Rabbit Hole

2010 // USA // John Cameron Mitchell // January 26, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

B- - Everything that occurs within Rabbit Hole revolves around a personal cataclysm that is only hinted at for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, a stratagem that proves wholly consistent with the work's interest in the phenomena of emotional evasion and suppression. The young son of polished upper-middle-class strivers Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) perished eight months ago in a car accident, and although their life is not necessarily in tatters, the couple's unresolved grief crouches in the room, mocking their hollow gestures towards normalcy. John Cameron Mitchell--creator of brash and bratty indie gambits like Hedwig and Angry Inch and Shortbus--isn't the obvious choice to helm David Lindsay-Abaire's adaptation of his own play. While Mitchell's direction is assured and sensitive to the nuances and diversity of human emotion, Rabbit Hole too often feels like a grimly dutiful exploration of a character blueprint, rather than an authentic tale of sorrow. For a story about unthinkable loss, it exhibits a curious lack of poignancy, one that cannot be explained entirely by Becca's ruthless shuttering of her emotional landscape. It's a distinguished film, but frigidly so, and rarely distinctive, apart from its embrace of a curious, scientific sort of solace befitting a faithless world.

The Fighter

2010 // USA // David O. Russell // December 26, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

B- - There's little that's ground-breaking in The Fighter, David O. Russell's grimy, amusing worm's-eye portrait of light welterweight boxing champion Mickey "Irish" Ward (an appropriately bulked and vulnerable Mark Wahlberg). The story sticks to the tropes of countless tales about working-class kids who escapes their dismal surroundings through excellence in one sphere or another. Meanwhile, the film's 1990s Lowell, Massachusetts setting is saturated with the sort of affectionately misshapen blue-collar Bay State characters and locales that now serve as stock cinematic fodder. This isn't to say that Russell's film is without its appealing features, chief among them the director's facility for rendering his boxing sequences with enviable vitality and sensational drama. Christian Bale, as Ward's crack-addicted, ex-fighter brother (and sometimes trainer) Dick-Eklund, undergoes yet another astonishing physical transformation, here into a sweaty, bug-eyed heap of deceit and cloying reassurances. While the lack of ambition in Russell's approach to the material is often unsatisfactory, the film proffers its share of lingering elements. These range from the garish, as in Mickey's assemblage of dog-faced, sailor-mouthed older sisters, to the reserved, as in the smears of bright blue icing on a character's skin and clothes. There are just enough of these memorable particulars to save The Fighter from dismissal.

A Prophet

2009 // France - Italy // Jacques Audiard // December 24, 2010 // Netflix Instant

B+ - In recent years, even arthouse cinemas seem to have been overrun with gangster epics, and although the mother tongue often changes, the cadences are usually the same. Fortunately, Jacques Audiard's mostly prison-bound entry in the subgenre, A Prophet, proves to be a vibrant and exceptional dramatic work, one that elbows conventions and repeatedly surprises without feeling the need to burn its underlying formula to the ground. Much of the film's absorbing and lithe character lies in the manner in which it regards its anti-hero, Malik (Tahar Rahim), an nonreligious Arab who enters the French corrections system without family or allies, and receives a six-year crash course in the acquisition and safeguarding of power. Rahim's estimable performance—part whipped mongrel, part prowling panthe—and Audiard's peculiar flourishes of magical realism provide glimpses of the man's emotional terrain, but the details of his schemes are often shuttered away from the viewer until the last moment. Accordingly, the film works remarkably well strictly as a bloody, smoldering thriller where the narrative's precise trajectory is deliciously uncertain. More broadly, A Prophet refreshes in its shades-of-gray stance towards nakedly self-interested behavior, in its grim assessment of the clashes between self-respect and ambition, and in the specificity of its contemporary French setting, so awash in social and ethnic shudders.

Marwencol

2010 // USA // Jeff Malmberg // December 22, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

B - Outsider art seems to provide ripe opportunity for documentary film-making, with results ranging from ache-laden portraiture (The Cats of Mirikitani) to knotty explorations of the vagaries of the art world (My Kid Could Paint That). Although it rarely demonstrates any real cinematic liveliness and relies overmuch on the compelling character of its subject's work, Marwencol admirably balances the personal and sociopolitical dimensions of its tale. First-time director Jeff Malmberg quickly zeroes in on the questions raised by the work of miniaturist and photographer Mark Hogancamp, a traumatic brain injury survivor who has constructed an elaborate fantasy narrative about a fictional World War II-era Belgian town, populating it with dolls that stand in for his family, friends, and fears. Much of the thrill of Marwencol stems from the manner in which it sumptuously steeps us in Hogancamp's art, which evinces an astonishingly intuitive facility for both the emotional and the technical aspects of figure photography. Predictably enough, Hogancamp is eventually discovered by New York City bohemians, and tension surfaces between the comforts of fantasy and the demands of reality. While the narrative pattern Malmberg relies upon feels a bit too familiar, he nonetheless studs his film with unexpected revelations, all while maintaining a palpable wonderment at his subject's talents and resilience.

Tron: Legacy

2010 // USA // Joseph Kosinski // December 17, 2010 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Hi-Pointe Theater)

C - Given that 1982's Tron was intended primarily as a vehicle for bleeding-edge animation technology, it's perhaps unsurprising that its belated sequel, Tron: Legacy, is so fixated on one-upping the original's distinctive neon-detailed action sequences with all the eye-popping computer wizardry the twenty-first century can muster. While the sequel features appropriately gorgeous design and credible visuals—save for a creepy de-aging effect—almost every other component is dispiritingly slack or garishly off-key. This unfortunately encompasses Jeff Bridges' performance, which presents fiftysomething, computer-entrapped Kevin Flynn as a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Dude. Garrett Hedlund, meanwhile, fits the textbook definition of the handsome cipher as Flynn's restless, resentful son, Sam. (Do I smell a reconciliation coming? I think I do!) To its credit, the sequel presents a thoughtful thematic nucleus that legitimately builds upon the original film's conceits: the Programs, having established the existence of Users, have now advanced to open rebellion against them, transforming their binary Eden into a terrifying Babel. However, Tron: Legacy is so preoccupied with overpowering, showy action set pieces that it doesn't bother to properly explicate is baffling tale of virtual prisons and spontaneous digital life, or even to answer the most elementary questions raised by its wooly, convoluted science-fiction systems (see also: The Matrix Trilogy).

Splice

2009 // Canada // Vincenzo Natali // October 14, 2010 // Playstation Store

D+ - If you're making a film that is essentially an update to Frankenstein for the era of stem cell research, you could pick far worse influences than David Cronenberg. Director Vincenzo Natali is plainly positioning Splice as a successor to the Canadian auteur's chilly "body horror" films—especially his most familiar work, The Fly—with a surfeit of disturbing biological imagery and undisguised sexual colorings. Yet Natali lacks Cronenberg's audacious sensibility, his facility for establishing an uncanny mood, and his psychological and cultural inquisitiveness. Consequently, Splice proves to be little more than a faintly ludicrous, consistently predictable monster movie, without much of anything interesting to say. There's a nugget of a compelling premise deep within—biotech corporations genetically strip-mining lab-created organisms—and the design of hybrid creature Dren is admittedly striking. However, the whole enterprise is weighed down by a thuddingly stupid script and choked by genre clichés. Add to that a pair of protagonists whose actions seem completely arbitrary, as well as long stretches of dreary Stalking Monster "action" and you begin asking yourself two questions. Where is the Natali who directed the cerebral, fearsome Cube? And why the hell did I bother with this?