The Five-Year Engagment, Safe

Safe

The Five-Year Engagment

"The Five-Year Engagement" is the kind of movie you'd walk out of on a plane. You'd have to go a ways back in romcom history to find a more mismatched pair than schlubby Jason Segel and (upper-)crusty Emily Blunt. They're trapped in a movie of cringe-inducing vulgarity and meanness in which nobody behaves remotely like a human being. And that's just the half hour we made it through.

Headhunters, Bernie, Sound of my Voice, Elles, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Headhunters

Bernie

Sound of my Voice

Elles

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

A good weekend at the multiplex began with the well-made Norwegian thriller "Headhunters." It's over-the-top fun with a few memorable scenes, though the story itself doesn't stand up to strict scrutiny.

Darling Companion

I know, I know: What was I thinking? Well, 21 years ago, Larry Kasdan directed and with wife Meg co-wrote one of my favorite movies of the 90s, the L.A. ensemble piece "Grand Canyon." Two decades later, they've collaborated on "Darling Companion," a movie of jaw-dropping insubstantiality that, to my pleasant surprise, played last night to an audience of one. (I got to recite the pre-show spiel about talking, texting and parking validation.)

Surviving Progress

The hand-wringing, Cassandra-ish documentary “Surviving Progress” is diffuse, inchoate – in short, a mess. The filmmakers interview a bunch of talking heads (many of whom have books to peddle) and give them free rein to ramble discursively about every imaginable problem of civilization: overconsumption of resources, global debt inequities, human rights violations, deforestation. Having no sense of the cinematic, they set the interviews to montages of international images and time-lapse photography. I’m sure they think they have a unifying thesis, but I defy them or anyone in the audience to explain it in a coherent paragraph. Their movie starts with one concept, then veers off into a series of tangents, never finding its way back. (The interviews are so full of “you know” and other extraneous verbiage, you wonder whether they’ve been edited at all.) “Surviving Progress” is dime-store eschatology.

Goodbye First Love

An impressionistic French reminiscence with an overly literal title, Mia Hansen-Love's "Goodbye First Love" does not merely indulge the moon-faced melodrama of adolescent romance but welters in it. The movie exudes sophistication, but its sensibility is actually quite regressive.

Fightville

I have about as much interest in mixed martial arts as in church music or origami, but I found myself cheering by the end of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s well-made documentary “Fightville,” about fighters, trainers, and promoters climbing the lower rungs of the MMA ladder in southern Louisiana. The filmmakers smartly focus on just a few engaging and well-spoken young men, who suffer no delusions of a smooth road to wealth and stardom but fight out of felt necessity. We see the brutal training schedule they must follow, and the heartbreak of missed opportunity when they allow real life to interfere with it. The bouts themselves are presented understandably, with explanations of the various ways victory can be earned. Like all good sports movies, the joy of “Fightville” lies less in the outcome of any particular contest than in the human connection between its subjects and the audience. A surprising delight.

Marley

I'm always eager to see a new Kevin Macdonald film. Some are great (the heart-stopping mountain-climbing documentary "Touching the Void"), some are terrible (the vapid High Concept doc "Life in a Day"), many are good ("One Day in September," "The Last King of Scotland," "State of Play"). More to the point, Macdonald is one of that small handful of directors (Steven Soderbergh comes to mind, maybe Robert Altman) who almost never make the same movie twice.