James Franco, ever the prolific actor, is easy to find on multiple screens at once fairly often. It’s especially interesting, however, to have just watched him in the memoir-adapted, true crime focused True Story when his most recent vehicle is also based on a memoir, also about a writer, and also involves a high-profile murder case. Whereas he is the suspected murderer in True Story, in Stephen Elliott’s adapted memoir The Adderall Diaries, Franco wears the writer’s shoes. The writer being Elliott, who, deep in a state of writer’s block, takes an interest in the public trial of an accused wife-murderer.

Pamela Romanowsky’s directorial debut has a few of the same old drug-fueled and frenzied elements one comes to expect in melt-down films. The cinematography of Bruce Thierry Cheung maxed out in color, angled sideways, and sometimes slowed down in a pretty, if not unexpected, way. The music of Michael Andrews fits well, pulsing when called for, though maybe not especially stirring at times.

Franco’s Elliott is propelled through life, and his writing career, by a zealous hatred and capitalization on his abusive relationship with his father. The reserves of his grudge-holding run deep. Thus far it’s proven lucrative for him, as his first auto-biographical novel is doing well and he’s gotten an advance from a publisher for his next. Except he can’t seem to write it. He sees the trial of Hans Reiser (Christian Slater) on television and, much to the dismay of his editor (Cynthia Nixon), decides to attempt an entirely different sort of novel. This will be his In Cold Blood, he claims.

At the trial he meets Lana (Amber Heard) and, with one look at his motorcycle, the two begin a relationship steeped in their mutual brokenness, hers involving an abusive step-father. It’s of course when Elliott’s life seems most together that things must coming crashing down. At a reading of his first book, wherein he’s depicted the death of his mother to cancer at an early age and the chain-reaction this had on his relationship with his father and his relationship with drugs, Elliott’s father Neil (Ed Harris) makes an appearance. Bad news is a key part of Elliott’s memoir revolves around the supposed death of his mentally abusive father. When Neil shows up, publicly decrying the lies present in Elliott’s memoir, his entire reputation and career are at stake.

The film’s source material is all about the inaccuracy of memory, the way we select and remember out of context in order to suit our feelings on our pasts. Romanowsky depicts this theme in multiple flashbacks, sometimes tweaking them to be slightly different, to add more context, as Elliott progresses. Elliott’s words also appear on the screen as he types, letting us in on his personal way of mis-remembering. Elliott as the unreliable narrator of his own life is interesting, sure, but, well, unreliable. By his own admittance. It’s hard to hope for his redemption when he doesn’t just push people away, he selfishly tries to drag them down into his dark pity party.

Franco and Harris are on point, while Slater is severely underused, his plot line of very little interest. And, I admit, there’s a certain amount of guilt one has in finding fault with a real person’s attempt to share their own difficult narrative, but somehow blaming mis-remembrance as an excuse for self-destructive behavior reeks of falsity. You can’t play the martyr if the cause never existed. Romanowsky never wins audience trust, and her film gets distracted by the lesser fleshed-out true crime story, something I’m assuming Elliott does better in his book. Added all up, The Adderall Diaries confuses itself somewhat when laying out all its many themes, and despite Franco’s masochistic charm, his protagonist remains lacking in finding his way toward empathy.

Based on the 2009 young adult novel “Undiscovered Gyrl” and directed by the book’s author, Allison Burnett, Ask Me Anything is the brash-but-not-bold tale of a recent high school graduate deferring college to make poor relationship decisions instead. Starring Britt Robertson (Dan in Real Life, the upcoming Tomorrowland) as Katie Kampenfelt, the film begins with Katie’s deferment of college and her high school guidance counselor’s suggestion that she start a blog in order to better work through what she’s actually searching for. The film has the openness of the blogging format (a la MTV’s show Awkward), but its twist ending and unreliable narrative make for a mixed-up and confusing viewing experience with very little takeaway.

Katie starts her anonymous blog explicitly detailing in as nonchalant a way as possible her thoughts on life as they pertain to her. Immediately we discover she has a boyfriend, Rory (Max Carver), but is more concerned with her ongoing tryst with a community college film professor, Dan (Justin Long), who is about 15 years older than her. Her mother (Molly Hagan) has a moustached boyfriend (Andy Buckley), and demonstrates a lack of interest or insight in her daughter’s life. Her father (Robert Patrick) is a sofa-bound alcoholic, whose death she seems always to be preparing for. She gets a great job at a bookstore with a wise boss to guide her (Martin Sheen) and then has to drop the job almost immediately when mom’s cop boyfriend discovers her boss has a sexual assault history. A new job drops into her lap in the form of Paul Spooner (Christian Slater), who needs a nanny to aid his wife (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) with their newborn.

