In Louder Than Bombs, Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was a world-renowned war photographer who risked her life in pursuit of an endless string of perfect shots. She didn’t always come out of the war zone unscathed, but she always came out. It’s ironic, then, that despite surviving countless dangers around the globe, she wound up the lone fatality of a single-vehicle car crash in a cozy New York suburb. Three years later, a retrospective of her work is being organized, and her widowed husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) has been tapped to display his wife’s photographs; he enlists the help of his grown son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg).

Complicating matters is a New York Times piece set to be written in advance of the showing by Isabelle’s former colleague, war reporter Richard Weissman (David Strathairn). The piece will reveal that Isabelle’s car accident was no accident at all, but rather a suicide, something Gene is fully aware of. Not only would Gene prefer to keep a more positive memory of his wife at the forefront of the celebration in her honor, he would rather his younger son, the teenaged Conrad (Devin Druid), not know the truth about his mother’s death.

Louder Than Bombs, the first English-speaking film from Norwegian director and co-writer Joachim Trier, sets itself up to be a significant melodrama. All of the pieces are there and ready to be played.

There is Gene, the widower and father of two who, thanks to the retrospective being organized in his wife’s memory, must do more than face life’s small daily reminders of a love lost—he must immerse himself in the life she lived. He must look at every photograph she took and know that he’s seeing her life, a life she spent far away from her family, through her eyes. This takes its toll on Gene, which in turn takes its toll on how he handles his relationship with Hannah (Amy Ryan), his coworker and lover.

Next is Jonah, who is a lot like the old man and not just because they’re both teachers. When Jonah is faced with an event of overwhelming emotional magnitude, he also makes poor choices. In this instance, his wife Amy (Megan Ketch) has just given birth to their first child, but when the frazzled new dad scours the hospital halls for a vending machine, he runs into an old girlfriend. Their hug lasts almost as long as the lies he tells.

Conrad, whose life is challenging enough as a teenager without a mother, has all but disconnected himself emotionally from his father, opting to live in a world of loud music and online gaming. He’s awkward and introverted and everything one would expect from a 14-year-old in his situation, but he’s also undaunted in his secret love for his classmate crush, the cheerleader Melanie (Ruby Jerins).

Even Richard, the war correspondent, brings more to the story than just the byline on the revelatory posthumous profile of the revered photographer, wife, and mother.

Again, all of the melodramatic pieces are there, but much to his credit, Trier never plays those pieces the way most would expect them to be played. Instead, the filmmaker lets his characters progress through subtle developments that require the viewer to stay keenly attuned to the little things they say and do, rather than waiting for the next bombastic outburst to occur. A lot of that character progression is negative, but it’s genuine, and it’s fueled by the fatal flaws the trio shares—a wicked combination of denial, deceit, and dreadful communication. Watching them fool themselves and others isn’t like watching people spiral out of control and perish in a fiery crash. It’s more like watching people slowly dissolve. Only Conrad, despite (or perhaps because of) his youth, offers a glimmer of hope with his unflappable crush on Melanie and his refusal to be anything but the person he is. Husbands, fathers, and sons make poor choices that carry with them the potential for irrevocable consequences, and yet just like in real life, they can’t stop making those choices; it’s in their nature.

And what about Isabelle? She appears in flashback and in dreams, but she is more mystery than matriarch. Yes, she was a loving mother and wife, as well as a successful war photographer, but beyond that (and beyond the suggestion of depression), little else is known about her. This is a terrific move by Trier, because it maintains a sense of wonder about who this woman was and why she meant what she meant to the men in her life. To explain more would have done a disservice to the character. In the role, Huppert is mesmerizing, and Trier knows how to capture the best of her, including a long, lingering, dialogue-free close-up of Huppert as she stares down the camera, leaving you wondering what she is thinking about and hoping you’ll have the chance to learn.

The rest of the cast is excellent, anchored by an amazing performance by relative newcomer Druid as Conrad Reed. Byrne and Eisenberg may have (combined) decades more experience than Druid, but they need him to be great more than he needs them to be great, and he delivers.

Louder Than Bombs is a wrenching tale about the criticality of communication and the collateral damage of deceit in the wake of significant loss. The film has barely a false note in it, hardly a moment when a character says or does something that demands to be challenged, and only the ending left me disappointed as ringing somewhat hollow. Still, despite the questionable destination of the tale, the journey is completely worth it.

There’s an inherent paradox when it comes to family: despite spending more time with your parents/siblings than anyone else, you’ll never get to truly know who these people are. Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs, his follow-up to the devastating masterpiece Oslo August 31, explores the collisions between the individual, subjective experiences of family members, along with the barriers of communication that can spring up between the people closest to you. The film starts approximately three years after the death of Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert), a war photographer who took her own life by crashing her car. Isabelle’s husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) and eldest son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) know the truth surrounding her death, but her 15-year-old son Conrad (Devin Druid) still thinks it was an accident. Now, with Isabelle’s former colleague (David Strathairn) planning to reveal the truth about her death in a piece he’s planning for the New York Times, Gene tries to tell the truth to Conrad while attempting to repair the relationship between his two sons.

Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt continue to show off their strength as filmmakers when it comes to experimenting with form to accurately portrayal the thought process. The film frequently swaps perspectives between Gene, Jonah and Conrad, while also hopping back and forth through time to when Isabelle was alive. Through this, it’s apparent that each man has a different idea of who Isabelle was, and the way these differing interpretations intersect is when Louder than Bombs hits a level of specificity that creates some great drama. But when Trier decides to break away and show the stories of each individual—Gene’s secret relationship with one of Conrad’s teachers (Amy Ryan), Jonah’s fear of becoming a father, and Conrad’s crush on a cheerleader that’s out of his league—it falls into clichés that wind up making the film get lost within itself. It’s disappointing because, when Trier’s methods do work, he creates some heart-wrenching and sublime moments (an extreme close-up of a character staring the camera down will haunt viewers for days). If Trier had more moments like these, Louder than Bombs could have been the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.

A day ahead of its Jan. 28th Sundance Film Festival premiere, the comedy Don Verdean is giving the internet a sneak peek at the upcoming movie. Deadline debuted the Don Verdean clip, featuring two of the film’s stars Sam Rockwell and Danny McBride, as well as Leslie Bibb and Amy Ryan. Don Verdean is the new comedy written & directed Jared Hess and co-written by his brother Jerusha (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre), also boasting the likes of Will Forte and Jemaine Clement in the cast.

Don Verdean is Sam Rockwell, a self-proclaimed biblical archaeologist that gets hired by a local pastor to uncover sacred relics to promote the Christian faith. When Don’s effort become futile, he must launch a comedic cover-up. Don Verdean already sold to Lionsgate ahead of the festival, one of the first entries into Sundance to sell this year.

Today might not quite be Danny McBride’s, “lucky day,” but tomorrow he and everyone behind the new Sundance comedy Don Verdean will premiere their film in Park City, Utah. Watch the Don Verdean movie clip below:

Ominous, awash in blue, and unexpectedly epic-looking, Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s upcoming Birdman has an heir of something special from the looks of its first trailer. With a star-studded cast lead by Michael Keaton, Birdman follows a washed-up actor (Keaton), known for playing the titular superhero, who launches an attempted career comeback with a Broadway play. From the looks of this trailer Keaton butts heads with his Broadway co-star (played by Edward Norton) and causes a very concerned-looking Zach Galifianakis stress. Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, and Amy Ryan also star in the film shot by recent Oscar-winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who is responsible for the beautifully orchestrated long-takes on display in the trailer. Lubezki fans will remember his gripping long-take cinematography from 2006’s Children of Men.

Birdman is set for its domestic release on October 17th of this year, watch Michael Keaton walk through Times Square in his tightey whiteys set to a remix of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” in the trailer below:

Watch trailer for Birdman

The recent revival of bombastic ’80s action flicks spearheaded by Sylvester Stallone hasn’t been as unwelcome as I thought it would be pre-Expendables. That movie, though unremarkable, is a lot of fun because it’s so honest about what it is–a big, loud, unabashed testosterone parade for people who like watching things go boom. Escape Plan, the newest Stallone vehicle (the fact that the man can still sell tickets on name recognition alone is amazing), directed by Mikael Hafstrom, isn’t fun at all, and exchanges fun, blood-pumping, excessive action for a lame prison-breakout puzzle that we have to watch two oafs (masquerading as geniuses) attempt to solve. Dumb fun is fun, at least. Dumb is just dumb.

Stallone plays Ray Breslin, a man who can break out of any prison on earth (he literally wrote the book on prison security). He’s a voluntary jailbird, though; for his (bizarre) job, he’s placed in prisons to break out of them, illuminating for the wardens where the holes in their security systems are. He’s basically a bad-ass security consultant. When an especially high-paying prison-break gig comes along, Breslin embraces the challenge, even though he and his team (Curtis Jackson and Amy Ryan, both virtually inconsequential) are given dangerously little information. Predictably, the mission isn’t what it seems to be–Breslin finds himself in a prison built of technology so advanced it looks alien and, to his surprise, he’s legitimately locked-up.

