2011
Directed by: Bill Condon.
Written by: Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer.
With: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson, Dakota Fanning, Ashley Greene, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Anna Kendrick, Jackson Rathbone and Peter Facinelli.

The end of the Romeo and Juliet of young-adult vampire stories begins with part one of Breaking Dawn (like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it's been divided into two movies), which will delight TwiHards with its relentless fidelity to the novel. Non-fans are likely to find it both silly and rather dull.

Things get off to a promising start: As rain pours down in horror-movie sheets, teenage werewolf Jacob Black (Lautner) explodes from his family's modest home, hurls a scrap of paper to the ground and gallops off into the gloom in wolf form… though not before ripping off his shirt to expose the six-pack over which tween girls of all ages have been swooning since 2009's New Moon. The inciting document, damp with the tears of grey Pacific Northwest skies, is, unsurprisingly, an invitation to the wedding of morose teen drama-queen Bella Swan (Stewart), whom Jacob loved and lost, to emo vampire Edward Cullen (Pattinson).

Let's give credit where it's due: Oscar-winning filmmaker Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters) strikes a fine line between giving fiercely loyal TwiHards exactly what they want and poking sly fun at the movies' Tiger Beat sensibilities, which offset the primordial power of forbidden lust by draping it in skittish teenage restraint. Unfortunately, Breaking Dawn quickly succumbs to the kind of mopey seriousness that makes high-schoolers' diaries such tedious reading. Bella dreads the thought of walking down the floral draped woodland-grove aisle conceived by her stylish, soon-to-be sister-in-law Alice (Greene) in sky-high heels and a bias-draped satin dress that golden-age Hollywood costumier to the stars Edith Head would have approved. (Oh, that deeply plunging back, with its fetishistic row of tiny buttons and the demure mesh panel that guards against inadvertent back cleavage!) It's not that she has cold feet, mind you, just that she's more a jeans-and-sneakers girl… though there was that bad dream in which she and her pallid groom were standing on a pile of bloody corpses.

Edward, for his part, feels compelled to bare his darkest secrets to Bella before they tie the knot. He wasn't always the "just say no" to bloodlust exemplar she knows and loves, he confides. Once upon a time, when he was young and rebellious, Edward was very, very bad, slaking his desire for blood like any other undead fiend. Well, not quite like any undead fiend… in fact, he was the Dexter Morgan of vampires, killing only rapists and murderers. But he still feels bad about the days before he switched to an animal-blood diet, which is what passes for vegetarian in vampire circles. "You probably saved more lives than you took," simpers Bella with the exquisitely shallow logic of the young and besotted, and that's all there is to say about that.

In any event, the wedding goes off flawlessly, except for bit of inevitable vampire-werewolf tension, and the bride and groom jet off to Brazil for their honeymoon. And that's where the trouble starts. Since Bella wants to enjoy being human just a little longer before joining the ranks of the undead (she is, after all, sufficiently young that even her best friend speculates that there must have been a shotgun somewhere in the wedding equation -- why else would an 18 year old get married in this day and age?), poor Edward, whose skimmed-milk complexion seems even greyer in the South American moonlight, must continue to rein his passionate desires for fear of hurting her. (A word to the wise: Refrain from blue-balls jokes within hearing range of true Twilight believers; they don't take kindly to sniggering about the magnificent river of self-sacrificing tears in which Bella and Edward's relationship is drenched.)

Needless to say, the young not-quite-lovers inevitably cave to nature's demands and Bella becomes pregnant with a half-vampire child, an event unprecedented in the supernatural canon that rules the Twilight universe. The best efforts of Edward's principled, compassionate doctor dad (Facinelli) to manage the situation don't add up to much: Bella's pregnancy may well be the death of her, a death she's willing to embrace but that may shatter the fragile treaty between werewolves and vampires.

It goes without saying that this is silly stuff played for maximum solemnity, because that's the Twilight series in a nutshell. You either love it with every fiber of your being or dismiss it as pathetic pap for simpering virgins. But again, like the Harry Potter cycle, the Twilight saga is both self-contained and self-perpetuating. If it plucks your most sensitive nerve, you're in, and if it doesn't, you're doomed to be perpetually on the outside.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Note to lazy students: A failing grade awaits all those who rely on this film to get them through Greek Mythology 101. But as old-school epic entertainment dressed up with state-of-the-art effects—including remarkably natural-looking 3D—Immortals rates an easy A.

1238 BC: Brutal Heraklion King Hyperion (Mickey Rourke) is obsessed with ensuring his place in history and believes his best bet is to find the legendary Bow of Epirus, a mystical weapon that can turn a mere mortal into a one-man army. It can also free the bestial Titans, an ancient race of immortals overthrown and imprisoned beneath Mount Tartarus by the gods of Olympus. Not that it's clear why one would want to do such a thing: The odds that the Titans would submit to being any puny human's dogs of war seem slim. Be that as it may, Hyperion both kidnaps virgin oracle Phaedra ( Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto) and looses his masked army to rape and pillage its way across Greece; if Phaedra's visions don't lead him to the bow, maybe an old-fashioned reign of terror will.

The small cliff-side village where fatherless Theseus (Henry Cavill, the new Superman) lives with his pious mother (Anne Day-Jones) is one of many in the path of Hyperion's troops. Unbeknownst to anyone, himself included, Theseus is no mere peasant in thrall to pipe dreams of heroism: The elderly mentor (John Hurt) who trained him to fight is the god Zeus himself and Theseus is destined for greatness. But he must first endure the consequences of hubris: By humiliating a warrior named Lysander (Joseph Morgan, of the 2009 Ben-Hur miniseries), he brings about the destruction of his village, his mother's death and his own enslavement. But those events also cause his path to intersect with Phaedra's, and with the help of a wily thief (Stephen Dorff) and a loyal monk (Greg Bryk), he embarks on an epic journey to recover the bow and inspire his countrymen to defy Hyperion. The Olympians—who include the young and vital Zeus (Luke Evans), Athena (Isabel Lucas), Aries (Daniel Sharman) and Poseidon (Kellan Lutz, of the Twilight series)—watch from on high and, when it suits them, ignore the fact that they're forbidden to interfere in the affairs of men.

