The Canyons

"The Canyons" isn't as bad as you'd feared, or as bad as you'd hoped. But it is bad, flat not in the affectless way of good Bret Easton Ellis (the film's writer) but in Paul Schrader's directorial style and wooden performances by Lilo and porn king James Deen.

Promised Land

"Promised Land" - not to be confused with the 1988 Jason Gedrick-Tracy Pollan film of the same name - stars Matt Damon as Steve Butler, a glib, highly successful salesman with the sinister-sounding Global Cross Power corporation, whose job entails spending a few days and nights in each of a series of blurred-together rural towns, buttering up the locals and getting them to enter land leases that allow Global to extract natural gas - via fracking - from underneath their ranches and farms. We meet Steve as he pulls into a small burg in Pennsylvania with his sometime partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand). She complains that the town, just a couple hours outside Pittsburgh, looks like Kentucky. "You get two hours outside any city and it looks like Kentucky," Iowa-born Steve replies.

"Restless": a career nadir for Gus Van Sant

Gus Van Sant has made some terrific pictures, including several of his recent, more under-the-radar works: "Elephant," "Gerry," "Paranoid Park."