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Tribeca Film

After two critically adored novels, success has hardened Philip’s heart and calcified any remaining slivers of decency that may have once existed. As a result, “notability” has turned him into an insufferable, self-involved and repulsive egotist, interested only in his writing and the potential acclaim that may follow. At first glance it doesn’t appear that Philip (Jason Schwartzman) is fraught with internal pain, but it is there. Underneath the narcissistic veneer is a man who neither understands himself nor the world he lives in, thus making it impossible for Philip to emotionally connect with anyone or anything. This recent bout of despondency propels him out of the sonically assaultive milieu that is New York City and into an idyllic country home, away from his photographer girlfriend Ashley (Elisabeth Moss), where he can begin working on his next novel.

This is the concise, swiftly constructed setup of Listen Up Philip, the acidic, sardonic and transcendent third film from emerging writer/director Alex Ross Perry.

A24

Earlier this week came news of WB/DC’s Suicide Squad, and the sparkly list of celebs wanted to play various morally murky supervillains. And right afterward came an update from Deadline- yes, Tom Hardy, Will Smith and Margot Robbie are super interested in pursuing some supervillainy (save for Ryan Gosling, who’s being all finicky). But in one throwaway sentence of that Deadline piece was something even more shocking (more shocking than Will Smith playing an outright villain, if you can believe it). It seems Robbie was free to pursue Suicide Squad because her previous target, the live-action Ghost in the Shell adaptation, had ditched her to pitch woo at Scarlett Johansson.

Relativity

The Nicholas Sparks idea well is running dry — also, hey, how come the guy hasn’t tried to kill anyone by tossing them down a well yet? surely, that has to be coming soon — and the prolific author has started cribbing from his own material to slap together lackluster storylines that only approximate genuine feelings, emotional ether floating on the breeze. The latest film to be adapted from Sparks’ written works, Michael Hoffman‘s The Best of Me is rife with plotlines pulled from other Sparks features — kid cancer, car accidents, using an interest in astronomy to prove that someone is smart, disapproving parents, a small Southern town (always a small Southern town, someone introduce Sparks to the North for chrissakes), trademark shocking deaths — but everything is so loosely cobbled together that the film feels closer to a cinematic adaptation of Nicholas Sparks-branded Mad Libs than it does an actual feature.

There is, however, one thing that Sparks is still damn good at portraying: the idiocy of first love. But while Sparks’ stories are so often occupied with showing good-looking teens pawing away at each other (and, yes, also pawing away at deep emotions), Sparks steadfastly refuses to face the truth of what he’s writing. These kids are dumb. First love is not the end-all and be-all. The person you are at age seventeen is not the (cough cough) best version of yourself, and continuing to base books and movies on such ideals is, frankly, as immature as anything you’ll find in the average American high school. These things — these emotions — don’t endure. But they do in Sparkstown, U.S.A., and both the author and his characters’ resistance to growing up is the worst part of the majority of his films. (And, no, we’re not forgetting about films like Message in a Bottle or Nights in Rodanthe, as it’s fairly obvious that the typical Sparks story is still about dum-dum teens.)

Racism is over in America.

That’s the conclusion reached by far too many people in the real world apparently, and the new film Dear White People sets out to address those opinions on both sides of the color-divide through a combination of frequent laughs and a sharply farcical commentary. If Higher Learning and P.C.U. spent a drunken night together this would be the frowned-upon result of that union. Just don’t call it a movilatto.

Winchester University is an Ivy League school populated primarily with white students, but the campus ignites with controversy after one of the houses hosts a racially-fueled party inviting people to come celebrate and liberate their “inner negro.”  We then jump back several weeks in the lives of a quartet of black students who find their own personal agendas intertwined and altered leading up to the party.

GoDigital

Not every film opens on thousands of screens (or in theaters at all) as more and more each year make their debuts on various video on demand services. We’ve already looked at a couple of the horror titles opening today, but two other new films aim to deliver VOD thrills this weekend too. They don’t share a genre, but both films feature characters who film part or all of the action.

Default is a hostage drama reminiscent in some ways of Captain Phillips or A Hijacking for the simple reason that it gives serious time to exploring the pirates’ motivations. It’s an airplane instead of a ship, but the bigger difference is that the film is presented in a found footage-ish format as both the hostages and pirates are wielding cameras. Extraterrestrial also drops a group of people into harm’s way, but the danger this time comes from someplace farther away than the African continent. A group of friends spending time at a remote cabin come under attack by alien beings, but as they fight to survive the night they discover that aliens may have an unexpected ally.

Kristen Stewart has long been maligned for her seemingly unshakeable performance tics – the hair-playing, the lip-biting, the huffy breathing – and despite being gifted with a compelling character in Peter Sattler’s ambitious Camp X-Ray, Stewart simply can’t kick her bad habits in service to a good performance. Sattler’s debut feature is set at Guantanamo Bay, requiring Stewart to play a young U.S. soldier who finds her worldview forever altered by her experiences, and the actress simply isn’t up to the task, bringing down the quality and power of the entire film in the process.

The film opens with a shot of the Twin Towers smoking on 9/11, as seen on television in a foreign country that we only, much later, learn is Germany. Aware of the events and confoundingly kitted out with a bag of cell phones, Ali Amir (Payman Maadi) turns his attention away from the news for afternoon prayer. He doesn’t finish those prayers, because a black bag is soon thrown over his head and he’s carted off to Gitmo. Beaten, caged, and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, the film then flashes forward to eight years later, and the arrival of Stewart’s Private Amy Cole.

DC Comics

Amidst all the DC Comics hooplah that’s got everyone so riled up (Ezra Miller, a solo Cyborg film, the dreaded words: “Part Two”) was a piece of news that was more or less confirmed a month ago: David Ayer‘s Suicide Squad. It’s a project that’s been in discussion for about a year (the words “suicide” and “squad” were first mentioned in reference to Warner Bros. back in December), and last month Ayer was said to be circling the project — meaning he’ll take it, probably, unless a stray tennis ball knocks him out of orbit and towards another gritty WWII tank movie. And when WB put out yesterday’s ten-page rap sheet of upcoming flicks, there was Ayer’s name at number two on the list — right next to a “Suicide Squad” and a “2016.”

In case you haven’t seen the Squad pop up on Arrow, the Arkham game series or their recent animated movie (they’re so hot right now), here’s a quick summation of what makes this squad so suicide-y. The Suicide Squad is a team of DC antiheroes (and outright supervillains) recruited by Amanda Waller (think DC’s Nick Fury, but more dickish), used as a super-secret superpowered blacks ops team. It’s a win-win for all: the various Squad members (usually, names like Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Bronze Tiger and Count Vertigo) get years off the multiple prison sentences they’re all constantly serving (they are supervillains, after all), while Waller gets a hit squad that can suffer a few casualties without anyone losing sleep at night (again, supervillains).