Early word among some insiders is that this year’s Sundance NEXT section may be the best yet, though hype has a tendency to take on momentum of its own. Still when it’s all said and done, some buzz titles may emerge from the section which is a spotlight on emerging talent. A first glimpse at one film that will premiere at next month’s festival, A Teacher bows today with the debut of its poster. [ Related: Sundance Film Festival Reveals 2013 U.S. & World Competition And NEXT Slate ] The simple image on the poster for A Teacher only hints at the drama, which may stir some controversy among audiences given the nature of its plot, described below: Diana (Lindsay Burdge), a young, attractive teacher at a suburban Texas high school, is well-liked by her students and colleagues. Her life seems to be following the status quo, but in reality she’s having a secret affair with her student Eric (Will Brittain). She confides in no one but him, reveling in the teenage terrain of sexting and backseat quickies. Even when the risk of discovery looms over their relationship, her investment in the fantasy remains stronger than reality. Unable to control herself, she heads down a reckless path of self-destruction. The subject of a teacher-student affair may be tabloid fodder, but writer/director Hannah Fidell resists sensationalism or the temptation to pathologize her protagonist. With bold vision, Fidell uses highly controlled pacing, silky camera movements, and a tense percussive sound aesthetic to free its narrative from the confines of convention, while a fascinating performance by Lindsay Burdge transports us into Diana’s head space, where her unabated obsession lives.
Ang Lee ‘s Life of Pi is a doubled-edged argument for the transcendent capabilities of film. Its central section uses the latest technological achievements to transform the fantastical, fable-like tale of Yann Martel’s award-winning novel into some of the most innovative and wondrous images to flicker across the big screen this year. And in its framing story, one it returns to periodically as if needing to keep the audience from getting too caught up in the gorgeous abstraction of its narrative at sea, it provides a reminder of why we should trust more in those images, as it ploddingly trots out its source material’s heavy-handed and unnecessary delineation of its own themes. Those themes include faith and what fuels it. And in case anyone watching is in danger of not picking that up, Rafe Spall, in the role of a fictionalized version of Martel coming to interview the title character (played by Irrfan Khan as an adult) at his home in Canada, announces that he’s been promised a story that will make him believe in God. The nature of that God is a general one — Martel, and David Magee, who wrote the screenplay, are more interested in the idea of religion rather than one in particular. As a young boy, played by Ayush Tandon, Pi Patel becomes enchanted by Hinduism, then Christianity, then Islam, practicing them all with no sense that they need clash. As a grown man sharing his extraordinary tale of survival with a stranger who has come his way by chance, Pi remains a figure of strong but vague spirituality, though the film’s ultimate assessment of why people choose to believe in a higher power seems unlikely to please the devout. Life of Pi is also, more compellingly, about storytelling: the way we choose to present and frame the events that happen to us. Long before he’s stranded at sea with a tiger for company, Pi’s life is one that’s filled with strands of magical realism. Born in Pondicherry in French India, he’s named after a swimming pool in Paris that his uncle once visited. Its clear water is presented by the film as looking like air until swimmers ripple its surface as they dart across the screen. He and his brother Ravi (Vibish Sivakumar) spend their soft-focus childhood growing up on a zoo run by their reason-loving father (Adil Hussain) and their softer, more nurturing mother (Tabu). The animal inhabitants are showcased in a delightful opening credits sequence — all except the newest arrival, a Bengal tiger with the unlikely name of Richard Parker. The tragedy that strands a teenage Pi (played by perfectly adequate first-timer Suraj Sharma) in a lifeboat with Richard Parker in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a terrifyingly realized storm that takes down the freighter transporting the Patel family and their menagerie to a new life in Canada. Water, whether in the form of a remembered pool or an angry sea swamping the deck of a ship, is the element that buoys the film along. Lee uses it as the medium for some unparalleled instances of 3-D, first in how our protagonist is thrown onto his tiny boat with a few panicked animals, riding giant waves that bring the larger vessel down to a resting place of haunting and tragic beauty. Later, as Pi and his dangerous companion struggle to reach some kind of accord that will allow for their mutual coexistence on a very limited space, the ocean stretches endlessly around them as a force of mystical capriciousness — sometimes it’s a mirror-still reflection of the sky, another time it offers up sustenance via a school of flying fish or takes it away in a dreamily alarming brush with a whale. The sea dwarfs the odd pair of travelers, the camera sometimes swinging out above the lifeboat to show it as a small blip in a vast body of water that resembles the cosmos. Pi’s continued existence and trials may be thanks to the whims of the universe — “I give myself to you!” he yells to whatever deity might be listening, “I am your vessel! Whatever comes, I want to know!” — but it’s his relationship