In Theaters:
The A-Team

Bereft of inspiration or not, Narc director Joe Carnahan’s reboot of the 1980’s Stephen J. Cannell series is a rare thing these days: the action flick that knows its limits; this is probably due to it not being produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Certainly there are moments of Bruckheimer-itis here, with Carnahan’s propensity for sunset-hued helicopter shots and an irritating Action Movie 101 score by Alan Silvestri. But Carnahan completely disregards the Bruckheimer bigger-is-better school of filmic thought. When these guys get into a jam, they tend to get out of it by being smarter and quicker, not simply willing to expend more ammunition and amass a higher body count…

The A-Team opens everywhere today. You can read the full review at Short Ends & Leader.

New on DVD:
Burma VJ

Anders Østergaard’s pummeling, electrifying documentary is a hybrid kind of creature, both about Burma’s Saffron Revolution itself (so named because of the color of the robes worn by the monks who bravely forsook their monasteries to lead marches for freedom) and the impossible lengths many went to in order to record what happened. The “VJ” of the title stands for “video journalists,” the scrum of people darting in and out of the crowds thronging Rangoon’s streets during those tumultuous days, documenting every they can. The idea is to smuggle footage out of the country or get it posted online to get around the oppressive junta’s media blackout…

Burma VJ will be available on DVD next week. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books:
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

It’s the rare novel that can live up to a killer premise, those bombshell ideas that get readers’ minds snapping and crackling like crossed wires, so much so that the printed page translation of that idea almost always pales in comparison. We create our own fantasies, after all, artists simply point the way. So to say that Aimee Bender’s (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) crisply dreamlike new novel doesn’t fully deliver on the promise of its central conceit is less of a criticism than it might seem. Bender takes a clever idea and runs with it as well as can be expected, being more focused on how one particular life-changing event affects her protagonist rather than on its repercussions for the wider world. For the latter, that’s why we have science fiction…

Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is on sale now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
Cropsey

For their gripping documentary about the persistence of urban legends in the adult mind, co-directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio returned to the place of their childhood and its darkest fears: Staten Island. Standing in a strip of deep forest that still runs through the middle of the rapidly developed island are ruins that speak to the island’s not-so-distant past as New York’s dumping ground for the unwanted. For decades, the island, the smallest of the region’s five boroughs, was home not just to the massive Fresh Kills garbage dump (visible from space), but also tuberculosis sufferers and mental patients. The sprawling complexes like the Willowbrook Mental Institution now darkly loom, deserted and graffiti-covered, as reminders of past sins — Willowbrook was closed after official investigations and muckraking reporting by a young firebrand named Geraldo Rivera uncovered a shocking level of abuse — and also dream factories for the production of urban legends…

Cropsey opens in limited release tomorrow. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books:
Directive 51

This is why so many people don’t like science fiction. Character is subordinated to event, nuance to overkill, dialogue to exposition, and story to sheer information. John Barnes’ Directive 51 isn’t a story so much as it is a lightly fictionalized datadump, the sort of thing more correctly experienced as a handout addendum to a PowerPoint presentation on the Newest Threat Facing America being given by some think tank in a Washington, DC-area Hilton conference room…

Directive 51 is on sale now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
When You’re Strange

Like all the better ones, The Doors were an odd band, an encapsulation of their time’s cultural tumult and also an apposite rejection of the period’s values — both mainstream and counterculture. It’s fitting, then, that Tom DiCillo’s documentary about them should arrive as such a curious artifact. The film opens with what appears to be a stiff reenactment of some Jim Morrison fever-dream, with a bearded actor vaguely resembling him driving around in the desert, listening to radio reports of his own death. The fact that it’s actually from a film Morrison shot himself in 1969, two years before the onetime film student’s death, makes the sequence more haunting than it otherwise would be, but no more convincingly dramatic…

When You’re Strange is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Kimjongilia

