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Review: Erased (from Village Voice)

ERASED

Mix a dollop of The Bourne Identity, a dash (or two) of Taken, and a pinch of the spy classic Three Days of the Condor (1975), stir it all together, and you get Erased, a thriller whose storytelling ingredients are so familiar that one could watch it with the sound off and still know what's going on. Aaron Eckhart is Ben Logan, a recently widowed private security analyst living in Brussels who awakes one morning to find his office empty, his co-workers in the morgue, and his personal identity wiped away. With his rebellious teenage daughter, Amy (Liana Liberato), in tow, Ben begins dodging assassins. As luck would have it, he's a retired black-ops agent, so, game on. German director Philipp Stölzl proves adept at staging fight scenes in confined spaces, and has fun with a bob-and-weave train station pursuit. The movie zips along nicely for a while, but once screenwriter Arash Amel begins explaining the vast conspiracy Ben has stumbled upon, action gives way to talky angst. Eckhart is too lively an actor for material this mundane, although a Liam Neeson hand-me-down is probably irresistible in today's marketplace. Can Erased Again be far behind? (Chuck Wilson)

Review: The Numbers Station

THE NUMBERS STATION

A thriller that focuses on only two key characters shouldn't be hard to explain, yet, the plot specifics of the unexciting but sweetly old-fashioned The Numbers Station are hard to nail down. John Cusack stars as Emerson, a CIA hit man suffering a midlife crisis. To give him a rest, the bosses send him to England to guard a WWII bunker from which coded radio messages are sent to U.S. spies. Yes, shortwave radio! It's still around! Emerson spends three days shifts guarding Katherine (Malin Akerman), a gorgeous young cryptologist who sends number-coded assignment to secret agents the world over. All is well until the bunker’s other two agents are attacked and forced to send out 15 rogue assassination assignments. Don't ask how, but Emerson and Katherine end up trapped in the bunker, desperately trying to find the code that will reverse those orders. Onscreen, all this makes sense (mostly), thanks to first-timer F. Scott Frazier’s well-written script. There are some decent shootouts, but the movie's strongest asset are the soulful performances Danish director Kasper Barfoed, making his American debut, draws from Cusack and Akerman, a Swedish-born newcomer with half a dozen films in the pipeline and stardom waiting just around the corner. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: Antiviral

ANTIVIRAL

A loving family thrives on its traditions, and so it is that the debut feature from writer-director Brandon Cronenberg proves to be just as hide-your-eyes yucky as the early films of his father, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg (Videodrome, The Fly, A History of Violence). Antiviral imagines a world in which celebrity-obsessed average Joes pay for the privilege of being injected with colds, flus, and far nastier viruses harvested from the voluntarily donated blood of movie stars and models. Young Syd March (a fearless Caleb Landry Jones) works in a virus clinic and is secretly injecting himself with the blood he's assigned to draw from famous beauty Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon). Syd is selling his Hannah-enriched blood on the black market, an enterprise that makes his body a dangerously valuable commodity. Cronenberg works in sly jokes about consumerism run amok, but the unceasing close-ups of injections, including one in a man's gums, and the filmmaker's daring exploration of blood fetishism-- thick, tasty blood spewed on sterile-white walls-- is cultural satire taken to the extreme. Papa Cronenberg must be proud, but be advised: If there's a blood test in your future, book it before seeing this movie. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: Aftershock

AFTERSHOCK

As an artist, Eli Roth always seeks to elevate the human spirit. Whether he's working as writer-director (Hostel), as producer (The Last Exorcism), or as an actor-producer (Aftershock), you can be confident that characters will be tortured and gutted with tender loving care. Here, Roth suffers a few physical indignities himself. He plays a tourist who, with two buddies (Ariel Levy and Nicolás Martínez) and three girls they've just met, gets caught in an earthquake in Santiago, Chile. When Levy’s hand is sliced off by falling debris, panicked nightclub patrons kick it around the dancefloor. Should we laugh? Is this a comedy? If so, are we also expected to giggle when a gang of escaped convicts chase down and rape one of the women? (The Chilean tourism board will not be including this movie in its next promo packet.) Director Nicolás López is so tone deaf, and the action scenes so murkily photographed, that it's impossible to gauge his intentions. A weird hybrid of the Final Destination death comedies and the Hostel/Saw cruelty fests, Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: No One Lives

NO ONE LIVES

The body count rises with bloody, relentless precision in No One Lives, an old-fashioned slasher flick masquerading as a kidnapping thriller. When a family of Tennessee backwoods killers kidnaps a traveling couple, the power dynamic abruptly shifts when the man, known only as Driver (Luke Evans), turns out to be a serial killer on the run. Mayhem ensues, as one by one, Driver begins picking off the clan, deploying tools the maniacs from Friday the 13th and Halloween would appreciate: a woodchipper, the whirring fan of a car engine, and for one nasty beheading, a wooden clipboard. Director Ryûhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) is too talented for material this retro-junky, but he and screenwriter David Cohen keep the action coming hard and fast, while managing to suggest that Emma (Adelaide Clemens), the heiress Driver has been psychologically torturing for months, may be sweet on her captor, who's definitely crushing on her. No One Lives should satisfy horror fans, but with Fast & Furious 6 and two Hobbit sequels in his near future, the charismatic Evans must be praying that Driver quickly fades from view. Evans is Welsh so he probably didn't realize: Movie monsters never die. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: Evil Dead (from The Village Voice)

