TAKE SHELTER Review (3-1/2 out of 5 stars)

The wonderfully unique and beautifully shot TAKE SHELTER features performances by two gifted actors and images that will stay with you well beyond the theater. It's not easy to watch – the main character, Curtis (Michael Shannon) wakes gasping from nightmares of apocalyptic scenarios, people scrabbling for his daughter and leviathan-sized storms, and his life and relationships spiral from the envy of others to what may be the undiagnosed beginnings of schizophrenia. Indeed, the movie teeters on the brink of madness or annihilation or both, framed by a foreboding score full of weird, discordant notes, Curtis's agitation and spaced-out distraction, news of a chemical spill nearby and visions of birds falling from the sky, levitating furniture and furious twisters materializing on the horizon.

Working-class Curtis LaForche has a beautiful, loving wife Samantha (the incredible Jessica Chastain) and a six year-old, deaf daughter Hannah. His horrifying dreams seem to carry over into his waking life as he shudders at nonexistent thunderclaps or experiences excruciating pain from a dog bite that never actually happened. All these events convince him that doom is nigh. So he prepares for it, but doesn’t inform Samantha, first buying a shipping crate and then burying it in the back yard while she's selling hand-stitched wares at a local fair. He sinks every last bit of the already struggling family's savings into the underground shelter, and then takes a risky home loan to continue to finance it. He stocks up on canned food and gas masks. He installs electricity and plumbing and spends his nights there, eyes shut tight in thought. Hell does eventually break loose – not with the weather but those close to him, and most of all the woman he loves, in pain over being misled then ignored.

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50/50 Review (4-1/2 out of 5 stars)

50/50 successfully navigates a very tricky line between pathos and humor – and nails them both in the process. Joseph Gordon-Levitt knocks it out of the park as the main character Adam (possible Oscar nod, I'm thinking), Seth Rogen is wonderful as his loudmouth pal and Anna Kendrick, Anjelica Huston and Bryce Dallas Howard each rock in their respective roles. The film smacks of recognizable realness (especially when compared to another recent hipster-with-a-tumor show, Gus Van Sant's RESTLESS – which this leaves in the dust). It offers a new and refreshing take on cancer diagnosis and the daily, often banal squirms and struggles to follow, in a way that’s neither condescending nor sentimental nor cutesy. And the humor is delightful. It's even got a fantastic soundtrack. This "cancer comedy" – an idea that sounds so dreadful on its face – really wowed me in the end.

It's inspired by a true story, and written by the real-life Adam – Will Reiser – who's actually buddies with Rogen, meaning the latter reenacted his experiences. Adam is a writer for Seattle Public Radio, a cute, self-effacing, mellow guy thrown for a loop when the source of his back pain is revealed to be a tumor growing along his spine -- he thought it was due to his positions during sex. "I don’t smoke. I don’t drink… I recycle?" Alas, his cancer’s genetic.

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PUNCTURE Review (2 out of 5 stars)

PUNCTURE provides a great service in documenting the corruption surrounding an innocuous-sounding but important medical device: the safety syringe. Yet in the hands of a first-time screenwriter and co-directors, this cinematic retelling of the late Houston attorney Mike Weiss's (Chris Evans) gripping, uphill battle with insidious corporate forces in the late 90's falls into such an instantly recognizable formula that much of its entertainment potential is lost.

It begins with Vicky (Vinessa Shaw), a pretty, young local ER nurse, who accidentally sticks herself with a needle while attempting to sedate a shaking PCP addict. Then flash forward three years to the shirtless, rippled CAPTAIN AMERICA physique of Chris Evans as hotshot personal injury lawyer Weiss, snorting coke and speed-talking through a case in his hotel room.

And… I'm already bored. (And tempted to call their number, 1-888-GOT-PAIN.) It's already crystal clear that Evans is the anti-hero meant to grow on me (didn't happen) as he slugs away for justice. Tony Goldwyn's CONVICTION (2010) comes to mind, another gripping, true underdog story (Hilary Swank vs. small-town police corruption) and also sadly reduced to mediocrity. But similar to ERIN BROCKOVICH or THE CONSTANT GARDENER, PUNCTURE faces off with nasty, behemoth corporations – yet feels like a retread from the get-go.