When Dan moves and shrugs off Katie for his age-appropriate girlfriend, she spirals out of control, breaking up with and then dangling her boyfriend for attention. More predictably, she promptly allows a flirtation and then affair to happen between her and Paul. It’s one bad decision after the next and we might be able to feel some iota of sympathy for Katie if her issues weren’t just so obvious and remorseless. Burnett tries to build a deeper connection, throwing a seemingly random, clinically depressed, old high school acquaintance into Katie’s life to ask her the deep questions she won’t ask herself, including those about sexual abuse as a child. Old home footage of her childhood play out on-screen whenever Katie engages in sex in an overt attempt to express her sex use as a form of escape and to feel significant. It’s not especially affective in off-setting the sense of fantasy in this girl’s world. It’s hard to take her seriously or care about her decisions when every adult in her world is given plenty of opportunity to intervene and then doesn’t.

This especially works against the film’s ending, which I won’t spoil, but will say is very much trying to make a point about perspective, voyeurism, and teenagers in the digital age, but only succeeds in leaving us feeling lied to and taken advantage of. I get the point of it, what Burnett was hoping to achieve, but think there might have been a better way to get there other than dumping a ton of emotion into the last 10 minutes.

With such a promising cast, it very much seems that this film should have been able to go further. But here we have a case of too much reliance on emotional connection to the writing, and whereas the novel’s quirky blog style and adorable typos helped teenagers build a rapport with Katie, the film doesn’t feel like a blog, it feels like a look into the life of a person determined to choose wrong and with no desire to have anyone tell them not to.

Burnett has proven he has writing down, having written several screenplays and multiple best-selling novels, but the bond between reader and character is most definitely not the same as the bond between character and viewer. And this attempt at page-to-screen just doesn’t seem to entirely translate.

Ask Me Anything opens in LA and in VOD on Friday Dec. 19th.

You know a Lars Von Trier movie is good when it feels like you’ve just spent two educationally arousing hours in the university for the cinematically gifted. As soon as Von Trier announced that his next movie was going to be called Nymphomaniac, the general murmur from everyone was “there goes Lars again!” When he announced that it will be centred around one woman’s rampant sexual experiences with hundreds of partners and that it will be his longest movie ever, the general consensus was “that crazy Lars just doesn’t stop!” But what no one expected was that Von Trier was on his way to making his most accessible movie to date, while still managing to push envelopes, burn bridges, laugh in the face of etiquette and brandish his middle finger to the foppishness of society’s flimsy facade.

After a prolonged darkness during which nothing but the organic sound of water drops on metal is heard, a bloody woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is revealed to be lying on the cobblestones. In the first of many outbursts of ingenuity, sounds of Rammstein barge in on the soundtrack, as if uninvited, while Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) quietly buys his milk and notices the unconscious woman in the alley. She prefers a cup of tea with milk over an ambulance and the police, so Seligman opens his door to her and agrees to nourish her back to health. An unmistakable kind of magnetism instantly develops between the two and, importantly, with zero hint of sexual tension. Seligman sits transfixed by the bedside to hear Joe’s story and what brought her to this point of apathy and self-loathing.

Joe tells her story in chapter form, and in Vol. 1 we are presented with the first five chapters. Between Seligman’s excitable interruptions, to Joe’s narrative with comments on how her experiences parallel the art of fly-fishing, and the sensational creativity that peppers the flashbacks with delightful visuals, it’s clear that these are some of the most inspired chapters from the Lars Von Trier library. Not only is Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 refreshingly funny in so many moments but thanks to the playful structure, the intellectual dialogue and the fascinating personalities from Joe’s past (not to mention Joe and Seligman themselves) the picture is also incredibly compelling. The performances from Gainsbourg and Skarsgard are the anchors of a ship full of talent; Stacy Martin who makes her feature film debut as the Young Joe, a pleasantly surprising Shia LeBouf and the greatest Uma Thurman outside of a Tarantino movie you’ll likely ever see. Those are just the standouts, but Nymphomaniac is such an accomplished film that the only truly sore thumb is Christian Slater, who doesn’t quite reach the believable levels all his other colleagues do.

Naturally, the question salivating on everyone’s tongue concerns sex, and Von Trier wouldn’t want it any other way. Nymphomaniac has a “hardcore” and a “softcore” version, with the obvious intention being that the hardcore cut is the definitive director’s version. Unfortunately, the society that Von Trier so dearly loves to poke and provoke simply cannot handle a five hour hardcore Von Trier movie called Nymphomaniac. As such, the film was split into two volumes and the Vol. 1 that’s currently available on VOD across North America is the softcore version running just under 2 hours. Those not lucky enough to live in Denmark (the only country that got the chance to see the full frontal five-hour version) will most likely have to wait until the inevitable DVD/Blu Ray release to see the film as it was intended. The good news is that the softcore version is still a brilliant piece of modern cinema that has zero tasteless sex scenes.