with Richard Parker that provides the human side to this existential crisis. A seamless blend of real tiger and CGI, Richard Parker is a fully believable creation, and while Pi searches him for some sign of a soul, of some connection between living things, Life of Pi is careful not to anthropomorphize him. He’s a formidable beast, a potential killer, and the film’s best representation of its central question of whether there’s some design to existence or if it’s just a collection of chaotic and sometimes awful events. Unfortunately, Life of Pi also prods at this question during periodic returns to the present day with the grown Pi and Martel, and the scenes create the sensation of an author leaning over your shoulder as you read to point out all of the symbolism he doesn’t want you to miss. The story of Pi and Richard Parker already has the clean simplicity of a myth and really doesn’t require significant elaboration, but following in the footsteps of the source material, the film provides elaboration anyway, demonstrating a condescension to the audience that dulls the spectacle it punctuates. The past and the present day become an example of not just the contrast between the classic poles of showing and telling but of the fundamentally cinematic and the not. Pi’s reliability as a narrator is one of the key aspects of the story, but the heightened sensibility of his account is contrasted not with some underlying sense of another reality but of a framing story that’s only there as a vehicle for authorial exposition. Lee’s movie is a grand gesture of filmmaking pushed to its furthest technical edges, but hemmed in and confined by its fidelity to words on a page. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It speaks to just how good David O. Russell is at portraying raw, high-strung sincerity that Silver Linings Playbook is able to walk a line between likable and tolerable despite a premise the reeks of quirky bullshit. In addition to its frequently cutesy treatment of mental illness, the movie features a love interest who instantly latches onto and pursues the film’s mess of a hero like she read the script in advance and was assured things will eventually work out. Based on a novel by Matthew Quick and adapted for the screen by Russell himself, Silver Linings Playbook is an unfussy, rambling crowd-pleaser that recalls elements of the filmmaker’s past work: the New Age coachings of the existential detectives in I Heart Huckabees, the back-in-your-childhood-home set-up of Spanking the Monkey and the chaotic regional family flavor of The Fighter . More than any of that, though, the movie brings to mind the leaked videos of Russell having a meltdown in front of Lily Tomlin on the set of Huckabees , pacing back and forth, incensed and out of control. Russell seems, from all accounts, like a man who knows his way around mood swings and wild bursts of emotion. His very apparent ability to empathize with his protagonist in Silver Linings Playbook while allowing him to behave in some ugly ways both grounds the film and, at times, proves problematic. Russell is more generous with his hero than he is with those who live with and love the guy. Pat ( Bradley Cooper ) is a former teacher back from eight months in a Baltimore mental institution, The state-provided treatment he’s receiving for a previously undiagnosed bipolar disorder is part of a plea bargain stemming from his violent reaction to the discovery that his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) had been fooling around with another man. Pat has talked his mother Dolores (Jacki Weaver) into letting him come home against his doctor’s recommendation, and with Nikki having sold their house and secured a restraining order against him, he moves into the attic of his Pennsylvania childhood home and attempts to get his life in order. Despite having embraced a new fitness regimen (he’s rarely dressed in anything other than workout gear, with the occasional addition of a garbage bag-like vest to stimulate sweating) and a garbled but deeply felt set of self-help principles involving finding silver linings, maintaining positivity and the affirmation “excelsior,” Pat’s not doing that well. He isn’t taking his meds, he unapologetically bursts into his parents’ room at four in the morning to complain about the ending of A Farewell to Arms and he’s fixated on how he’s going to prove himself to Nikki and win her back, despite all the evidence that she’s done with him. Cooper’s slippery charm makes him an unexpected and imperfect fit for the role of Pat. He’s great at portraying his character’s utter conviction in his delusions and his enveloping rage when something pushes him over the edge. But, as devoted as he is to the role, Cooper does less well showing the character’s filter-free, no pretense appeal. To put it another way, Cooper tends to get cast as a handsome jerk for a reason, and given the oafish way he reacts to Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) when they first meet in the movie, it’s not easy to see why she would be so instantly and strongly attracted to him. She literally begins chasing him down the street when he goes for runs until he starts spending time with her. Tiffany, who is the widowed sister of the wife (Julia Stiles) of Pat’s friend Ronnie (John Ortiz), has some instability and past tragedy of her own to deal with, but Pat doesn’t want to play reluctant outcasts with her. He is determined to become the upright citizen he thinks Nikki wants. Lawrence imbues this potential (okay, likely) manic pixie dream girl with complexity and heart, showing her as someone who’s unwilling to let Pat push her around