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This might not be a film for everyone, but those who like challenging hyper-cool cinema will rejoice. When your plot deals with a black bluesman in the South chaining a nymphomaniac white girl to the radiator in his house, you’re skirting the edge of good taste. But Craig Brewer, the director of the wonderful pimp to rapper flick HUSTLE & FLOW, knows that his exploitation premise is really just the framework to tell an iconic redemption story.

Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson, PULP FICTION) is a former blues singer who farms to make a living. His wife has just run off with his brother. The local preacher R.L. (John Cothran Jr., THE CELL) is keeping an eye on him so that he doesn’t stray too far of the path of righteousness due to his anger and bitterness over the break-up of his marriage. One morning, he finds the young white girl Rae (Christina Ricci, PUMPKIN) lying in the street by his mailbox, beaten severely and only wearing a short top and panties. He takes her back to his house and watches over her as she fights fever. When Lazarus learns that she is a nympho who has been sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Harry in town since her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake, ALPHA DOG) went off to the army, Lazarus decides to chain her to his radiator and cure her of her sinful ways.

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Skip this movie and just watch the trailer online for free. You’ll get all the funny jokes, less of the homophobia and not waste your freakin’ time. This tired, slapstick CITY SLICKERS wanna-be is a career low for William H. Macy, who I hope received a nice paycheck for his effort. Tim Allen, John Travolta and Martin Lawrence have all been in worse, but that’s not saying much is it.

The set-up is simple. Four middle-aged men want to reclaim some of their youth and manliness so they set out on a motorcycle road trip. Doug Madsen (Allen, CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS) is a dentist with high-cholesterol who finds rebellion against his family’s wimpy opinion on him by eating a stick of butter. Woody Stevens (Travolta, BATTLEFIELD EARTH) is some kind of rich businessman who is married to a swimsuit model, who is actually in the process of losing it all. Bobby Davis (Lawrence, BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2) is a henpecked plumber who took the last year off to write a how to book. Dudley Frank (Macy, FARGO) is a clueless computer programmer who barely knows how to ride his bike, which is a fact that is reinforced over and over again.
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This is an interesting crime drama in that it presents various scenarios for its main crime, doesn’t confirm positively any one of them, yet still finds closure for its overall story. It does this by paralleling the tales of its lead character and its lead subject.

Louis Simo (Adrien Brody, THE PIANIST) is a two-bit private eye, who mainly works cheating spouse cases. He gets a tip that Helen Bessolo (Lois Smith, THE MINORITY REPORT) wants to hire someone to look deeper into the death of her son — SUPERMAN actor George Reeves (Ben Affleck, GOOD WILL HUNTING). The police are ruling it a suicide, but rumors point to foul play.

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Director Richard Linklater goes back to the animated rotoscope effect, where animated graphics are applied over live-action performances, which he used on his film, WAKING LIFE. The choice seems both stylistically geared toward the drug-fueled material and also practical in that it was a cheaper way to do the sci-fi tale rather than in live-action with visual effects. The result is a hit or miss affair, which is more a story problem than a stylistic one.

Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves, THE MATRIX) is an undercover drug cop who is trying to find the top supplier of the deadly and highly addictive drug called Substance D. Two druggies named James Barris (Robert Downey Jr., CHAPLIN) and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson, NATURAL BORN KILLERS) live with him and ramble on and on about their paranoid theories. Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder, DRACULA) is Arctor’s supplier, but he has fallen for her, yet she refuses to sleep with him. Their friend Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane, DAZED AND CONFUSED) is completely gone on Substance D, suffering from delusions. When Arctor is at the police headquarters, he wears what is called a scramble suit, which covers this body with shifting images of various humans thus covering his identity. Outside of the police doctors, no one else on the force knows what he looks like. So when Barris turns Arctor in, how will they know that he’s really a cop?

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LAND GIRLS commits the greatest crime that any romance can commit — it makes us root against the intended lovers. The title is a reference to the British Land Army, which was comprised of women who went to work jobs that were vacated by the men when they went off to fight in WWII.