A muscular mash-up of classical mythology, Italian peplums and macho preening, Immortals is deeply indebted to 300, especially in its deliriously bloody battle sequences and fetishistic fascination with lightly clad male flesh. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. The videogame look that dominates the trailers is less obtrusive in the film itself, and the fact that Immortals' leanly muscled gods, who spend much of their time lolling divinely around Olympus in gilded-leather skirts and fabulous headgear, owe a great deal to Bruce of Los Angeles physique photography and James Bidgood's lavishly art-directed Pink Narcissus can be ignored by viewers who'd rather not acknowledge the pervasive homoeroticism (which extends to an 11th-hour vision of the ongoing war in Heaven as one long upskirt shot).

John Hurt's opening and closing voiceover narration appears intended to give the film a certain gravitas and fails. But director Tarsem Singh's visual imagination is truly extraordinary, and Immortals is both as consistently astonishing as his criminally underrated The Fall (2006) and far more engaging than last year's instantly forgettable remake of Clash of the Titans.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Shot in Ghana and Burkino Faso with a largely English-speaking cast, this grim and slyly ambitious zombie movie emphasizes character development over "Can you top this?" gore effects and breakneck pacing, and makes eloquent use of its eerily desolate locations.

West Africa, the near future: Crammed with American and English military personnel, aid workers and civilians, the last plane out of apocalyptic zombie hell crashes into the ocean while making a desperate attempt to reach a small airstrip somewhere in Sierra Leone. The only survivors are a wounded mercenary and American Air Force engineer Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman), who's forced to make the first of an endless series of life-or-death moral decisions within moments of washing ashore.

Murphy just wants to get back to his wife and daughter, and has seen enough to know that the bitten are doomed, the weak are a liability and simple human decency a luxury that can get a man killed in a pitiless landscape where dehydration is as dangerous as the cannibal dead. All he has going for him is that he's armed and knows machines well enough to get a junked car running and might be able to keep it going long enough to reach that airstrip. Nothing stops the living dead in their remorseless search for flesh—not broiling sun, nighttime cold, fatigue or thirst or despair—but they can't out-shamble a motor vehicle.

Meanwhile, army deserter Sergeant David Dembele (Prince David Osei, a star in his native Ghana) has made his way home on foot in hopes of finding his wife and son. But he arrives too late: His village is a blood-streaked ruin and his wife is dead. A dying neighbor holds out a small ray of hope, whispering that Dembele's boy (Gaal Hama) was rescued from the carnage by a northbound military convoy. So Dembele starts walking, his advantage—aside from the fact that he too is armed, and has a machete to fall back on when the bullets run out—being that he knows the terrain and has been negotiating its rigors since he himself was a child.

The two men eventually cross paths and merge their complementary skills with the tacit understanding that if Dembele guides Murphy to the airstrip, Murphy will let him take the car so he can continue searching for his son. But the airstrip is an abandoned ruin and the car dies, so the men continue on foot, trudging through a surreal landscape of red dust, thorny trees, desperate survivors and silent, lurching zombies no less lethal for their shattered bones, clouded eyes and gaping flesh wounds.

Though not as deliriously gory as many contemporary zombie movies, The Dead is also more haunting by virtue of its relentless stillness and the naggingly insistent shadows of a tantalizingly ambiguous subtext that lurk at the edges of its sun-seared frames. Though the U.K.-born Ford Brothers, Howard and Jon, cite George Romero's Dawn of the Dead as a seminal influence, they don't lead with their politics. The endlessly repeated image of a well-fed white man gunning down skeletal black people is a potent one, but no more so than a sleekly uniformed black man turning his gun on ragged civilians. Do the zombies embody the erupting rage of generations of Africans disenfranchised by the legacy of colonialism? Or are they a plague-like Ebola, incubated in Africa and destined to lay waste to rapacious, destructive human parasites of every kind? While some horror fans would no doubt prefer more flesh-ripping, gut-chomping gross-out sequences, others will appreciate The Dead's subtle variations on a well-worn theme.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

This slick "prelude" to John Carpenter's 1982 remake of the classic ’50s monster movie sics an alien shape-shifter on a team of Norwegian scientists based in a remote Antarctic research station. And while they may be savvier than the trapped victims-to-be of earlier incarnations, the new guys get picked off just as predictably.

Ambitious young paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is surprised when the eminent Dr. Sandor Halvorson (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen) invites her to join his Antarctic research team, but he comes recommended by her poutingly handsome pal Adam Goldman (Eric Christian Olsen) and she smells a career-making opportunity in his cryptic references to something remarkable they've discovered buried deep in the pack ice.

Forty-eight hours later, she's at Thule Station (ominously named for the region ancient geographers considered the ends of the civilized Earth), and some 24 hours after that she's fighting for her life: Halvorson's team has uncovered both a bona-fide UFO and an alien that isn't as dead as it looks, despite having been frozen solid for centuries. And its ability to mimic other living things—including people—means there's no telling who can be trusted, from senior geologist Edvard (Trond Espen Seim) and hunky American helicopter pilot Carter (Australian actor Joel Edgerton) to Lars (Jorgen Langhelle), the gruff façade with the cute little dog.

Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen counts Carpenter's The Thing among his favorite movies and, to his credit, managed to sell normally subtitle-averse studio executives on casting Nordic actors as the Norwegians and having them speak English only when with Americans. Eric Heisserer's screenplay is clearly the work of a fan who got a major kick out of making his story dovetail neatly with the one that thrilled him as an impressionable youngster and, like the 1982 version, this Thing is heavily invested in grotesquely imaginative special effects, though the pervasive influence of Japanese "tentacle horror" lends icky sexual implications to scenes in which the alien impales screaming monster-fodder with various writhing extrusions and melts bodies together in a grotesque sort of extreme intercourse. In all, there's plenty to entertain current horror fans, and maybe even send them back to Things past.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

This engaging but derivative thriller opens ss high-end diamond dealer Kyle Miller (Nicolas Cage) tries to close a deal while speeding home in his Porsche, the high-strung, insecure Sarah (Nicole Kidman) is simultaneously fixing dinner and losing one more battle in the ongoing war of wills with their rebellious daughter Avery (Liana Liberato), who'd rather go to a party with slutty pal Kendra (Emily Meade) than suffer through a stultifying meal with the ’rents.

As Avery slips out of her room and Kyle announces that he has to head right back out for a meet with his buyer, the security phone rings: The police are doing house-to-house interviews in connection with a recent rash of burglaries in the Millers' gated and heavily fortified community and do they have a minute? But it's not the police who force their way past Kyle at the front door: It's a quartet of quietly desperate thugs who order him to disarm the security system and open the heavy-duty safe they know is concealed behind a wall panel in his home office.

