Title: The Lie Director: Joshua Leonard Starring: Joshua Leonard, Jess Weixler, Mark Webber, Gerry Bednob, Jane Adams The directorial debut of Joshua Leonard, “The Lie” is an uncommonly assured and engaging portrait of post-millennial and particularly male uncertainty, and how the snowballing effects of impulsive dishonesty will eventually run you down from behind like a jackrabbit. Buoyed by strong performances, this meagerly budgeted but intelligently scaled and smartly told indie film deftly takes the pulse of anxious, arrested times. Married Los Angelenos Lonnie (Leonard) and Clover Leonard (Jess Weixler) were once upon a time go-it-their-own-way idealists. Now, faced with raising a two-year-old daughter, they’ve come to also face some of the…

Title: Oranges and Sunshine Director: Jim Loach Starring: Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham “Oranges and Sunshine” is re-affirming evidence that not every remarkable true story a remarkable film makes. Based on the book “Empty Cradles” by British social worker Margaret Humphreys, the movie tells the story of its crusading subject, who worked to uncover one of the most shocking government-sanctioned scandals of modern times — the forced deportation of many thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia. Both overall and scene-to-scene, though, ”Oranges and Sunshine” exudes a just-fine feeling of dutiful emotional string-pulling, and nothing more. It commits no great and cringe-worthy offenses, but neither does it ever really get…

For his narrative feature film debut, director Jim Loach chose to tackle a sprawling tale of warped governmental policy, spanning three decades and involving the forced deportation of British kids to Australia. Almost as shocking as its narrative — which tells the story of literally tens of thousands of children, and the terrible abuses they suffered after in many cases being told that their parents were dead — is the fact that it is hardly known the United States, where tales of adolescent mistreatment and murder are typically seized upon with a white-hot tabloid fervor, grist for the mill of the 24-hour cable news channels. ShockYa had the chance recently to speak to Loach one-on-one, about…

Title: A Bird of the Air Director: Margaret Whitton Starring: Jackson Hurst, Rachel Nichols, Linda Emond, Buck Henry, Judith Ivey, Erik Jensen, Matte Osian “A Bird of the Air,” based on the novel “The Loop” by Joe Coomer, represents an unexpected boon to the judgment of Matthew McConaughey. After all, the naked drumming aficionado was attached to star in the movie adaptation for some time, back when he and “Sahara” costar Penelope Cruz were keeping each other warm. The financing never came together, however, and he backed out. Other possible filmmaking combinations came and went before a decidedly more indie route was eventually settled upon, years later, in the form…

Too many romantic comedies witlessly hone in on the differences between men and women to create a heightened-stakes backdrop in which every interaction with the opposite sex is imbued with some sort of grand, gender-statement significance, which is of course then supposed to be neatly resolved and tidily put away by the time a paired-off happy ending rolls around. Co-written by Annie Mumolo and “Saturday Night Live”‘s Kristen Wiig, “Bridesmaids” instead focuses a considerable amount of its energy on female friendships, yes, but also the things women want in relationships — love, security, availability — that are the same as men. The result is the best female-fronted Hollywood comedy in years, and a…

Title: The Hedgehog Director: Mona Achache Starring: Garance Le Guillermic, Josiane Balasko, Togo Igawa Somewhere, no doubt, adult film actor and shameless publicity whore Ron Jeremy is kicking himself over finding out that there exists a movie entitled “The Hedgehog” in which he is not the star, or the beneficiary of a large life-rights check. No, director Mona Achache’s movie is no hairy skin-flick biopic, but instead a darkly comedic broadside aimed at stuffy French elitism, a movie very loosely of a sort with “Gosford Park” and the forthcoming “The Women on the 6th Floor,” written and directed by Philippe Le Guay. Based on Muriel Barbery’s 2006 French-language novel “The Elegance…

Title: The Tree Director: Julie Bertucelli Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Morgana Davies, Marton Csokas, Aden Young, Gillian Jones, Penne Hackforth-Jones, Christian Bayers, Tom Russell, Gabriel Gotting, Zoe Boe A tender, well sketched drama of familial reconnection and rebirth in the wake of tragedy, Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, a French-Australian co-production set in the rural environs of the latter country, for the most part successfully balances the literal and metaphorical in its telling of coping with loss, and trying to move on after the death of a loved one. Engaging acting and some gorgeous and involving cinematography make this movie a treat for arthouse audiences. When her truck-driver husband Peter (Aden Young)…

Title: Sarah’s Key Director: Gilles Paquet-Brenner Starring: Kristin Scott Thomas, Melusine Mayance, Frederic Pierrot, Niels Arestrup, Michel Duchaussoy, Dominique Frot, Aidan Quinn War stories are often terrible and grim, but their high moral contrast allows room to compellingly highlight some of the best instincts and aspects of humanity, alongside the worst. Set against the backdrop of one of those amazingly under-told stories of real-life history, the compelling and pedigreed Sarah’s Key, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, is a sort of cold-case ancestral mystery, except rooted in character and told with an admirable self-discipline often lacking in thematically similar films. The story centers around Julia Jarmond (Scott Thomas), an American magazine journalist married…

Title: Bloodworth Director: Shane Dax Taylor Starring: Val Kilmer, Reece Thompson, Hilary Duff, Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, W. Earl Brown, Frances Conroy, Hilarie Burton With its just-so production design, characterized chiefly by rust, and a gallery of weathered and otherwise stunted characters fumbling toward some vaguely defined senses of purpose or peace, “Bloodworth”, based on William Gay’s novel “Provinces of Night”, slots comfortably in the cinematic canon of Southern Gothic, wherein everything and everyone is dadgum country-fied, and, well, ain’t that interesting and grand? This isn’t to say that the film, a drama about the long shadows of alcoholism, familial neglect and demons unaddressed, is a terrible or hokey thing,…

Ryan Condal has been hired to write the script for a big-screen adaptation of renowned writer Greg Rucka’s comic “Queen & Country” for 20th Century Fox. Ryan is repped by ICM and Energy Entertainment, he is also writing “Hercules” for Universal Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment. The adaptation of Rucka’s Oni Press comic, according to The Hollywood Reporter, centers on a female British Special Ops agent named Tara Chase, who ends up on the run through Eastern Europe after completing a hit on a target. Stay tuned to Shockya.com for the latest “Queen & Country” movie news and more. By Costa Koutsoutis (Source: Superherohype.com, The Hollywood Reporter)