The story begins with Stella (Catherine McCormack, DANGEROUS BEAUTY), Ag (Rachel Weisz, THE CONSTANT GARDENER) and Prue (Anna Friel, GOAL!) arriving on a farm in Dorset, where the farmer John Lawrence (Tom Georgeson, NOTES ON A SCANDAL) believes it’s a lark to send women out to do men’s work. Turns out the young women have been trained quite well and take to their work very quickly, leaving ample time for them to set eyes on the farmer’s son Joe (Steven Mackintosh, UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION), who dreams of being a pilot. Prue is the first to set out and shag Joe, followed by Ag, who doesn’t want to be a virgin when she gets married. Stella, who is engaged to the rich sailor Philip (Paul Bettany, A BEAUTIFUL MIND), watches Joe from a distance, trying to hold back her feelings for him. I mean, he wants to fly and she wants to fly… so they must be destined to be together.

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Do not go by the ads and trailer for this film; it’s not a CHRONICLES OF NARNIA wanna-be. If you’re familiar with Katherine Paterson’s award-winning young adult book, then you know the story is a coming-of-age tale about friendship, which happens to include some fantasy elements. It’s more akin to MY GIRL than NARNIA.

Jesse Aarons (Josh Hutcherson, ZATHURA) is a tween whose family is very poor. He’s subjected to not only the ridicule of having to wear hand-me-down sneakers, but having to wear hand-me-down sneakers from his older sister. Jesse is a bit scared of his imposing and gruff father (Robert Patrick, TERMINATOR 2), who seems to treat Jesse’s youngest sister May Belle (Bailee Madison) with more friendliness and kindness.

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Another addition to the superior group of films about the plight of Africa, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND is a social drama with the tension of a thriller and is capped with a tour de force performance from Forest Whitaker. This historical biopic puts a fictional protagonist in the center of real life dramas surrounding the rise and fall of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy, CHRONICLES OF NARNIA) is a recent medical school grad who doesn’t want to stay in Scotland and go into boring family practice like his father. So he heads off to Uganda to make a difference as well as have some fun. General Idi Amin (Whitaker, THE CRYING GAME) has just come to power and his pro-poor rhetoric is quickly making him a national hero. Nicholas couldn’t imagine the poverty and need that he encounters when he comes to serve at the rural hospital with Dr. Merrit (Adam Kotz) and his wife Sarah (Gillian Anderson, TV’s X-FILES).

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Overcoming some clunky moments, Sony’s first foray into fully animated features is charming and fun due to its likeable central characters and beautiful visuals. Boog (Martin Lawrence, BAD BOYS) is a performing bear who was rescued as a cub by forest ranger Beth (Debra Messing, TV’s WILL & GRACE). One day Boog helps free Elliot the deer (Ashton Kutcher, TV’s THAT ‘70S SHOW) from hunter Shaw (Gary Sinise, FORREST GUMP), which sets in motion a series of incidents that ends in Beth deciding to return Boog to the woods. With little natural survival skills, Boog enlists Elliot to take him back to town before open hunting season begins. Along the way Boog and Elliot will have run-ins with Scottish warrior squirrel McSquizzy (Billy Connolly, MRS. BROWN) and alpha male buck Ian (Patrick Warburton, TV’s SEINFELD) along with a host of other woodland creatures.

Like MADAGASCAR, OPEN SEASON puts domesticated wild animals back into the wild. The films are similar in that the main character doesn’t want to go back to the wild and ends up being forced to go. However, the key difference is that Elliot, who causes Boog to be dumped in the woods, also wants to leave the forest. Their similar motivations help drive the narrative.

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Combining the inspirational inner city teacher tale with a drug abuse story, HALF NELSON bucks all the stereotypes of the similar tales that came before. The film is brought to life with complete dedication by the central performers Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps.

Gosling (THE NOTEBOOK) plays Dan Dunne, a middle school teacher in the inner city, who also happens to be a semi-functional drug addict. He coaches the girls’ basketball team, which includes Drey (Epps). Dunne is an unconventional teacher, who strives to make his students think rather than sticking to the school board approved material. His passion for teaching is one of the traits that attracts fellow teacher Isabel (Monique Curnen, LADY IN THE WATER) to him. However, when his now clean ex Rachel (Tina Holmes, TV’s SIX FEET UNDER) shows up, it’s the start of Dunne’s downward spiral, which begins with Drey discovering him smoking crack.

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