Kyle resists, Sarah cowers, Avery picks the worst possible moment to sneak back in and the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game is on, pitting a sweaty, soft-bellied businessman, his brittle wife and the mouthy teen who's suddenly regressed to a whimpering little girl against four heavily armed criminals: the ruthless but not entirely unreasonable Elias ( Animal Kingdom's Ben Mendelsohn), who appears to be in charge; his handsome younger brother, Jonah (Cam Gigandet); Elias' twitchy tweaker girlfriend (Jordana Spiro, star of TV's “My Boys”), and the ominously quiet Ty (Dash Mihok), who don't intend to leave until they get what they want.

Anyone who's seen either version of Straw Dogs or Funny Games, The Strangers, Hostage, Fear, the underrated Vicious (co-scripted by P.J. Hogan in anti-Muriel's Wedding mode), last year's Spanish-language Secuestrados (to which Trespass bears an uncanny resemblance) or any number of other home-invasion pictures knows exactly what to expect from this sleek thriller. Secrets and lies will come to light and drive wedges into the relationships between family members and their captors alike. Desperate alliances will be made and broken and the authorities will arrive only when the flames—literal and metaphorical—have resolved themselves into smoldering ashes and there's nothing left to do except clean up the mess.

That said, Trespass is efficiently scripted, well-acted and briskly paced; and while, yes, foolish things are done, who can honestly say he or she has never opened a door to an unfamiliar delivery person, maintenance worker, Con Ed man or security guard because really, what are the odds that they're not exactly who and/or what they say? Neither a game-changer nor an ambitious misfire, Trespass is genre filmmaking at its most generic, the kind of movie that will almost certainly find its audience on VOD, where it becomes available two weeks after its theatrical release.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Slow to start and rambling when it gets going, Oka! nevertheless offers small pleasures, not least a glimpse of life deep in the African rainforest.

A beguiling blend of documentary and fiction, Oka! ("listen," in the Akka language) is inspired by the experiences of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, who devoted himself to recording the music of Central Africa's Bayaka people. The film’s cast is almost entirely composed of Bayaka villagers from Yandombe, where Sarno has lived since the mid-1980s, and includes extensive footage of rainforest wildlife.

Larry Whitman (Kris Marshall), who spent years recording the music of the Bayaka pygmies, is languishing miserably at his mother's New Jersey home, listening to his tapes of Bayaka chants and pining for Africa, when a painful burst of shining static sends him in search of medical advice. The news is bad: Larry's liver is failing and his doctor (Peter Riegert) warns that his Africa days are over. Larry needs a transplant, not a physically rigorous sojourn far from hospitals and Medivac units. All of which convinces Larry that he has to go back: If he's going to die, he'd rather do it in Yandombe among people he loves, trying to track down and record the molimo, a legendary wind instrument everyone says is lost to history.

But Larry finds Yandombe changed. Their self-appointed Bantu mayor Bassoun (Isaach de Bankole), who condescendingly refers to the Bayaka as his "little brothers," has pressured them to move out of their ancestral rainforest into a village on its outskirts, and has granted logging rights to a Chinese businessman named Yi (Korean-American actor Will Yun Lee). Dismayed by the encroaching modern world, with its noise and wanton destruction of the natural world, tribal elder Sataka (Mapumba), Larry's old friend, has moved back to the forest with his wife, Ekadi (Essandja). Sataka's granddaughter, Makombe (Mbombi), is now a flirtatious young woman. Many of Yandombe's men are either working for Yi or too afraid of Bassoun to protest.

Larry clashes frequently with Bassoun—who plans to further disenfranchise the Bayaka by persuading them to illegally kill a jungle elephant, leaving him free to make further lumber deals with Yi—and eventually flees deep into the wild. Larry's twin goals are to find Sataka, who represents the old Bayaka way of life he found so seductive, and record the malimo.

Filmmaker Currier, for many years deeply involved with environmental causes, met Sarno when she hired him as her translator while researching a documentary about the pygmy Ota Benga, brought to the United States in 1905 as an "educational" exhibit featured in that year's World's Fair. Sarno persuaded her to switch to a project that better represented contemporary pygmy life.

Oka! is not for all tastes: The story is slow to get started and unfolds in a way that feels unfocused and rambling. But viewers willing to stay the course stand a good chance of surrendering to its unhurried rhythms and small but vivid pleasures: An up-close glimpse of a wild gorilla, going about its business with weighty grace; a tribal dance that revolves around a performer draped head to foot in dried fronds, like some primordial Cousin Itt; the villagers' affectionate teasing of Larry (they all agree that he can't dance to save his life, but it's fun to watch him try); the scene in which they follow his path into the forest, a chanting column of children, young people and elders determined to make sure their pet white man hasn't gotten himself into trouble.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Writer-director Rod Lurie's remake of the notorious Straw Dogs isn't a terrible movie. It's just not an exceptional one, a liability that increases exponentially with the quality of the original film. And unfortunately for Lurie, Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs was a high-water mark in the career of an exceptional filmmaker.

Actress Amy and screenwriter David Sumner (Kate Bosworth, James Marsden), who met on the set of the popular TV show "Perfect Crime," are to all appearances a happily married Hollywood couple. But a stay in Amy's way-down-South hometown, where she intends to sell her late father's farm and David hopes to work on a screenplay about the fall of Stalingrad, is all it takes to lay bare the fault lines in their relationship. In fact, the erosion starts before they're even in town. You'd think that a man who slings words for a living might have noticed the bitterness beneath Amy's flippant observation that Blackwater should by all rights be called Backwater, but David, blinded by magnolia fever, is oblivious: Semi-rural Mississippi is so quaint, what with its lush landscape, picturesquely decaying barns and farmhouses, small-town rituals, archaic manners and old-school attitudes.

So besotted is David that he doesn't immediately realize how differently they play the game of top dog/underdog down here. And by the time he does, David has already lost more ground than he can recoup to Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) and his bully boys (Drew Powell, Rhys Coiro, Billy Lush), whom he unwisely hired to fix up the property before they put it on the market. Not that David had any way of knowing that one-time football star Charlie was Amy's high-school boyfriend. But failing—or refusing—to notice the seething resentment and flat-out contempt under the superficial politeness…. well, in the eyes of the Blackwater boys, that's exactly the kind of weakness they'd expect from a citified sissy who wouldn't know an honest day's work if it jumped out of the swamp and bit his pansy ass. And to her dismay, superficially, at least, Amy finds herself seeing David through the their eyes.

The Blackwater boys' assault on David's masculinity culminates in Amy's rape, but it's the simultaneous disappearance of saucy cheerleader Janice Hedden (Willa Holland) and the mentally challenged Jeremy Niles (Dominic Purcell) that triggers a façade-stripping explosion of violence.

