Youth, The Lady in the Van, In the Heart of the Sea, Janis: Little Girl Blue, Hitchcock/Truffaut, Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words

Youth

The Lady in the Van

In the Heart of the Sea

Janis: Little Girl Blue

Hitchcock/Truffaut

Ingrid Bergman - In Her Own Words

Quick capsules from a relatively slow (and mostly middling) December:

California Solo, Quartet

California Solo

Quartet

The one-man show "California Solo" stars Robert Carlyle as Lachlan MacAldonich, the guitar player in a fictional mid-'90s British grunge band called The Cranks whose debut album achieved critical acclaim before the lead singer, Lachlan's brother, died high on drugs in a Hollywood Hills car crash. These days, Lachlan works on an organic produce farm, drinks himself into oblivion most nights, and on weekends hawks his wares rather annoyingly at SoCal farmers' markets. When a DUI charge and a long-forgotten marijuana possession rap trigger INS removal proceedings, Lachlan has to find someone (a frequent customer who seems to prefer him to her boyfriend? the ex-wife or now-teenage daughter he hasn't seen in years?) for whom his deportation would pose an "extreme hardship." Slow, trite, and predictable, "California Solo" covers familiar ground uninterestingly - and Carlyle's hopeless as a vocalist.

First Position, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

First Position

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Since Jeffrey Blitz's great 2002 documentary "Spellbound," you can write the treatments for such pix by Mad Libs (choose activity: spelling bee, crosswords, ballroom dancing; add backstory; climax at national finals). Bess Kargman's youth-ballet-competition doc "First Person" is formulaic, cheesy, and not particularly well-made, but Kargman chose a delightful sextet of kids to track, and they imbue the flick with more humor and joy than it deserves. What makes the kids so impressive is not so much their virtuosity as their seriousness (often singleness) of purpose, their perseverance through intense physical pain, their professionalism. Everyone comes off well except a couple of the parents, one a total Tiger Mother, another who with a few words manages to put the weight of the world on his daughter's shoulders. Kargman needed to tighten up the story - at times, despite the supposed rigor of the Youth America Grand Prix, it seems everyone who fucks up gets a Tonya Harding retake - but she's made sharp enough casting choices to overcome her directorial failings and the movie's good clean fun.