tyler Durden. But when Hesher stomps into T.J.’s living room, stripping down to his skivvies and settling in to watch porn, we realize T.J.’s depressed father (Rainn Wilson, unrecognizable) and elderly grandmother (Piper Laurie) can see him, too, and that Susser’s script doesn’t see the homeless metalhead as a allegory for grief, but as an actual character who needs a character arc.

The flick’s third-act rush for a resolution softens its no-holds-barred attitude and the film ends on a lull. Brochu is a fine young actor, but the film’s bigger issue is Susser’s sudden urge to satisfy those audiences who want a movie about headbanging to end in a group hug. The energy is drained by a forced love triangle between T.J., Hesher and a lonely grocery bagger (Natalie Portman). As always, Portman is grievously miscast—she and her agent would do well to emulate Gordon-Levitt, who continues his crusade to prove himself as the next great talent. In (500) Days of Summer, he was pert and idealistic with eyes as wide as a puppy. Here, he’s about-faced to play a truly threatening grunt that keeps his eyes squinted half shut like a hungover frog. Gordon-Levitt stares at the world like a wolf prepared for attack—he’s destructive even when it’s not in his best interests, getting clobbered by a gas grill as he wrestles it into a stranger’s pool. Hesher wreaks so much carnage that his major turning comes when he—gasp!—cleans up someone else’s mess. You don’t resent the movie that surrounds him, but you don’t need it. Gordon-Levitt was born to rock and we salute him.

Click here for Hesher in Boxoffice Magazine

Peter Jackson wrangled Middle Earth into submission, but here he’s defeated by suburban Pennsylvania. Alice Sebold’s evocative best seller proves to be more unfilmable than Tolkien’s sprawling fantasy trilogy. The novel about a murdered girl read like a tone poem with characters flitting in and out as though from her afterlife rec room, teen Susie Salmon was flipping restlessly through channels to check in on her crush Ray Singh, his mom, her psychic channeler, her four family members and her killer. Their arcs folded together at their own pace with offhandedness Jackson could only mimic with a mini-series. Sliced in half for that oh-so-Hollywood tidiness, The Lovely Bones is a disappointment, yet it’s impossible to imagine anyone else doing it better. Jackson’s taken heat for his enthusiastic use of CGI, but the critiques miss his intention. When 14-year-old Susie (Saoirse Ronan, a future star) is hurtled into the In-Between after a fatal run-in with serial pedophile Stanley Tucci (human, if not empathetic), she spends years of Earth time racing through her emotions—an inner journey Sebold does with words and Jackson wisely does without. Instead of holding tight to the book with heavy voice-over narration, he goes silent and translates Susie’s feelings into visuals. In these powerful, wordless stretches the girl races through angry skies and fields that dissolve under her feet. He’s nailed it; the only way to adapt this book is to break away from its actual pages. The book still takes the film in a rout, but you can’t say Jackson didn’t know what hit him.

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Sam Taylor Wood’s biopic of 17 year old John Lennon opens with the first chord of “A Hard’s Days Night”—a one second blast of reverb that, like the film itself, is recognizable but stops just shy of infringement. This is the life story of the Beatles’ most complicated genius (according to himself), remixed for added drama. The Weinsteins have thrown their weight behind the flick’s mass appeal, and while it’s sure to be picked apart by Lennon devotees—say, those who have penned Wikipedia bios for his mom, aunt and uncle that run nearly as long as the file on Liverpool—indie box office sales will sound mighty sweet.

Like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There—which never once came out and said the name “Bob Dylan”—Nowhere Boy bites its tongue and refuses to say “The Beatles.” A scene where John (Aaron Johnson) tells his guardian and Aunt, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), he and The Quarrymen have just changed their name is a tease. She’s not interested in hearing about the band, and she never would be. (Which makes you wonder just what the two talked about on their legendary once-a-week phone chats that continued until his death.) Mimi prefers Tchaikovsky, schoolwork and nagging John to wear his glasses, already in their signature shape, though for now he’d rather shove them in his pocket. John’s mother, Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), was the rock ‘n’ roll fan, and Matt Greenhalgh’s screenplay suggests he only picked up a guitar to get closer to her. Julia was a winsome heartbreaker forced to give up custody of John when he was five. (Mimi kept calling social services on the single mom for having her son share a bed with her and her new boyfriend.)

As Duff plays her, Julia’s swollen with love and optimism, like a balloon that’s easily burst; when drained she falls into depression. And to shelter their daughters, Jacqui and Julia (who would write the memoir that inspired the film), common law husband Bobby (David Morrissey) wants to keep distance between her and her son, leaving young Lennon without a warm mother figure but with a need to convince himself that he’s cocksure enough not to need one. Wood’s portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-son fudges the facts but finds emotional truth. Johnson is wholly credible as the future rock king: handsome, smart, brash, impulsive, overconfident and angry, he makes everything we’d later learn about Lennon feel inevitable. When he first blows off 15 year old Paul McCartney with a masturbation joke before reluctantly bowing down to his guitar skills, the dynamics that would make the band conquer then implode are already sparking. By the end of the film, Lennon’s learned to share the mic with Paul and George (Sam Bell), but he can’t help strutting like he’s the star of the show, even though his own mom claps louder for Paul’s solos. Paul and George might have the skill, but John earned the swagger. And though this biopic is as tidy as a three minute pop song, when we see him look back one last time as he leaves Aunt Mimi’s for Hamburg and all that would come after, the music god is just a little more human.

Click here for Nowhere Boy in Boxoffice Magazine