Both Peckinpah's and Lurie's Straw Dogs deviate significantly from Gordon Williams' 1969 source novel, The Siege of Trencher's Farm, but remain faithful to its underlying notion that civilization is a thin veneer laid over animal instincts: The difference between an educated, civilized man and a brutish habitual thug is nothing more than what it takes to strip that veneer away. The new Straw Dogs is inevitably less shocking than the old, for reasons ranging from post-Vietnam War disillusionment with middle-class notions of proper behavior to the ever greater levels of onscreen violence to which ordinary moviegoers have become accustomed.

But the strength of Peckinpah's version and the weakness of Lurie's lie in the ambiguities. Two of the most disturbing moments in the original are gone from the remake: Amy's capitulation to pleasure while being raped by Charlie (a scene Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman invented out of whole cloth and which was as un-PC in 1971, when the term "politically correct" didn't even exist, as it is now) and David's declaration that he "will not allow violence against this house"—not against his wife or the child-like Niles, but against his property and, by extension, all the property it contains. Each marks a pivotal moment in Amy and David's acceptance of a primitive code of conduct that values brute strength and physical assets over the intangible indicators of prestige and social standing of "sophisticated" societies like Hollywood. Good performances throughout—Skarsgard is the standout—help give Lurie's Straw Dogs considerable weight, but the original is still the better movie by a considerable margin.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Taiwanese cultists follow their spiritual leader to a mid-size Texas city, where they're regarded with a mixture of unsurprising suspicion and sometimes startling openness in this long, slow but sometimes sharply observed drama about cultural differences and efforts to breach them.

There's already trouble between Hou (Shing Ka), a doctor, and his wife, Xiu (Jodi Lin), who earned her own medical degree but deferred to expectations that she would be a stay-at-home mother to eight-year-old Ollie (Matthew Chiu), long before he uproots his family and settles them in Garland, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The fact that Hou truly believes the nutty ramblings of Teacher Chen (Jackson Ning)—which involve seeing the face of God on TV, and the arrival of a spaceship on March 31st that will transport the faithful to the 18th dimension—while Xiu thinks they're a load of nonsense doesn't help.

Xiu quickly tires of wearing the white track suits and cowboy hats that cult members somehow continue to think help them to blend in with the overwhelmingly Caucasian and African-American locals despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, hates having to share their home with another couple, both true believers, and loathes Hou's newfound expectation that she'll turn into a silent, deferential wife who never thinks of questioning his judgment.

The locals—including earlier generations of immigrants, some of them assimilated Asians, like the Indian motel owner convinced that Xiu is going to kill herself and Ollie when she all she wants is a little break from her husband's hectoring—don't know what to make of the odd but earnest visitors. And frankly, they can be forgiven for worrying that they're going to wake up one morning to news reports of their very own Jonestown. And while Teacher Chen's followers try to explain themselves to outsiders by giving frequent press conferences, his bespectacled spokesman (Wayne Chang) lacks the kind of slick, telegenic presence that might have eased some minds, especially when he starts talking about things like the magical properties of soda or steaks speaking to human beings from the bellies of those who ate them in the days before God's arrival.

Based on real events that transpired in Garland in 1998, Miller's thoughtful God’s Land is alternately fascinating and stultifyingly dull…actually, that's not true—it's more tedious than enthralling, but finds its groove just frequently enough that you wish it had done so more often. Though undercut by some amateurish performances, leads Lin and Ka are remarkable, and Chiu is a charming, unaffected child performer. The film is strongest when it stays close to the family, whose complicated dynamic is delineated with considerable grace and subtlety. The poignant conclusion neither ridicules nor endorses the cultists' belief, instead acknowledging that the experience of divinity is a deeply personal thing whose transformative power isn't subject to consensus.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

A young man falls in love with the woman who's about to marry his older brother in this light, entertaining Bollywood comedy of manners and mores.

London-based investment banker Luv Agnihotri (Pakistani "prince of pop" Ali Zafar, who does all his own singing) has just broken up with longtime girlfriend Piali Patel (Tara D'Souza), the woman he was sure was the one. Emotionally wounded and tired of trying to find somebody to love the western way, he calls his Mumbai-based brother, fledgling Bollywood filmmaker Kush (American-born Imran Khan, of 2010's Break ke Baad), and asks for help. Luv knows his parents would be delighted to broker an arranged marriage, but wants Kush to play an active part in the process; he's confident that a girl Kush likes—one with "Delhi in her heart and London in her heartbeat," as the catchy song goes—will be a girl he'll like as well.

Being a good brother, Kush agrees, and after a rocky start he and his parents think they may have found a good candidate in Dimple Dixit (model Kareena Kaif). Well educated and from a good family, Dimple is fluent in both Hindi and English—she was born in London, where her father (Kanwaljit Singh), a government minister, was posted for 18 years—and could live in India or England with equal ease. Of course, their first meeting is something of a shock to Kush, who recognizes Dimple as "D," the wild child he knew in college...the one who smoked and drank in public, paraded around in a hot pants and boots, played a mean electric guitar and got arrested for staging a spontaneous rave at the Taj Mahal.

But several years down the line, Dimple has calmed down: She's still an outspoken free spirit, but now her fundamental kindness and devotion to her family—especially her mentally-challenged brother Ajju (Afreen Khan)—are also apparent. She effortlessly charms the Agnihotri family, who in turn make a fine impression on the Dixits, so once Dimple and Luv have "met" on Skype, their marriage is a done deal.

The Dixits rent a luxurious guest house big enough for two families' worth of guests, and as Luv clears his calendar the preparations begin: Marigold garlands are threaded and hung, caterers hired, lavish Taj Mahal-themed invitations designed and printed, lights draped and a huge "Dimple Weds Luv" banner erected. But it isn't long before a blind man could see that Dimple and Kush are falling for each other: How long will it take them to admit it and agree on a course of action, given that Luv's arrival and the formal engagement ceremony are just a few days off and the wedding juggernaut is gaining momentum with each passing hour?

Mere Brother ki Dulhan is nothing more than a fluffy rom-com, but first-time director Ali Abbas Zafar (who is not the same person as the actor playing Luv) keeps it just this side of light and charming. He even reins in Kaif's manic-pixie-dream-girl performance right before it becomes irredeemably annoying, which is no mean feat. The choreography and songs are both energetic and colorful, and the cast is uniformly attractive, but Zafar is the real standout, managing to make Luv sexy, vulnerable, kind of a jerk and oddly endearing throughout.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Behind this shamelessly hard-sell title there's an informative, child-friendly documentary about the evolutionary development and legacy of pterodactyls and other winged reptiles that should enjoy a long life at natural history museums and science centers.

