american gun
There never was a social ill that couldn't be dissected by ensemble drama. Aric Avelino's first feature shuffles through three disparate stories—an Oregon town, as well as the perpetrator's mother (Marcia Gay Harden), tries to recover from a school shooting; a Detroit principal (Forrest Whitaker) tries to stem the influx of firearms into his school while wrestling with his paternal responsibilities; and a Virginia co-ed (Linda Cardellini) who works in granddad Donald Sutherland's gun shop is tempted by his wares when her best friend is raped. Fine performances occasionally distract from the movie's schematic structure, and unlike a certain Oscar winner, Avelino occasionally lets the scenes wander off-message so you don't feel as if you're being tugged through a Bizarro amusement park. But even if he skirts the need for phony catharsis, the movie never escapes its essential contrivance.

--Sam Adams (Bala)

atl Whatever else you might think about Chris Robinson's feature film debut, credit his longtime music video DP, Crash, is certainly long overdue. And it is good-looking: bright and energetic, with camerawork deft rather than showy or acrobatic. Not so booty- or gangstalicious as the trailers might suggest, the plot concerns Rashad (TI/Tip Harris) and his 14-year-old brother Ant (Evan Ross Naess), orphaned and living with their Uncle George (Mykelti Williamson), finding community and focus down at the roller rink. They're briefly distracted by fast money (Big Boi plays the tempter, equipped with fine rims and fierce pit bulls) and girls in tight tops. Less than thrilled with cleaning offices alongside his uncle and friends, Rashad also takes responsibility for Ant. When aspiring comic book artist Rashad meets fabulous New-New (Lauren London), the movie takes another turn, as he's inclined to commit even as he's also unaware that she has a secret (having to do with her formidable father). Amid the conventions (crises involving guns, skates and college applications), the movie raises thoughtful questions about identity, loyalty and ambition.—

Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Awesome; I fuckin' shot that!
Handing 50 fans Hi8 cameras and telling them to "just keep shooting," The Beastie Boys must have conceived this split-screen document of their Oct. 9, 2004 show at Madison Square Garden as the ultimate fan souvenir. Surely no aficionado of the Beasties' willfully rambunctious hip-hop could begrudge the almost universally shitty footage that came back from the cleaners (mercifully supplemented by a few higher-def sources). Behind-the-camera voices can often be heard reminding people that "this is for the DVD," but on the big screen, the Lego-like quality of the source material leaves way too much to be desired. There's nothing lacking in the Beasties' performance, although a three-song instrumental set in the middle of the show sucks all the energy out of the room, but the increasing use of retro editing tricks to spice up the footage in the movie's second half (courtesy of director Nathaniel Hornblower, better known as Beastie Adam Yauch) reeks of desperation. As a DVD, it makes a great CD.

--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

Basic Instinct 2
You never thought you'd miss Joe Eszterhas. But this unawaited sequel is so desperate to recapture the 1992 film's bizarre pleasures that his script looks positively polished. Once again, novelist Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) seduces a man who thinks he's smarter than she is, following a wacky opening scene that has her masturbating herself with an English footballer's finger while driving her car into the Thames. Enter Dr. Glass (David Morrissey), his mentor Milena (Charlotte Rampling) and grumpy Detective Washburn (David Thewlis), all suspecting Catherine committed murder because she is... "risk addicted." When Glass refuses her initial advances, she declares him poster boy for "the nightmare of shrinkdom: too many questions ... nobody gets laid." (That said, everyone gets laid here: it's BI2!) Once again, bodies pile up, Catherine pouts and purrs, and her explanation (in her novel at film's end) is more interesting than anything you've just seen. Corny, lurid and sensational, the film leaves you wondering why anyone cares if Catherine's guilty or not. "How do you know she's lying?" asks Glass. "Because everything that comes out of her fucking mouth is a lie!" barks Washburn. He is, as they say, slow on the uptake. --C.F. (UA Riverview)

Basic Instinct 2

C.S.A.: THE confederate states of america
See Cindy Fuchs' review .

(AMC Anthony Wayne)

ice age: the meltdown
Another climate change, another trek. This time out, the multiculti family—wooly mammoth Manny (voiced by Ray Romano), sabertooth tiger Diego (Denis Leary) and lispy sloth Sid (John Leguizamo)—are on the move due to global warming. Warned by a sideshow barker turtle (Jay Leno) who predicts a bleak and very immediate future of floods and devastation, they seek a legendary big-bark-boat, large enough to handle hundreds of post-prehistoric creatures. Diego's afraid of water, Sid's trying to keep everyone's spirits up, and oh yes, Manny bears an extra burden, believing he's the last of his kind, until he meets Ellie (Queen Latifah), a pert green-eyed mammoth who thinks she's a possum (she's traveling with her adoptive possum brothers, Seann William Scott and Josh Peck). Between her delusion and Jaws-like predators hunting them from beneath the thawing ice, Sid has his work cut out for him. It doesn't help that the movie fills in its lack of plot by cutting away to Scrat, the acorn-doting critter who keeps cracking ice walls and starting leaks, big eyes bulging and wily-coyote limbs stretching: This bit was cute once, but grows tedious twice and three and four times. The movie shows some loss of friends (Leno's wacky turtle is perversely unaffected by his dead buddy) and some emotional growth, all to get the fam back where it started.

slither
In the opening small-town-establishing montage alone, winking references are made to Videodrome, The Thing, and Basket Case director Frank Henenlotter. But by naming the local high school after Earl Bassett, Fred Ward's character from Tremors, writer/director James Gunn really tips his hand. Slither may be the first film since that 1990 burrowing-creature flick to so ably balance between old-fashioned monster movie and self-mocking comedy. While not as successful with either his laughs or his thrills, Gunn simply plucks the earlier film's tone and adds it to a ready-made stew of genre ingredients. The story, about an alien invader that spawns an army of slugs to transform the townsfolk into hive-mind automatons, allows the film to toggle between body snatchers, slimy rubber monsters, creepy-crawly aliens and zombie attacks at a brisk pace. Gunn thankfully relegates the influence of his apprenticeship at Troma to a shot of Toxic Avenger on TV and a Lloyd Kaufman cameo, and plays the horror relatively straight, leaving the comedy to his hick-town characters. Slither works as a loving Fangoria fantasia set to a bombastic score straight out of an old Universal horror; worth making the trek to your nearest still-standing Drive-In.

--Shaun Brady (AMC Orleans; UA Riverview)

sophie scholl: the final days
Hitler Youth turned resistance fighter, Julia Jentsch's Sophie Scholl is a Joan of Arc for anti-Nazi Germans, who gets her belated sainthood courtesy of director Marc Rothemund and screenwriter Fred Brienersdorfer. Scholl and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) were members of the White Rose, many of whom were post-Stalingard veterans disillusioned by the carnage of the Eastern front. In 1943, the Scholls were caught distributing anti-Hitler leaflets, interrogated, subjected to a perfunctory trial and promptly executed. The previously undisclosed transcripts of this process form much of the movie's script. Based in fact or not, the movie's account is altogether too tidy, especially since Gerald Alexander Held's interrogator, rather than putting the screws to Sophie, seems to be practically on the verge of being swayed by her. Along with Downfall, Sophie Scholl seems to be part of an inadvertent but unmistakable movement to confront the legacy of the Holocaust by denaturing it, fitting it into familiar forms until it's just one more unpleasant episode to be absorbed into the body politic.

--S.A. (Ritz 5; Ritz 16)