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RESTLESS Review (2 out of 5 stars)

This prettily shot, sweetly performed film about dying young suffers due to a simplistic script, despite the proven talents of two-time Oscar-nominated director (for MILK and GOOD WILL HUNTING) Gus Van Sant.

Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper) is a handsome young teen heartthrob type with tussled blonde locks and self-consciously hip, vintage outfits (i.e. poseur). While brooding in a double-breasted black suit, outsized collar and pocket watch at a funeral, he's busted by unfazed hipster mourner Annabel Cotton (Mia Wasikowska) for crashing the proceedings. She too is a pretty, skinny blonde delighting in duds from decades past, her pixie do reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn or another Mia, in ROSEMARY'S BABY. And so they begin crashing funerals together, which we're meant to find cute but to me felt insensitive and mocking of people's pain; that they're young and foolish and it's their own coping mechanism for personal tragedies is no excuse.

These two eccentric model-types engage in a sweet, first-time romance over the course of the coming autumn, each finding solace in the other's similarly close acquaintanceship with mortality, between his coma following a car accident that killed his parents and Annabel's mere three months left to live due to a brain tumor.

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DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME Review (1-1/2 out of 5 stars)

This Chinese murder mystery (with a title that sounds like a Scooby Doo episode — ruh roh) and wannabe epic positively bursts at the seams with nonstop hand-to-hand combat, often on a phony-looking stage set or framed by inexpert CGI. Unlike its lineup of far superior kung fu predecessors over the past decade-plus — CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON; HERO; HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, even May's TRUE LEGEND — DEE’s lack of compelling characters and abstruse storyline had me primarily wondering when it would end. The title character is based on legendary Tang Dynasty official Di Renjie, a real-life judge known in every Chinese household today and made famous in the West in the mid-twentieth century by Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels.

The fictional story's setup informs us that it's 689 in the city of Luoyang. A series of bizarre deaths — in which victims spontaneously burst into flame — prompts the wise Empress Wu (Carina Lau) to release her political prisoner, Detective Dee (Andy Lau, of 2004’s HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS), with the proviso that he crack the case. The victims are all involved in the ongoing construction of a skyscraper-sized Buddhist statue, the official unveiling of which is timed to coincide with Wu's inauguration as China’s first female emperor. She assigns her trusted bodyguard Jing (Li Bingbing) to keep an eye on the p.i.

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OUR IDIOT BROTHER (1-1/2 out of 5 stars)

The spontaneity of the moments captured by OUR IDIOT BROTHER's outtakes, shown during the closing credits, in no way resemble the insipid and even insulting blather of the film itself. IDIOT is another ham-handed attempt to throw together a lengthy list of famous faces (I'm looking at you, VALENTINE'S DAY) in a bland cavalcade of cinematic clichés and flat characterizations. It's yet another corporatized, profit-maximized "comedy" showing neither ingenuity nor insight and barely qualifying as entertainment.

Paul Rudd — an actor whose innately clever sense of humor always emerges in unscripted interviews but is all too rarely displayed in his abysmal choice of films — plays Ned, a sunny, oblivious hippie type who naively asks a stranger on the subway to hold his cash. After serving an eight-month jail sentence for selling dope to an undercover cop (in a clear case of entrapment, if you ask me), he couch surfs with each of three sisters while working, not terribly hard, to get his life back on track.

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FRIGHT NIGHT (2 out of 5 stars)

This predictable, paint-by-the-numbers remake of the scarier '85 cult classic is chock full of moments that may have proven suspenseful or hilarious had they not been so sloppily timed. Colin Farrell, Anton Yelchin and David Tennant's characters are all dreadfully dull, the dialogue is trite and multiple details go unexplained in a script not too different from the original (with a few modern touches such as iPhone apps and Real Housewives), yet still somehow worse.

Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) is a semi-geeky teen in puce-colored sneakers living in a remote desert McNeighborhood bordering Las Vegas. Imogen Poots plays his gorgeous girlfriend Amy, and unlike most nerd-and-a-hot-girl film items, they're believable together. His spurned childhood friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) rightly suspects a vampire behind the growing number of classmates' disappearances, a disparity not necessarily easy to gauge given the many strippers and other nocturnal entertainers who hide away in the daytime.

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