The first collaboration between naturalist David Attenborough (best known for spearheading popular BBC nature series like “Life on Earth”) and BSkyB's new Sky3D division, Flying Monsters 3D is a child-centric introduction to the winged reptiles that have enthralled filmmakers and audiences for decades, from the silent movie The Lost World (1925) to the 2011 TV series “Terra Nova.”

The avuncular Attenborough, a patient and friendly guide through the alien landscape of prehistoric Earth, is aided by both human experts and the products of state-of-the–art computer animation that ought to keep the most restless small fry in their seats. And the eerily lifelike living fossils—squawking, hissing, gobbling and, yes, flying pterosaurs, a term that encompasses everything from primitive pteranodons to the massive Quetzalcoatlus—aren't the half of it.

CGI technology untangles knots of ossified ribs and vertebrae and assembles them into neat skeletons; animated MRI imagery reveals the internal structure of bones both strong enough to launch 400-pound reptiles into the air and sufficiently light to allow them to remain aloft; wireframe simulations vividly illustrate the advantage of, say, short tails over long and spotlight the kind of fossil details that wow paleontologists, from the delicate shadows of biological fibers that kept leathery but delicate wings from tearing to the first evidence of feathers.

And that's not to slight the footage of still-living creatures like the gliding, Southeast Asian Draco lizards, which hint at how ancient reptiles may have first taken to the air, and imperious flamingos, whose ability to forage on land, in water and aloft hints at why birds eventually survived while the pterosaurs died off. While occasionally imprecise in a way that will nag at adults, the movie compensates with a couple of extraordinary visuals, the most memorable being combined footage of a real small aircraft and a simulated Quetzalcoatlus with virtually the same 35-foot wingspan: That is one mother of a flying monster.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

2011
Directed by:Steven Quale.
Written by:Eric Heisserer, based on characters created by Jeffrey Reddick.
With:Nicholas D'Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, P.J. Byrne, Arlen Escarpeta, David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance and Tony Todd.

Like the four preceding Final Destination movies, Final Destination 5 is pure formula in action: A group of people survive an accident only to die subsequently as the reaper tidies up accounts. All that distinguishes one from the next is the Rube Goldberg-like inventiveness of the grotesque accidents that claim the victims’ lives.

Of the 25 employees of Presage Paper (Get it? Presage?) on a rented tour bus that’s supposed to be whisking them off to a team-building retreat but is instead idling in the middle of a long, long bridge, only eight survive the span’s sudden, catastrophic collapse. And they owe their lives to Sam (D’Agosto), an aspiring chef who gave up a prestigious internship in Paris because his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) didn’t want to move: Just before the accident, Sam had a horrifying vision of what was about to happen, and those who followed his lead and beat a hasty retreat to terra firma — Molly, Peter (Fisher), Sam’s best friend, and his perky girlfriend, Candice (Wroe), a college gymnast doing an internship; odious boss Dennis Lapham (Koechner, of TV's True Blood); and co-workers Olivia (MacInnes Wood), Isaac (Byrne) and Nathan (Escarpeta) — avoided miserable fates. Or did they? Well, duh.

FBI agent Block (Vance), who’s heading up the investigation into the catastrophe that killed a total of 86 motorists and construction workers, is convinced that Sam played some part in causing it. After all, Block is a rational man and the only rational explanation for Sam’s advance knowledge of the bridge collapse is that he had something to do with making it collapse. But there’s no evidence, so he has to content himself with keeping Sam and his friends under surveillance.

The “Lucky Eight,” as they’re dubbed by the media, soon discover that they’re not as lucky as they seem. Death is a sore loser with a mean streak and, one by one, they start dying in bizarre, grotesque accidents, starting with Candice, who somehow winds up in a broken, twisted knot of broken bones and ripped flesh during a routine practice session. She's followed by horny, opportunistic Isaac (casting the pudgy, bespectacled Byrne as a genuine lothario rather than the fat, funny friend who could score at a nymphos anonymous mixer is one of the movie's rare flashes of wit), whose death at a holistic spa is designed to delight anyone who secretly believes that acupuncture is the ancient Chinese term for “torture by smiling sadist with evil needles.” In a slight departure from the earlier films, Final Destination 5 holds out the hope that there may be a way to escape certain death, albeit one whose price is eternal damnation (something no one actually says aloud, which is what passes for subtlety in Final World), but savvy series regulars won’t put much stock in it.

Like the previous installment in the series, Final Destination 5 is in terrific-looking 3D (and really, how can the Final team resist, what with all the spurting blood and flying body parts?), and is generally technically slick, briskly paced and painless to watch, assuming you’re not the sort to squirm miserably at the sight of anatomical mayhem. If you were, of course, you probably wouldn’t have read this far, let alone considered ponying up for a premium-priced movie ticket to see attractive young people turned into human hamburger. And yes, there is a shot of a meat grinder: In keeping with the Hell’s PSA theme that informs the series, young Sam’s culinary ambitions occasion several leisurely looks at the dangers that lurk within the kitchen…especially the professional kitchen, with its rotisserie stakes, bubbling fry stations and banks of razor-sharp knives.

The most entertaining few minutes of the film (aside from the brutal falling plane-engine gag) come after it's over, in the form of a "greatest hits" mayhem reel: shown back to back and scored with AC/DC's raucous "If You Want Blood," Death's dirty tricks are hilarious.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal.

2011
Written and Directed by: Joe Cornish.
With: Jodie Whittaker, Mark Frost, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Jumayn Hunter, Franz Drameh, Leeon Jones, Simon Howard, Luke Treadwell, Danielle Vitalis, Paige Meade, Sammy Williams, Michael Ajao.

Wyndham Tower in the South London housing project Clayton Estate isn’t much: It’s rundown, controlled by drug dealers and terrorized by restless, unsupervised teenagers like Moses (Boyega), Pest (Esmail), Dennis (Drameh), Jerome (Jones) and Biggz (Howard), whom we first meet as they’re mugging Sam (Whittaker), a newly graduated nurse who just moved in a couple of months ago. Fortunately for Sam, something suddenly and explosively strikes a nearby parked car—something much bigger than any of the Guys Fawkes Day fireworks lighting up the night sky—just as they’ve relieved her of her wallet, ring and cell-phone and it looks as though things are about to get uglier.