His escape hinges on a partnership he forms with a fellow prisoner, Emil Rottmayer, played by–wait for it–the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger (he told you he’d be back). From here, we watch the two lugs try every trick in the prison-movie handbook (staged, diversionary fistfights, sharp object hand-offs) to bust out of the maximum-security hellhole, and their faux-intellectual scheming is torturous to sit through. Are we really meant to believe that these inarticulate muscle-heads are calculating masterminds? Don’t get me wrong–I’m almost certain that, in real life, Sly and Arnie are smarter than the average man. But seriously, veiny-armed Sly builds a sextant (an instrument of celestial navigation) out of a pen, a piece of paper, and a pair of glasses. It’s not just the absurdity that’s painful; it’s the fact that I’d much rather watch these guys hit, shoot, and maim things! About two thirds of the film seems to be spent with the dynamic duo plotting out their boring little strategies. We’ve waited decades–DECADES–for these knuckleheads to do a team-up movie, and you give us an hour of hallway walk-and-talks? For shame!

The film isn’t without its high points, though. Whenever Stallone and Schwarzenegger do get to crack some skulls, it’s a thrill that’s half driven by decent filmmaking (Hafstrom’s a solid action director), half by Rambo-nator mash-up nostalgia. Though the sloppy script is working against him, Schwarzenegger puts on an unexpectedly entertaining performance. In one of the only good dialog-driven scenes in the film, he’s allowed to speak German, which astonishingly reveals that when you take away the language barrier, Arnie loosens up and is actually a great performer (gasp!). Jim Caviezel has a lot of fun playing the intellectually dominating, soft-spoken warden. Watching him interact with Schwarzenegger is particularly enjoyable. The shoot-em-up finale is a lot of fun to watch, but it deserves more movie real-estate than it gets. The final set piece is pretty epic, but it ends up feeling anticlimactic after the trudge that is the film’s chubby middle section.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger are occasionally funny together–Arnie’s “You hit like a vegetarian!” line is wonderfully low-brow and hilarious–but they’re best as a pair of ass-kickers, and Hafstrom overestimates the entertainment value of watching them yap. Easily, the film’s biggest thrill comes near its conclusion, in a slow-mo closeup of Schwarzenegger’s eyes as his head turns toward the camera, ready to unleash hell on the bad guys with the giant machine gun he’s just ripped off of a helicopter turret (like only a former body-builder could). If only we’d gotten more of this dude-tacular ridiculousness, this action star team-up-for-the-ages could have been all we ever dreamt it could be. Instead, we get Stallone explaining to Schwarzenegger that toilet water swirls counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere. Wake me up when the guns go bang.

Win Win is an indie drama from Thomas McCarthy whose third film proves he knows how to write genuine human behavior. Although there are some similarities between his other films, Win Win should appeal to a wider audience with this simple but sweet film about family.

Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) is a high school wrestling coach for a losing team. He is a lawyer with his own practice but work is slow. He is so stressed out because of the lack of work he sometimes collapses while jogging. Needless to say, things are not looking up for him.

Looking to seize an opportunity at work he becomes a legal guardian for one of his clients named Leo (Burt Young), who has dementia in order to gain some extra income. While looking after Leo’s house, Mike finds Leo’s 16 year old grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), who randomly shows up at the home. He has never met his grandfather before but since he no longer gets along with his mother he had no choice but to flee.

Turns out that Kyle’s mother Cindy (Melanie Lynskey) is in drug rehab and never really provided a stable household for Kyle to live in. That might explain why Kyle is a foul mouthed chain-smoker at the age of 16. Although Kyle may seem like a punk on the outside, deep down he is a gentle soul.

Kyle comes to wrestling practice with Mike and asks if he could join. Mike asks him if he has ever wrestled before and Kyle causally says, “Yeah.” It turns out Kyle is fantastic at wrestling and is easily the best one on the team. Mike knows that Kyle is just what the team needs in order to turn their losing season around.

At his first match on the team, Kyle dominates his opponent with ease. His teammates are thankful to have the newcomer bring such success to the team. Kyle also bonds quickly with Mike’s family and soon becomes part of it. Even Mike’s wife, who was a little reluctant with the idea of Kyle at first, now thinks of Kyle as her own son.

With each match the team seems to be getting better and better now that they have Kyle. For the first time in a long time, things are looking up for Mike. Extra income from Leo and Kyle is vastly improving the wresting team’s record. Kyle is very happy to be wrestling again and has even quit smoking. Everything is swell until Kyle’s mother Cindy comes for him.

Cindy claims she came back to take care of Leo but made it obvious she just came back for his money. When she threatens to take Mike to court over it he comes up with a deal, saying he will take care of Leo for free and send her the monthly commission as long as she leaves Kyle alone. But Cindy now wants her son too, even if it is against his will.

Paul Giamatti is fantastic as always, playing the likeable but slightly flawed character of Mike, a family man who seizes opportunities when they arise. Amy Ryan is not on the screen as much as I would have liked, playing the role of a mother not at all like the one in Gone Baby Gone. This time she is a loving mother that thinks the world of her family and does it very convincingly.

