NYC Film Critic

Putty Hill
Written and Directed by Matt Porterfield
Starring Sky Ferreira, Zoe Vance, James Siebor Jr., Dustin Ray
**1/2

Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill is an earnest attempt to do something different with the “kids aren’t all right” school of movies, which seek to depict the aimlessness and/or amorality of contemporary youth.  It’s a genre that’s almost as old as Hollywood itself, growing out of such socially-conscious one-reelers as 1909’s A Drunkard’s Reformation and The Usurer’s Grip, which warned viewers against the evils of alcoholism and loan sharks respectively.

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Orgasm Inc.
Directed by Elizabeth Canner
***

Nine years in the making, Elizabeth Canner’s eye-catchingly titled documentary Orgasm Inc. is neither a profile of a corporation that specializes in providing orgasms nor an expose of the contemporary porn industry.  Rather, this thoughtful—if at times clumsy—film is the latest salvo in the ongoing debate over the increased power of the pharmaceutical industry in shaping our health-care system, a subject that has steadily made its way from the headlines into documentaries and even narrative features (see the recent Love and Other Drugs…well, the first half of it, anyway).

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Sanctum
Directed by Alister Grierson
Written by John Garvin and Andrew Wight
Starring Richard Roxburgh, Ioan Gruffudd, Rhys Wakefield, Alice Parkinson
***

Home
Directed by Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Narrated by Glenn Close
**1/2

Don’t get too excited by the prominent placement of James Cameron’s name above the title of this 3D-enhanced deep-sea diving adventure.  This isn’t the director’s official follow-up to the wildly successful Avatar; he’s not actually stepping back into the director’s chair until Avatar 2 and 3 start filming sometime next year.  Cameron merely executive produced Sanctum and lent the production the special 3D cameras he had developed for his sci-fi extravaganza.

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No Strings Attached
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Written by Elizabeth Meriwether
Starring Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Greta Gerwig, Kevin Kline
**1/2

The Other Woman
Written and Directed by Don Roos
Starring Natalie Portman, Scott Cohen, Charlie Tahan, Lisa Kudrow
**

Now that Black Swan has become her highest-grossing non-Star Wars film to date and appears poised to win her a Best Actress trophy on Oscar night, it seems the right time to ask: Who the heck is Natalie Portman, anyway?  It’s certainly hard to think of another prominent young actress out there right now with a less defined screen persona.  On the one hand, she doesn’t possess the natural charisma of a movie star like Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon or even Anne Hathaway.  At the same time, she doesn’t vanish into her roles in the way the best character actresses do—think Tilda Swinton, Carey Mulligan or Portman’s fellow Oscar nominee, Michelle Williams.  Whenever she’s onscreen (including in Black Swan), you’re always aware that you’re watching someone named Natalie Portman playing a character, but neither that character, nor Portman herself, completely registers as a believable presence.

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Kaboom
Written and Directed by Gregg Araki
Starring Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, Juno Temple, Chris Zylka
***1/2

I came to writer/director Gregg Araki’s work relatively late in his career.  This wasn’t a deliberate choice, mind you.  I was living overseas when his first three features—The Living End, Totally F***ed Up and The Doom Generation—become cult favorites in the early ‘90s and while those films were successful on the indie circuit stateside, there wasn’t much demand for them internationally.  I had returned to American soil by the time he released Nowhere and Splendor in 1997 and 1999 but neither film registered on my radar, perhaps because they were granted the most limited of theatrical releases.

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The Way Back
Directed by Peter Weir
Screenplay by Keith R. Clarke and Peter Weir
Starring Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell Saoirse Ronan
***

If there’s one thing that unites director Peter Weir’s recent (and, with only four movies in the last eighteen years, sadly small) filmography it’s that each entry is, at its core, the story of a one man’s attempt to survive in the face of extreme circumstances.   Obviously that description can apply to any number of films, but Weir picks circumstances that are particularly extreme.  1993’s Fearless featured Jeff Bridges as the survivor of an airplane crash, 1998’s The Truman Show cast Jim Carrey as the unwitting star of a reality TV series with a cast and crew of hundreds and 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World found Russell Crowe (in his last great screen performance) as a 19^th century sea captain leading his frigate into battle against a bigger, faster opponent.

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I’m Dangerous with Love
Directed by Michael Negroponte
**

As several of the addicts profiled in the new documentary I’m Dangerous with Love tell director Michael Negroponte, detoxing from drug abuse is such a difficult, deliberating process, it’s no wonder that there’s an underground market for get-clean-quick miracle cures.  According to the film, one such “cure” is ibogaine, a West African hallucinogen that’s widely used in shaman rituals, but resides on the list of banned substances stateside.

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Plastic Planet
Directed by Werner Boote
**1/2

Ever since An Inconvenient Truth lit up the box office back in 2006, we’ve been treated to a slew of independently financed environmental documentaries that investigate specific problems facing the natural world.  Want to learn more about our depleted supplies of fresh drinking water?  Check out 2008’s Flow.  Concerned about the oil industry’s less-than-noble business practices overseas?  Track down 2009’s Crude.  And how about the dangers posed by natural gas drilling?  Try Josh Fox’s Gasland from last year.  One warning: avoid watching these films back to back, lest you come away convinced that we’re all doomed and devote the next few months of your life to constructing a bunker to house stockpiles of fresh water, canned foodstuffs and battery-powered electronics.

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With the holiday hiatus fast approaching, here’s a big batch of reviews of some of December’s most interesting offerings (leading off with Sofia Coppola’s latest film Somewhere, starring Stephen Dorff), some of which will be rolling out in the next two weeks, while others have already opened.  Look for two more posts to come before the New Year, a Film Journal published reaction to Jack Black’s Gulliver’s Travels and, last but not least, my 2011 Year in Review.

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The New York Film Critics Online, of which I am a member, met today to single out the best 2010 had to offer.  To no one’s great surprise, The Social Network took home the big three awards–Screenplay, Director and Picture.  But we did spread the wealth around a little, handing Actor to James Franco for his terrific turn in 127 Hours, Actress to Natalie Portman for her poised work in Black Swan (although, to be honest, I was pulling for Blue Valentine‘s Michelle Williams or Another Year‘s Lesley Manville) and Breakthrough Performer to Noomi Rapace, the best thing about the film versions of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.  The win I was most thrilled about?  Exit Through the Gift Shop‘s squeaker victory in the Documentary category.  The win I was least thrilled about?  John Wells as Debut Director for his solid, but unremarkable drama The Company Men.  Read the full list of winners–as well as NYFCO’s collective Top 10 of 2010 list (not to be confused with my own list, which I hope to post here within the next two weeks)–after the jump.

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