In the ensuing confusion, Sam high-tails it home and calls the police while Moses pokes around in the damaged vehicle in search of valuables. He finds something, all right, but nothing he could have expected: Some kind of animal claws his face and takes off, going straight through a hurricane fence and vanishing into a storage shed. Moses and company follow and kill the creature, though it beats the hell out of them exactly what they’ve killed. They decide to take the nasty corpse to their pal Ron (Frost), who works out of the apartment where his boss, scary drug dealer Hi-Hatz (Hunter), grows dope in his specially constructed and seriously fortified weed room and coordinates distribution of harder drugs. Ron is always watching National Geographic specials and knows about weird wildlife, plus they can score a little weed while they’re there, even if they have to put up with losers like Ron’s pal Brewis (Treadwell), a middle-class slacker who’s squandered more opportunities than the whol/e lot of them have ever had. And then stuff gets crazy….

Like Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later, Attack the Block (whose title echoes that of the 1999 Korean crime comedy Attack the Gas Station! for no particular reason) is firmly rooted in John Wyndham’s apocalyptic Day of the Triffids, a smart, bleak little book about how quickly large-scale disaster strips away the veneer of British gentility. Not that “genteel” is the first word that comes to mind when describing many of Clayton Estate’s tenants: Like low-income housing projects everywhere, its residents are divided between poor people with middle-class aspirations and practical plans for realizing them, and sullen, seethingly resentful representatives of the permanent underclass.

But also like Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later and Day of the Triffids, Attack the Block clings to a touching faith in the power of adversity—especially the kind of outrageously unlikely adversity guaranteed to dispose of the average person before he or she can come to grips with the fact that it’s happening—to bring out the inner hero in the most unlikely and/or unpromising individuals.

And so Moses and his gang; sensible, well-brought-up Sam; totally toasted stoner Brewis and a even a couple of pint-sized gangsta wannabes who’ve renamed themselves Mayhem and Probs (Ajao and Williams) round up makeshift weapons ranging from ornamental samurai swords to gasoline-filled super-soakers (this being the U.K., guns are largely conspicuous by their absence) and make a stand. The result isn’t a genre-changer and heavy-duty special-effects connoisseurs may be underwhelmed by the evil aliens, but overall Attack the Block is brisk, witty and crackling good fun, the kind of movie genre buffs live to discover and share with their friends before it’s officially dubbed a cult classic.

2011
Directed by: Jim Mickle.
Written by: Nick Damici and Jim Mickle.
With: Nick Damici, Connor Paolo, Michael Cerveris, Sean Nelson, Kelly McGillis, Danielle Harris, Donnie Dennison, Chance Kelly and Tim House.

I first read Dracula as an adolescent and never looked back, but 40 years later I found myself reduced to wondering whether anyone had anything new to say about vampires...someone other than Stephenie Meyer, who somehow managed to turn the the oversexed undead into abstinence proselytizers an d_________: That's not the way I like my vampires,

Stake Land sounds like Daybreakers by way of Night of the Living Dead, but it’s better than that, a clever horror-action hybrid tailor-made for viewers who like their vampire movies bloody and mean, rather than awash in teenage angst.

In the not-too-distant future, sometime just before the start of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic The Road, a suburban family is frantically packing their SUV in hopes of outrunning the vampire plague that’s toppled the US government and plunged ordinary citizens into a waking nightmare. Alas, they waited just a little too long... long enough that the bloodthirsty dead have caught their scent. Only teenager Martin (Paolo, of TV’s Gossip Girl) survives the inevitable frenzied attack by a pack of zombie-like vampires, and he wouldn’t have made it had he not had the good fortune to run smack into Mister (co-writer Damici), who’s adapted to the rules of this nasty new world by reinventing himself as a stone-cold vampire slayer.

But even the hardboiled Mister has had enough of killing bloodsuckers before they kill him: It’s a thankless, never-ending treadmill of a gig and he knows for a fact that sooner or later he’s going to lose. So Mister is headed north in a vintage convertible to check out rumors about a safe haven called “New Eden,” and he’s willing to let Martin sign on for the ride. Their post-apocalyptic road trip takes them through eerily deserted towns and fortified “lockdowns,” rural areas where survivors have banded together to systematically exterminate existing vampires, keep new ones out and establish something like a functioning society. The results look like 19th-century western frontier towns, hardscrabble clusters of battered houses peopled by the tough, the lucky and the pragmatic.

Mister and Martin pick up some strays along the way — Sister Anna (an all-but-unrecognizable McGillis), a pregnant girl (Halloween-franchise veteran Harris) and a marine (child-star Nelson, of Fresh) — and eventually run afoul of the Bretheren, a Christian militia led by the dogmatic Jebediah (acclaimed stage actor Cerveris), who believes the plague is God’s way of punishing sinners and has a very unchristian attitude when comes to those who think otherwise.

Stake Land’s title and premise echo 2009’s Zombieland, a deft mix of genuine horror and goofy, pop-culture humor. Stake Land, by contrast, is dead serious, even when it’s dropping vampires out of helicopters into lockdowns (think medieval armies using trebuchets to lob plague-ridden corpses into enemy territory). Stake Land isn’t a genre-changer, but its strong performances, brisk pacing and disturbingly believable post-apocalyptic setting add up to a fine variation on classic horror themes.

Sexy vampires who love the nightlife take a bite out of Berlin in this bloody German antidote to the swoony teen angst of the Twilight series.

Poor little Lena (Herfurth) hates her life, and not without reason: Her single mother is a bossy tramp, they live in a dump and everybody seems to be having fun but her. Already a petty thief and well on her way to getting her skinny behind into serious trouble, Lena meets the two people who will change her life over the course of 24 tumultuous hours.

The first is handsome cop Tom Serner (Riemelt), who shows a certain sympathy for the grubby waif, even after she escapes his attempt to arrest her by kicking him in the nads. The other is Louise (Hoss), the seductive but freaky beauty Lena meets and rejects at a midnight rave… though not before Louise has nipped at her throat. By the next day, Lena is jonesing for blood and answers, which Louise and her undead BFFs Charlotte (Ulrich) and Nora (Fischer) are happy to supply. “You won’t quench that thirst with abstinence,” purrs Louise as she offers Lena an elegant little glass of blood.