EVIL DEAD
In this wittily gory remake of the revered 1981 debut of Oz the Great and Powerful filmmaker Sam Raimi, five college-age friends go to the ol' cabin in the woods where the nerd of the group (Lou Taylor Pucci) commits a common camping mistake: reading aloud from a book of the dead. Cue an invisible demon that uses tree limbs to rape and thereby possess Mia (Jane Levy), who returns to the cabin eager to slice and dice her friends, as well as her brother (Shiloh Fernandez). In a virtuoso feature debut, Uruguayan-born writer-director Fede Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues honor the motifs of the original, from the camera rushing pell-mell through the woods to signal the demon's arrival, to the deployment of a chainsaw in the final showdown. But the plotting as a whole feels fresh, as does the emphasis on women strong enough to defend themselves. Alvarez also honors Raimi, who co-produced this remake, in another key way: The film's special effects are created with old-fashioned prosthetics and buckets of blood, which lend a horrifically tactile reality to such moments as when the possessed Mia slices her own tongue in two. Dare ya not to look. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: The Story of Luke (from The Village Voice)

The Story of Luke
A feel-good story about an autistic man's quest for independence, The Story of Luke is a charming little film in need of a bit more grit. After the grandmother who raised him dies, 25-year-old Luke (Lou Taylor Pucci) is sent to live with his aunt and uncle (Kristin Bauer van Straten and Cary Elwes). Luke is a high-functioning autistic who longs to find a real job so he can get his own place and, more important, ask a pretty receptionist (Sabryn Rock) out on a date. Peruvian-born writer-director Alonso Mayo, making his feature debut, has a flair for small, funny riffs, as when Luke's manic new boss (Seth Green) offers Luke a play-by-play commentary on a water-cooler mating dance between two co-workers. Luke would like to be liked, but he's not going to compromise his annoying, rule-laden worldview to win hearts, a philosophy the talented Pucci embodies with admirable rigor. One wishes that Mayo had been equally tough-minded. Luke faces challenges, to be sure, both within himself and out in the world, but even the meanies at the office are only sitcom-mean. In the end, Luke's path to self-empowerment is funny and sweet and a little too easy. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: 6 Souls (from The Village Voice)

6 Souls

In this silly but elegantly moody horror movie, Julianne Moore stars as Cara Harding, a psychologist who specializes in multiple personality disorder. When her shrink father (Jeffrey DeMunn) brings her in to examine soft-spoken David (Jonathan Rhys Meyer), the patient soon displays an aggressive alternate personality named Adam. Cara is thrown for a horror-film loop when she discovers that the real David was murdered 25 years ago, and thrown even further when those close to her begin to die, only to turn up as one of David/Adam's alternate personalities. Screenwriter Michael Cooney (Identity) has created a strong premise that eventually sinks into third-act predictability as Cara's investigation leads her into chainsaw-massacre hill country, where a blind witch cures the possessed. Silly stuff, and not too scary, but Moore and Rhys Meyer make the journey worthwhile. Perpetually tense, and endlessly resourceful, they're well matched and a pleasure to watch, especially in the early therapy scenes. Swedish-born directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein demonstrate a gift for inspiring good actors, including Frances Conroy as David's mother and Nate Corddry as Cara's computer-whiz brother, and for camera moves so creepily smooth that you can practically feel the duo's deep longing to direct a remake of The Shining. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: BLANCANIEVES (from The Village Voice)

BLANCANIEVES
The new film from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers may forget to notice that they can't hear the dialogue. Astutely, Berger has chosen to wrap his experiment around a tale everyone knows: the perils of that sweet beauty, Snow White. Here, she is Carmen (Sofia Oria), born in 1920s Seville to a mother who dies in childbirth. After the death of her grandmother, Carmen is sent to live with the paralyzed bullfighter father (Daniel Giménez Cacho) she's never met, as well as his new wife and former nurse (Maribel Verdú)-- the very measure of a wicked stepmother. Eventually, of course, there will be dwarfs, but Berger’s seven lugs are bullfighters, not miners, and one of them (Sergio Dorado) looks at Carmen (now played by Macarena Garcia) the way a prince looks at his princess. Don't expect Berger's Snow White to play out like Grimm's tale or Disney's masterpiece. In the hardscrabble reality of the flesh-and-blood real world, living happily ever after, the filmmaker suggests, is complicated stuff. (Chuck Wilson)

Review: The Sapphires (from The Village Voice)

THE SAPPHIRES

This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars, but has its easy pleasures, and it’s likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O’Dowd, who played the laid-back highway patrolman in Bridesmaids (2011), stars as Dave Lovelace, a musician living out of his car who stumbles upon a gifted girl group in rural Australia circa 1968. The four young women are Aboriginals, and as such are shunned and abused by white neighbors they’ve known all their lives. When Julie (Jessica Mauboy), the one with the really great voice, sees an advertisement seeking acts to perform for American troops in Vietnam, she convinces the others (Deborah Mailman, Shari Sebbens, and Miranda Tapsell) to audition. After Dave encourages the girls to switch their repertoire from Merle Haggard to Otis Redding tunes, the girls soon find themselves performing in Saigon and the war zone beyond. First-time director Wayne Blair and screenwriters Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, adapting Briggs’ stage play, don’t shy away from the era’s social complexities, but they keep their eye on the ball, which in this case is the sweet pull of soul tune harmony. Why resist? (Chuck Wilson)