Alex Shaffer was very natural playing the role of Kyle but after doing some research it is easy to understand why. At the age 17 Alex Shaffer won the New Jersey State Wrestling Championship in real life. He felt right at home when he shot for the legs and hop around the wrestling mat. There are only a couple of dialog scenes where you could tell he had never acted before.

Thomas McCarthy has used actor Bobby Cannavale in two of his films and in both he plays nearly the same character. The characters he plays are so socially desperate to be a part of someone else’s life because they are bored with their own. In The Station Agent that character was Joe, in Win Win it is Terry. Terry comes to Mike’s wrestling practice because he just wants to see this Kyle kid wrestle and perhaps trying to fill a void in his life from a recent divorce he had. He is excellent in both films providing comedic relief at the same time being the third wheel.

Win Win is the kind of film that will not blow you away, but is still enjoyable. It is well-acted and well told; even though the story is ultimately too safe which results in a warm family film that is worth watching once. However, compared to McCarthy’s The Station Agent this film was a bit of a let down.

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in his directorial debut in Jack Goes Boating, a film that is adapted from his acclaimed Off Broadway play. Considering Philip Seymour Hoffman is one my favorite present-time actors, keeping my expectations for the film in-check was troublesome if not impossible. Still, I try to give an unbiased review of this indie film, which I confess was not easy.

Jack Goes Boating is about a single shy limousine driver in his 40s named Jack (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). His best friend happens to be his co-worker named Clyde (John Ortiz). Clyde’s wife Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) works in a funeral home with Connie (Amy Ryan). Connie is also single and shy so Clyde and Lucy decide to play matchmaker as they both seem perfect for each other. They invite Jack and Connie over for a dinner date.

Going boating is somehow brought up in conversation and Jack, without realizing, makes the mistake of setting a date with Connie in summer, after they had just met. You can tell he is uncomfortable around women. Good thing for Jack is she is not fazed by the six month future date, but the bad thing for Jack is he does not know how to swim.

A similar mistake is made on their next encounter which takes place in a hospital. The two both agree that waiting for summer to come is going to be a while so Jack comes up with the idea of cooking her dinner. The suggestion makes Connie very happy and confesses that no one has ever cooked for her before. Jack realizes that he not only has a place to cook, living in the basement with his Uncle, but he does not even know how to cook. Jack continually puts himself these situations but seemingly not on purpose but rather out of sheer awkwardness Jack possess as a conversationalist.

Luckily for him, Clyde is there for him. Clyde bails Jack out by teaching him how to swim and letting him borrow his kitchen to cook in. And if that was not enough, Clyde even knows someone that can teach him how to cook. Needless to say, Clyde is a friend you can count on.

However, Jack gets the opportunity to return the favor to him when Clyde tells him that his wife has been cheating on him. Jack is no longer the one in need of help. Although, Jack admittedly states that he cannot relate to the situation, he still helps Clyde by allowing him to vent his problem.

As Clyde’s relationship with his wife is on a downward spiral, Jack’s is just starting to blossom. We see more than them just changing roles with their relationships, we see a transformation among their lives. The ending is up for interpretation but I think Clyde is ultimately the one looking up to Jack and perhaps be the one that dependents on him more now, instead of the other way around.

The scenes at times are almost painfully awkward but it fits because both Jack and Connie are awkward too. For an example, when Jack visits Connie when she is in the hospital, he brings his tape player and asks her to listen to a song. We are left to just watch her as she is listening to the music with headphones on and they say nothing. Realistic? Yes. But a little strange as a viewer, definitely.

The characters were not given much background at first, instead the film jumps right in and you learn about them along the way. Which was a little off-putting at first but as you learn more about the character you can then start to connect with each of them. Eventually, we can empathize with the characters about what they are going through.

Jack Goes Boating is based on the play by Bob Glaudini and three out of the four main characters were in that play, so playing the role for them should have felt comfortable. One would have thought Amy Adams would have been part of that play as she easily fits right in but she was the new addition. I would have liked to have seen her up for Best Supporting Female for the Independent Spirit Awards this year instead of Daphne Rubin-Vega who played Lucy.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of the most under-rated, or at least forgotten about, current actor on screen. His acting performances are nothing short of brilliant and here is no exception. He seems nature playing the shy and vulnerable character which is one we have seen from him on a few films.

The soundtrack on Jack Goes Boating was both pleasant and fitting. It contains a few indie and folk bands which include a song from DeVotchKa, Cat Power and Goldfrapp as well as multiple songs by Fleet Foxes.

I had higher hopes for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut but unfortunately the outcome was slightly above average. The dialog seemed out of place in a few spots and my guess is some scenes in general just worked better on stage. The transition from stage to screen is not an easy task as this film proves.