Lena isn’t immediately thrilled at the prospect of being a vampire, but she can’t do much about it and there’s no denying the perks. The transformation erases years of self-destructive living, leaving Lena as perfectly lovely as the others, and the lifestyle is lush: Gorgeous clothes, fast cars, fabulous jewels and decadent fun are all within easy reach when you’re inhumanly strong, immortal and conveniently invisible to security cameras. “We binge, drink, do lines and screw as much as we want and we never get fat, ugly, old or sick!” giggles the impish Nora, though the gravely beautiful Charlotte is clearly less enchanted with the eternal nightlife.

The sticking point for Lena is the endless killing, and if she were willing to commit to being the besotted Louise’s new eternal soul mate, she could go on not thinking about where the blood in those little glasses comes from. But Lena isn’t thrilled about that prospect either, and therein lies the problem.

Directed and co-written by Dennis Gansel, whose previous films range from the sex comedy Girls on Top to Before the Fall, a coming-of-age story set in an elite Nazi boarding school, We Are the Night is no genre-changer. But it’s bloody, occasionally clever and wears its underlying message about the perils of power lightly; it’s a shame the U.S. release version has been dubbed into English, because nothing destroys a movie’s internal integrity faster or more thoroughly.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

2011
Directed by:Michael Bay.
Written by:Ehren Kruger and Eric Heisserer, based on characters created by Jeffrey Reddick.
With:Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, Tyrese Gibson, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, John Turturro, Kevin Dunn, Julie White, Ken Jeong, Alan Tudyk, Lester Speight, Glenn Morshower, Buzz Aldrin, Bill O'Reilly and the voices of Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving, Leonard Nimoy, Jess Harnell, Charlie Adler, Robert Foxworth, James Remar, Francesco Quinn, George Coe, Tom Kenny, Reno Wilson, Frank Welker, Ron Bottitta, John DiMaggio, Keith Szarabajka and Greg Berg.

And "Dark” is the operative word, at least by the generally juvenile standards of the Transformers franchise. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing will determine your reaction to the third installment of the merchandising-driven series about giant robots from outer space.

Two movies ago, Sam Witwicky (LeBeouf) was just a nerdy teenager whose ambitions extended no further than buying his first car, a yellow and black-striped junker that to his callow eyes was the epitome of cool. As anyone with the slightest interest in seeing Transformers: Dark of the Moon already knows, that battered 1970 Camaro turned out to be much more than cheap transportation: It transformed into an iron giant dubbed “Bumblebee,” and came with a rainbow coalition of robo-friends and foes — the autobots and the decepticons, respectively. Given that the little toys were aimed squarely at little boys, there’s never any question as to which are the good guys.

Sam is now a newly minted college graduate facing a grim job market. How grim is it? So grim that the fact he’s pals with the autobots and has already helped them save the world twice doesn’t even get him a foot in the door. Thank goodness his smoking-hot girlfriend, Carly (lush-lipped U.K. newcomer Huntington-Whiteley) has a cool Washington, DC apartment and a great gig working for billionaire car buff Dylan (Dempsey), because otherwise he be living that battered car of his. Too bad the tycoon is such a creep, though in Dylan’s defense he might leer less if Carly’s definition of office-appropriate attire leaned to knee-length skirts and tailored jackets rather than thigh-skimming, cleavage-baring bandage dresses and five-inch heels.

And why did Sam's clueless mom and dad (White and Dunn) have to choose this moment to roll into town in the supersized tour bus they bought so they could spend their retirement crisscrossing the country? The 'rents are so embarrassing.

Anyway, the autobots are working with the U.S. government, which has known about them since the 1960s, to keep Earth safe from space invaders. (Who knew the entire space program was launched for the sole purpose of recovering what turned out to be bits of autobot technology from the moon?) And the sudden burst of chatter about decepticons lurking around the still-contaminated ruins of Chernobyl that gets a whole lot of high-level panties in a bunch proves to be accurate: Evil Megatron (voiced by Weaving) is once again marshaling his forces to take over Earth, and this time he plans to activate an interdimensional bridge that will haul his home planet, Cybertron, into our solar system, then use puny humans as slave labor to restore it to its pre-giant robot war glory.

That’s it for story, which might be okay if Transformers: Dark of the Moon were 95 minutes long. But it’s a full hour longer, almost all of which is devoted to noisy mayhem: car chases, shootouts, explosions, Chicago being pummeled into rubble (though it’s nice to see some city other than New York get flattened), military operations, breaking glass (as in skyscrapers, not bar ware), screaming civilians and, of course, bossy authority figures shouting at each other about what they should be doing about it.

Heretical though it may be to say, the decepticons — which look like everything from flying, chain-link dragons to monstrous worms that plunge in and out of city streets in a swirl of razor-sharp metal bands —a re way cooler than the lumbering, candy-colored autobots, even if they do turn into totally awesome cars. And the autobots are in turn way cooler than the human characters, a generally colorless bunch despite the best efforts of a cast packed with Oscar-nominees/winners (Malkovich, McDormand); experienced supporting players (Turturro, Duhamel, Tudyk); celebrities playing themselves (astronaut Aldrin, Fox News host O’Reilly); and pretty faces (former models Gibson and Huntington-Whiteley). But while the special effects are terrific, they can’t make you care: There’s plenty of manly weeping onscreen when the decepticons start executing captured autobots, but as far as I could tell, there wasn’t a damp eye in the theatre.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn's coolly beautiful action thriller looks like a slick, Hollywood thrill ride, but it's actually a bleakly funny deconstruction of genre movie cliches that will delight some viewers and infuriate others.

At first glance, the film's nameless protagonist (Ryan Gosling) has little to recommend him: He's handsome in a bland, unthreatening way, but that satin baseball jacket with the green-and-gold scorpion design on the back screams "dork," and the everyday art of pleasant small talk seems beyond him—the ratio of uncomfortable silences to words verges on excruciating. It takes a sharp eye to see the seething wariness he's hiding behind a facade of pleasant dullness.

No one would ever guess he's in the movie business, a highly paid stunt driver who doubles for glamorous action-movie stars. And no one would ever, ever imagine that he's got a sideline in driving getaway cars or that he's so in demand that professional thieves will pay to play by his rules: He won't carry a gun, he doesn't want to be friends and he's on the clock—no matter what happens on the inside, he won't wait one second past five minutes.

"The driver," as he's referred to throughout, lives alone, in an apartment as anonymous as he strives to be; he has no family and only one friend, Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the mechanic for whom he works. But when he falls for Irene (Carey Mulligan), the single mom next door, he falls hard, courting her politely, playing father figure to her little boy and looking out for her with the quiet vigilance of a sheepdog keeping an eye on an especially vulnerable lamb, even after she drops a bombshell called Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) into their fledgling relationship. Standard being her husband, who just got out of jail; she didn't mention him before because, well… she can't seem to explain why, but now that he's out, she's going to try to make things work.

