In Theaters:
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

It’s tough being an alt-geek these days. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, good as he’s ever been), 22-year-old Torontonian and epically anxious slacker, knows this all too well. He’s still moping over being duped last year by a girl who’s now the singer for a skyrocketing band named for the old Nintendo game “The Clash at Demonhead.” (Such references are strewn throughout the film: when a band’s hanger-on is asked what he plays, he slowly answers, “Zelda… Tetris,” as though his life depended on it.) Scott’s in his own band, the stutterifically named Sex Bob-omb, but they can barely get a gig, while his ex’s pouty visage taunts him from promos all over the local record store…

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is in theaters now — see it! Read the full review at PopMatters.

New on DVD:
Date Night

This weak-kneed comedy is guilty of many sins, the most surprising of which is the utter and complete miscasting of Steve Carell and Tina Fey…

Date Night is now available on DVD, if that matters. You can read the full, dispiriting review at PopMatters.

In Books:
The Korean War

Although its dust jacket would have you believing that it’s simply a generalized and shortish (at least as compared to the tome-prone lengths of military histories) encapsulation of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings’ book is anything but just another history. With a directness that’s disarming for the field – which is riddled with writers who approach their subjects in slow and circling accretion of detail – Cumings wastes no time limning many long-ignored facts and striking down sheaves of clichés and shibboleths of received learning about this “forgotten” war. It’s an insurrectionary work of history that leaves few preconceptions intact…

The Korean War is on sale now in bookstores pretty much everywhere and is quite worth your time. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
The Other Guys

The cop-buddy flick has long depended on humor to get by. In today’s uncertain Hollywood times, when even the most thoroughly test-marketed product frequently fails to catch fire, the formula needs something extra, something more than the usual bickering detectives running down the perps and telling their captain where to shove it. Who knew that something extra would involve a light FM-obsessed Will Ferrell cruising in a Prius?…

The Other Guys opens today pretty much everywhere. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
Lebanon

It will be the temptation of nearly everyone who sees or even hears of Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon to make some reference to Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot. They shouldn’t, because Maoz’s film—while even more spatially confined and relentlessly assaultive than Petersen’s—is in a place by itself. If a comparison must be made, then a more apt one would be to Picasso’s Guernica, whose sense of sickened powerlessness Maoz evokes on more than one occasion...

Lebanon opens Friday in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

New on DVD:
Stephen Fry in America

Supposedly, the conceit behind laconic British wit Stephen Fry’s six-episode tour of each of the 50 United States of America came from his nearly having been born an American. In the ‘50s, his father nearly took a job at Princeton University, but turned it down because he wanted his children to be raised in England. So it is that the looming, alternately gregarious and shy Fry states at the beginning of his show that he wanted to reconnect with “my other self, the strange American, Steve.” …

Stephen Fry in America is now available on DVD. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

New on DVD:
Close-up

There’s something about Abbas Kiarostami’s approach to his 1990 breakthrough film Close-Up that can be found in one of the most fascinating characters in his curious fiction/documentary hybrid – and it’s not the star. At the beginning of the film, we’re in territory familiar to appreciators of his 1997 classic Taste of Cherry. In a wandering, looping manner, we follow a cabbie as he drives casually through a Tehran caught so sharply in the crisp autumn light that every stone wall, every falling leaf jumps out at you…

Close-up is now available in a beautifully-packaged 2-disc edition from Criterion. Read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
Inception

During a particularly gnarled strand of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, where plot and exposition are delivered at a speed best reserved for those wearing appropriate crash gear, Ellen Page’s character—a quick-minded but childlike elf with the pointedly symbolic name of Ariadne—asks, “Now, whose subconscious are we going into now?” It gets a good chuckle from the audience, which at that point has been racing along with the characters as they jump from one level of dreaming to the next, fending off phantom guardians of the subconscious and struggling to finish a mission of world-shaking importance. From that point on, it’s every viewer for himself…

Inception opens wide on Friday. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
The Girl Who Played with Fire

Although it opens in an unexpected locale – a sunny Caribbean resort, as opposed to the serenely stone-grey streets of Stockholm – it isn’t long before Daniel Alfredson’s unnecessarily stoic take on Stieg Larsson’s second “Millennium” mystery is back on more familiar ground, which is not necessarily a good thing…

The Girl Who Played with Fire is in limited release now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Love Ranch

As Grace Bontempo, the seen-it-all madame of the titular 1970s Nevada brothel, Helen Mirren should have knocked this film to the ground and made it beg for mercy. Instead she watches from the sidelines with a grim, exhausted fatalism as the whole thing collapses about her. Granted, her character is delivered some harsh medical news at the film’s start, and life hasn’t dealt her the best hand—a whore for a mother and a fool for a husband—but Mirren’s misdirected passivity is still shocking to behold…

