Title: Gun Hill Road Writer-director: Rashaad Ernesto Green Starring: Esai Morales, Judy Reyes, Harmony Santana, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Vincent Laresca, Dennis Johnson When critics use the shorthand phrase “festival film,” in either praise or derision, they essentially mean movies like writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green’s feature debut, “Gun Hill Road”. From its evocative title and kind of self-consciously gritty style to its blowout emotional moments and hook-y social issue conceit transposed to a working-class familial setting, the film seems constructed in moralizing fashion to pull dramatic levers and kickstart off-screen dialogues, so it’s no particular surprise that it played in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Its failure to land a top-tier indie…

Title: Where the Road Meets the Sun Writer-director: Yong Mun Chee Starring: Will Yun Lee, Eric Mabius, Luke Brandon Field, Laura Ramsey, Fernando Noriega, Elsa Pataky, Jesse Garcia, Emmanuelle Vaugier A sprawling, somewhat self-consciously multi-ethnic drama of struggling immigrants from writer-director Yong Mun Chee, Where the Road Meets the Sun is a movie which means well, in unspooling its story of hard-knock, off-the-grid America, and both the unique opportunities and special perils that presents for those with headstrong dispositions. Unfortunately, despite some relaxed, inviting performances, the film repeatedly identifies plausibility as an enemy, and never locates a compelling enough throughline to hook and pull an audience through from beginning to end. A brief…

Title: The Misfits Starring: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Thelma Ritter “The Misfits” stands as the last completed film for both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, but its value and engagement extends well beyond that trivia question value, or any of the other salacious stories behind its troubled production. An unusual and illuminating ensemble drama from director John Huston and screenwriter Arthur Miller, the 1961 film is long on color and a bit short on plot, but so striking for the empathy it radiates for its fringe-dwelling, booze-happy characters. Set in Reno, the story centers around Roslyn Tabor (Monroe), a freshly divorced but still downhearted woman who, with her landlady Isabelle Steers…

Science-fiction is often so terribly difficult to get right on screen because its makers get bogged down in minutiae, trying to craft expansive, futuristic and/or alien worlds, or over-explain the processes that differentiate and separate their plane of reality from that of the present day. “Source Code “, thankfully, is not one of those movies. It grooves, it pulses, it entertains — deftly balancing smarts with a streamlined aim to please. The sophomore effort of director Duncan Jones ( “Moon “), the high-concept techno-thriller is kind of amusingly impatient with some of the nitty-gritty specifics of its own conceit (“Every second explaining things puts more lives at risk!” one character…

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: Septien Writer-director: Michael Tully Starring: Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully, Mark Darby Robinson, Rachel Korine, Jim Willingham A unique slice of Southern Gothic that premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Septien is sort of the embodiment of what more American indie film should be doing and trying – which is to say identifying universal themes or feelings worthwhile of exploration for the creators, and then coming at them in a roundabout or subversive manner. An off-kilter dramatic mystery that trades in low-level mischievousness, and a kind of quietly comedic snapshot of deep-fried familial dysfunction, Septien is the ultimate chameleonic cinematic experience — it is chiefly what one wishes it to be,…

Title: The First Beautiful Thing Director: Paolo Virzi Starring: Micaela Ramazzotti, Valerio Mastandrea, Claudia Pandolfi, Sergio Albelli, Fabrizia Sacchi A major box office player in its native Italy, and the country’s official 2011 selection for Best Foreign Film Academy Award consideration, ‘The First Beautiful Thing’ (also known as ‘La Prima Cosa Bella’) is a movie that’s both heartrending and heartwarming, and never falsely so. Fabulously staged and rapturously acted, it’s an honest and perceptive tale of adult reconciliation — of coming to the recognition that one’s parents are actually people too, and loving them with their faults and shortcomings, all the same. The story opens in 1971, at a small town fair,…

Title: In Our Name Writer-director: Brian Welsh Starring: Joanne Froggatt, Mel Raido, Andrew Knott, Chloe-Jayne Wilkinson, Janine Leigh, Shah Amin A British coming-home-from-war drama that toes the line between pedestrian and interesting, though tilting toward the former, ‘In Our Name’ connects chiefly as a gender-shift curiosity given its main focus on a female soldier. Joanne Froggatt’s engaging performance, which picked up the Most Promising Newcomer prize at this past year’s British Independent Film Awards, is the chief selling point of writer-director Brian Welsh’s sophomore outing, which otherwise cycles through the expected interpersonal difficulties of trying to readjust to civilian and married life. ‘In Our Name’ opens with Suzy Jackson (Froggatt) returning…

Title: The Ledge Writer-director: Matthew Chapman Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson, Terrence Howard, Chris Gorham A tapestral suspense drama about the intertwined romantic fates of a quartet of Baton Rouge residents – each wounded in their own way, and some more freshly than others — The Ledge exhibits a willingness and desire to let its characters bat back and forth opposing philosophies of life and faith more frequently found on display in literature or off-Broadway theater. An interesting character study only half-successfully masquerading as a kind of specifically plotted romantic thriller, writer-director Matthew Chapman’s movie resembles the smart and sensitive but still gangly teenager pushed out of the door, wearing clothes…

Title: The Chameleon Director: Jean-Paul Salome Starring: Marc-Andre Grondin, Ellen Barkin, Famke Janssen, Emilie de Ravin, Nick Stahl, Brian Geraghty, Tory Kittles, Nick Chinlund Amazing things happen every day, all the world over, but the perils of sticking too closely to chronological fact in the cinematic adaptation of what by most accounts is an interesting true story are amply demonstrated in The Chameleon, an emotionally opaque drama about a wayward European youngster who — with the help of a deeply dysfunctional family, each of whom perhaps has different reasons for wanting to believe – passes himself off as a missing Louisiana teen before finally being outed by federal investigators. A solidly sketched sense of place can’t elevate this torpid…