The driver calmly makes nice with Standard, who's understandably suspicious of this guy who's taken such an shine to his wife, and even comes to his aid when it becomes apparent that Standard's out of jail but still reluctantly in thrall to the thug life. The driver takes on a job that's supposed to clear Standard's debts once and for all, but it all goes straight to hell in a burst of violence that leaves no corner of the driver's life unstained.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

This brooding, character-driven mixed-martial-arts drama is Rocky squared, with a Cain-and-Abel twist: Estranged brothers, neither a professional fighter, make it into an elite MMA tournament and wind up pitted against each other. It's also a welter of sports-movie cliches awash in macho angst, but its raw emotional power will make strong men (and women) weep.

Embittered, broke and homeless, Iraq War veteran Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy) turns up on the Pittsburgh doorstep of the father he hasn't seen in 18 years. Once a wife-battering drunk who coached both his sons to high-school wrestling acclaim by pitting them against each other in a bitter battle for attention and approval, Paddy (Nick Nolte) has sobered up and wants desperately to reconcile with his boys. But Tommy wants no part of Paddy's 12-step penance: He just wants a place to crash until he can get his bearings, which he finds at the local gym. Tommy isn't much for small talk or locker-room camaraderie, but after decking cocky MMA up-and-comer Mad Dog Grimes (Erik Apple) in record time, he's the instant alpha dog.

addy tries using Tommy's return as an excuse to reconnect with his older son, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a high-school physics teacher living in a pleasant, middle-class Philadelphia suburb with his wife, Tess (Jennifer Morrison), and their two little girls. But while Brendan would like to reconcile with Tommy, from whom he's been estranged since they were separated by their parents' ugly split (Brendan stayed with Paddy while Tommy went with their mother), he's just as uninterested in his father's amends-making. It's too little, too late and, anyway, Brendan has his own problems: Financially crippled by medical bills, he and Tess are about to lose their house. A moderately successful wrestler before the one-two of a life-threatening injury in the ring and Tess' pleas convinced him to throw in the towel, Brendan starts surreptitiously picking up extra cash in local fights.

When word gets out, he's suspended from teaching and, facing months of unemployment, Brendan is about to enter the underground fight circuit when he hears about Sparta, a big-money, high-profile Atlantic City-based tournament. He decides to go into serious training and try to qualify even though the odds are wildly against him: Even his old friend Frank (Frank Grillo), who's training his own Sparta hopeful, says as much. But an accident sidelines Frank's candidate and he agrees to train Brendan.

Tommy, meanwhile, has found his own road to Sparta: Unaware that a viral video of Mad Dog Grimes' beat-down has both made him an underground sensation and revealed his identity to a group of marines he anonymously rescued from certain death, he asks Paddy to train him, while making it clear that nothing is forgiven. He won't even fight as Tommy Conlon; he's going to use his mother's maiden name, Reardon. Tommy fights like a jackhammer, all raw power and inchoate fury that Paddy works to focus and refine.

Brendan is a dancer: tough but always aware—now more than ever—that speed, focus and strategic intelligence are his edge over sheer muscle, skills Frank helps him hone. Both dark horses make the cut, and their unlikely stories—the aging science teacher out to recapture youthful glory that wasn't even so glorious and the sullen loner who never let on he was a war hero until being outed by the men whose lives he saved—make for great color commentary and human-inte

Of course they can, but to the credit of director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor—whose credits include the documentary Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Mark Kerr, which immersed him in the world of MMA fighters—there are plenty of unexpected—but not outlandish—twists along the way. And the outcome of the final face-off between brothers is both impossible to call and genuinely moving, in large part because Hardy and Edgerton (who are, respectively, English and Australian though if you didn't know, you'd never know it) are terrific actors, capable of bringing out the nuances in characters who could easily be reduced to types. Kudos are also due to stunt coordinator/fight choreographer JJ Perry: Nearly half the movie's 139 minutes is devoted to Sparta, and Perry's fight choreography is exceptional—you don't have to be a fan to follow the action or get thoroughly caught up in each match.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.

A romantic action picture whose shifts of tone are abrupt even by Bollywood standards, this spin on the 1992 Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston movie about a bodyguard who falls for his difficult charge is silly and derivative, but sneakily entertaining nonetheless.

The misleadingly named Lovely Singh (Salman Khan) was born to adversity, delivered shortly after his mother was seriously injured in the car crash that killed his father, a bodyguard employed by wealthy, Jaisinghpur-based businessman Sartaj Rana (Raj Babbar).

Lovely eventually followed in his father's footsteps and now works for Tiger Security, a high-end supplier of personal protection to the rich and famous. So he can hardly refuse when Sartaj calls looking for someone to guard his daughter, Divya (Kareena Kapoor). No one has actually threatened her, but Sartaj did some business with Mr. Mahtra (Aditya Pancholi), who turned out to have some shady associates, and Sartaj wants to be sure that Divya is under close watch for the next few weeks. Once she graduates from Symbiosis International College, Divya is getting married in England and will be safely out of harm's way.

But what should be a straightforward gig is complicated by the fact that the pampered, willful Divya doesn't want a bodyguard, especially a humorless muscleman who follows her everywhere, even into the ladies’ room (cue the cute, squealing coeds). Against the advice of her level-headed friend and classmate Maya (Hazel Keech), Divya devises exactly the kind of plan to distract her uniformed babysitter you'd expect from a spoiled rich girl: She calls Lovely's cell-phone and pretends to be "Chhaya," a shy femme fatale who loves him from afar. Wacky complications ensue, but take a dark turn when the stoic Lovely starts to fall for his mysterious caller.

Though lazily plotted—once you start asking questions, you're lost—Bodyguard gets better as it goes along. Divya is too immature and shallowly self-centered to be a tragic (or even tragic-lite) heroine, but she's the sole engineer of her own third-act unhappiness—which gives the thoroughly generic rom-com-with-guns machinations a little individuality—and there's a clever twist hidden in the voiceover narration. The musical numbers are energetic and colorful, and the first is briefly touched by genius: Choreographers Ganesh Acharya andVishnudeva actually give Khan's flexing biceps their own preposterous little solo.

This is director Siddique's third version of the same movie, following the 2010 Malayalam-language original and the 2011 Tamil remake; a fourth version, in Telugu, is in the works.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Film Journal International.