North Korea celebrated the 46th birthday of its dictator Kim Jong Il (the “Dear Leader”) by creating a hybrid red begonia in his honor, naming it kimjongilia. It supposedly symbolized wisdom, love, peace, and justice; none of which are at all in evidence in the North Korea portrayed in N.C. Heikin’s harrowing film about this modern-day slave state. A chain of starkly recorded interviews with people who escaped reveals not just the horror of their day-to-day privations, but also the depth of the near-religious indoctrination the state put them through…

Kimjongilia is in limited release now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
The Eclipse

The ghosts of the recent past never seem that far away in a certain kind of Irish spook story, of which writer/director Conor McPherson’s The Eclipse is an almost too-perfect example. A prolific playwright (The Weir, The Seafarer) and occasional filmmaker (Saltwater), McPherson can work his way around this sort of rainy tale with ease, crafting a mood that alternates between longing regret and bone-deep fright…

The Eclipse opens today in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo


The new movie of Stieg Larsson’s mystery novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), is a quality translation, comparable to what Ron Howard could have done with his Dan Brown films had the source material been worthy…

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in limited release now. You can read the full review at PopMatters.

In Theaters:
Remember Me

A gloomy romance about beautiful people in the big, beautiful city, Remember Me flirts with preposterousness on multiple occasions but still comes through with its dramatic potency very nearly intact. Given that the film’s central relationship revolves around a guy dating a girl just to get back at her policeman father, this achievement is nothing to scoff at…

Remember Me is playing everywhere now. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Green Zone

Fresh off the buzz from their last two Jason Bourne installments, director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon graft their patented punchiness onto an Iraq War-based story about the hunt for WMDs and the political machinations behind it. If the film had worked, the results could have been the birth of a new genre: the action muckraker. But Green Zone fails on both counts, as thriller and smart drama.

Green Zone opens wide today. You can read the full review at Film Journal International.

In Theaters:
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss

What do you do when your last name is that of a man synonymous with anti-Semitic propaganda? Do you change your name? Do you lash back at accusers and proclaim your ancestor a misunderstood artist too naïve to be guilty? Do you battle in causes diametrically opposed to that legacy, as a way of expunging the stain? Do you live quietly, aware that it was not your fault but unable to stem the tide of guilt?

With the far-flung family of German filmmaker Veit Harlan, a favorite of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and director of the still-banned 1940 hate film Jew Süss, their reactions cover all the above. Felix Moeller’s studious and inquisitive documentary, Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss, investigates the man behind the film and the disquieting legacy he left behind…

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Books:
The Emperor’s New Drugs

What if antidepressants were not just too easily available and overly prescribed by doctors—as has been argued in many venues for years now, though to no discernible effect—but didn’t even work? That’s the takeaway premise of psychology professor Irving Kirsch, Ph.D., in his new book, The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth…

You can read the full piece on Kirsch’s admittedly dry but fascinating book at Re:Print.

In Theaters:
The Art of the Steal

Everybody likes a good art heist, in theory, thanks to our cinematically-warped image of art thieves as gentlemanly criminals. But Don Argott’s documentary The Art of the Steal is the rare heist film where we root for the art owners, not the cunning thieves. The bad guys here are a powerful cabal of politicians, media entities, greedheads, and massive public charity organizations, while the good guys are a scrappy bunch of art scholars. What are they fighting over? Control of a collection believed to be the greatest repository of Post-Impressionist and early Modern art, and is rumored to be worth at least $25 billion…

The Art of the Steal is in limited release now. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters:
Shutter Island

For all Martin Scorsese’s delighted use of pulp tropes in the gangster films that made him a household name, those films were always a breed apart, energized more by his personal vision and the electricity being tossed off by his leading men than his impressive internal library of cinematic memories. Even with their cinema-drunk panache, Goodfellas and Mean Streets were ultimately beholden to few other filmmakers. What it came down to was that Scorsese had never knocked out a real genre picture, something that people could go see with some friends on a weekend night for a good scare. So it was that Scorsese took Dennis Lehane’s B-flick-inspired novel Shutter Island and made a real monster of a film…

Shutter Island opens wide today, after being delayed several months by Paramount (which decided to put its Oscar campaign money behind The Lovely Bones). Read the full review at Short Ends & Leader.