What makes Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 the best film of the year so far (and on its way to loads of year-end top ten lists if Vol. 2 is this good, mine included,) is that it’s a fusion of everything that’s makes us love cinema. It’s intellectual without being pretentious, for the themes, motifs and messages it stimulates don’t suffer from delusions of grandeur. They really are that grand. Its invigorating entertainment is like a rare aphrodisiac you’ve only had in your dreams, making it almost impossible to turn away from the screen at any moment. It employs the means of cinema to the sophisticated degrees which erect the medium to the wonderful art-form that it is. And it dares to enter places rarely visited by others in order to present a psychologically perturbing tale about the most taboo of human conditioning. In other words, if Vol. 2 is equally as impressive as Vol. 1, Lars Von Trier has surpassed himself and created a masterpiece.

If there is one thing Lars von Trier does extremely well it is creating controversy. In 2011 the Danish filmmaker was deemed “persona non grata”, which is a subtle way of saying ‘you’re not fucking welcome here’ at the Cannes Film Festival after making some Nazi remarks. Continuing that trend of controversial moves, von Trier has just released a series of 14 character posters for his upcoming film Nymphomaniac. His new film follows a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac named Joe (played Charlotte Gainsbourg) who recounts her erotic experiences to the man who saved her life. Given the subject matter and who is doing the film, what better way to promote Nymphomaniac than having posters of all of the characters reaching climax in the nude?

Below are all 14 character posters for Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac

He Was A Quiet Man contains some fairly well-known actors; Christian Slater, Elisha Cuthbert and William H. Macy, however, there is a good chance you have never heard of it. This likely is not due to low budget as much as it has to do with the poor first half the film and weak storyline. Although this film may not be a gem to most, it still maybe worth a watch as it does pick up about mid-way through.

As the title suggests, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater) plays a quiet man who is an introvert in every sense of the word. He is a loner who works at an unrewarding job where he despises nearly everyone who works with him. He boss humiliates and takes advantage of him. Maconel brings a gun with him to work with the intention of shooting his co-workers, although never follows through with it. One day a colleague has a breakdown and does what he has always wanted to do, shoots a few colleagues. Thanks to him being armed himself he takes out the shooter in what looks like an ultimate display of courage and honor.

Everyone now considers him a hero in the community and in the work place. His boss promotes him to the VP of Creative Thinking, replacing a victim of the shooting, Vanessa. Vanessa is quite possibly the only employee that he liked. She is now a quadriplegic from a bullet to the spine. Maconel visits her in the hospital and she asks him to assist her in committing suicide as she feels she has no reason to live anymore. Deep down he struggles with fulfilling that request or to care for her.

Although, they do touch on it a little bit, I couldn’t help but wonder why more people didn’t question the fact he had a gun to begin with. I can understand at first being perhaps overshadowed by the heroism but I would think it would be something not to overlook. That bothered me a little.

It seems to me that He Was A Quiet Man was nearly two separate films, the first half and the second half. I’m not even talking about the storyline either, I mean in terms of quality of the film itself. The first half starts out pretty rough with continuity errors and awkward acting. Thankfully, the film does pick up and gets on the right track later.

An impressive feat that the film was actually shot in just 21 days but I feel like it was better off as a short-story rather than a full length feature. The visual graphics at times were pretty impressive but in others were a little too amateurish. Some un-needed graphics were in there too. Specifically, when he is sitting around a fire, the fire was fake rather than using a real one. Also the airplanes that flew over were CGI and looked decent but for how close they were to them, you would think there would be a little more wind produced from them.

Christian Slater played Bob Maconel very well and by the end you see a transformation in character. His paranoia and madness was believable. It was hard to tell in the beginning if he was going to be able to pull off this character or not, I think he succeeded.

The cinematography in He Was A Quiet Man was impressive enough to where I think it should have been up for more awards. It did win Best Feature Cinematography at the Newport Beach Film Festival but was not even nominated at Sundance, Independent Spirit, or Cannes. Through unique camera angles and usage it was able to convey the mood of the film. Using a fixed fisheye camera on Maconel as he walks through the office gives you a paranoid and claustrophobic feel.

If you are one to turn off films half-way through if it is not to your liking, you may find yourself doing so. Fortunately, I do not fall into that category, although there has been plenty of times I have wanted to before. I say fortunately because all is not lost and there are some quality moments in there.