Love Ranch is in limited release. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

In Theaters:
The People vs. George Lucas

It’s a love-hate relationship, this thing that Star Wars fans have with the father / creator of so many of their space opera fantasies, and one that director Alexandre O. Phillippe deftly explores in his winning documentary on the subject. The crowd at Silverdocs’ East Coast premiere of the film was suitably keyed up for a film whose makers reportedly screened over 600 hours’ worth of fan-created Star Wars videos, remixes, remakes, and animations…

The People vs. George Lucas is on the festival circuit and may soon be coming to a holographic projector near you. Read the full review at Notes from the Road. Also, check out the trailer here.

In Theaters:
Wild Grass

A stalker story where reality quickly takes a tumble down a slippery slope, Alain Resnais’s take on Christian Gailly’s novel (L’Incident) — about a man who decides that the finding of a woman’s lost pocketbook entitles him to some form of romantic connection — plays a risky game, one that it loses in the end…

Wild Grass opens in limited release Friday. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Restrepo

From mid-2007 to mid-2008, Battle Company from the renowned 173rd Airborne Brigade was stationed at a lonely, isolated outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal valley, where they took enemy fire nearly every day, one of the longest exposures to combat American troops had seen since World War II. Writer Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and cameraman Tim Hetherington spent months in the valley with Battle Company, following what happened after their captain, a bluff and impatient guy named Kearney, decided to take the fight to the Taliban…

Restrepo opens in limited release Friday. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
8: The Mormon Proposition

In 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. One of the first couples to get married was Tyler Barrick and Spencer Jones, the almost improbably happy couple introduced at the start of Reed Cowan’s passionate but scattered documentary about the religious conservative fight to rescind their right to marry. Although Cowan’s film deals in a broader way with the movement that opposes gay civil rights, it’s much more specifically an attack on the Mormon church and its role in that movement. Interestingly, not only are almost all of the subjects interviewed in the film Mormon (current or ex) but all the filmmakers – including Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black – are as well. For his part, Cowan was a onetime Mormon evangelist. Everyone has axes to grind…

8: The Mormon Proposition is out now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Each summer, the self-explanatory group Human Rights Watch sponsors a film festival in London and New York with entries whose subjects (mostly documentary, with a few narrative films) cover the gamut of human crisis and suffering around the world. It’s a sometimes bleak affair, but always more rewarding than simply depressing because of the great variety of diverse human experience it illustrates.

I’ve been covering some of this year’s films for Notes from the Road, at PopMatters. Here’s links to the reviews of what I was lucky enough to see. You’ll be able to catch most of these on Netflix, with some (like the excellent a12th & Delaware) showing up on HBO.

• 12 & Delaware – A documentary about a street corner in Florida, one side of which has an abortion clinic, and the other a pro-life activist center. Review.
• Iran: Voices of the Unheard – In this beautiful, poetic documentary, a disparate group of people — a secular teacher, a nomadic tribesman, and a disaffected young urbanite — describe what life is like under the oppressive reign of the mullahs in Tehran. Review.
• Nero’s Guests – A documentary about a crusading Indian journalist who tries to bring attention to the plight of desperately poor farmers who have been committing suicide in record numbers (some 200,000 in the last few years). Review.
• Camp Victory, Afghanistan – One of the strongest, saddest documentaries to come out of the Afghanistan war, this one follows life at a small Afghan Army outpost where poorly-motivated recruits and a seasoned general (veteran of the fight against the Russians) bump up against the expectations of their American trainers. Review.
• Presumed Guilty – The Mexican justice system’s comically absurd unfairness is examined in this documentary about a man convicted for murder for no good reason at all. Review.
• War Don Don – A fascinating documentary about the war crimes trial of a rebel leader accused of unbelievable barbarity in the Sierra Leone civil war. Review.
• The Balibo Conspiracy – Anthony LaPaglia stars in this Australian drama based on the true story of journalists who went missing covering the start of the East Timorese genocide in 1975. Review.
• Last Best Chance – Senator Edward Kennedy’s office leads the exhausting fight for comprehensive immigration reform in the face of short-sighted xenophobia. Review.
• In the Land of the Free – An examination of case of the “Angola 3,” a trio of prisoners who between them have spent about a century in solitary confinement (possibly for crimes they didn’t commit); narration by Samuel L. Jackson. Review.
  
• The Unreturned – Almost five million Iraqis have fled their country since the American invasion and less than ten percent have returned; this is a film about those unable to settle elsewhere and too frightened to go home. Review.