or push her away — though aside from Tiffany’s loneliness, Lawrence is given little to indicate why her character feels compelled to try so hard with this erratic new arrival in her life. She enlists Pat as her partner in a dance competition, and slowly begins to win him over as well as his family, which is headed up by a skeptical Robert De Niro as Pat Sr., a football obsessive and bookie whose superstitious beliefs feed into his OCD. The glorious mess that is Pat’s family and community is the warmest, funniest aspect of Silver Linings Playbook , from Dolores’ continual preparation of “crabby snacks and homemades” to the earnest but panicked Ronnie and the repeated arrivals and subsequent reclaimings by police of Pat’s friend from the hospital Danny (Chris Tucker). De Niro, showing uncharacteristic (for his recent work) signs of life, is downright wonderful as Pat Sr., channeling his fondness and hope for his wayward son into an insistence that Pat watch Eagles games with him because he brings good luck. Pat isn’t as lovable as the filmmaker seems to find him, and sentiments like the one expressed by Danny that the mentally ill might “know something you don’t know” come cloyingly close to suggesting Silver Linings Playbook believes mood disorders to be a gift. The tangible details of the town and its supporting characters are anything but saccharine, however, and when the film takes time and indulges in them, it creates a sense of place you don’t want to leave behind. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake. If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It’s one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven’s wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre. Instead of Earth and Mars, this Total Recall world is split between the United Federation of Britain and the country formerly known as Australia, now called the Colony. (Reportedly the two were originally Euroamerica and New Shanghai, but in the spirit of the rest of the film any potential political commentary seems to have been neutered.) Most of the world has been rendered uninhabitable by warfare, and the remaining population clusters in and threatens to overrun these two cities, which are joined by a giant transportation device that travels through the center of the Earth and is called The Fall. The Fall, half space shuttle and half commuter rail, is the film’s most interesting idea, uniting the oppressive UFB and its head of state Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) with the have-nots in the Colony — as many of the latter, including our hero, travel to the more industrialized nation each morning to serve as cheap labor. Quaid shares an all-concrete studio in the Colony with his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who like him heads out via The Fall to work every day. She’s in emergency services, he’s at a factory that makes the synthetic soldiers that serve as the UFB’s army. Quaid’s been having recurring dreams of a woman (Jessica Biel) trying to rescue him from a scientific facility. Exhausted by the grind of his day-to-day life, entranced by these nighttime visions in which, as he says, it “feels like I’m doing something important,” he stops by Rekall, a service that implants artificial memories of adventures that are practically like having done the real thing. He asks to be given the experiences of being a secret agent, which doesn’t go so well, because he may have actually been a spy in a past that’s been wiped from his mind. This Total Recall does away with the wonderfully queasy ambiguity of the 1990 film, in which we’re never sure if Quaid is a badass involved in a rebel conspiracy to decide the fate of the world or if he’s just a regular schmuck who’s become too fond of and given himself over to the illusion he purchased for himself as a bit of escapism. We never really doubt that Farrell’s Quaid/double-agent Hauser is experiencing a legit reality even when another character tries to convince him otherwise — there’s no sense, even when the trouble begins, that what happened at Rekall was anything but what we saw on screen, complete with an explanation for why the treatment might have triggered buried memories. It’s a shame, because that aspect of the first film allowed it to follow a typical movie arc while also carrying a pointed critique of it — how appealing, to learn you’ve actually always been one of the most important people in the world, that everything depends on you! Who wouldn’t find that more seductive than just being another working stiff filed away in a giant apartment block, even if choosing to believe it meant possibly abandoning the real world and demonizing your wife at the same time? As that wife, Beckinsale’s entertainingly indestructible and glowery, striding like a Terminator with an immaculate blowout down countless hallways while wielding a gun, and chasing Quaid over rooftops and along balconies after her cover as an enemy agent is blown (“I give good wife,” she sneers). Farrell and Biel are perfectly serviceable in uninspiring roles, while Cranston tries gamely to look like he could be the equal of Farrell in a brawl and Bill Nighy appears briefly as rebellion leader Matthias. The film flickers from fight scene to chase scene and back again, rarely pausing after the introduction for a quiet moment. Wiseman’s an adequate director of action, but only one or two of these sequences rise out from the ruckus of automatic machine fire — the standout involves The Fall and how gravity on the transport shifts when it passes through the Earth’s core. And while the sets and art direction are striking, with their multi-tiered urban landscapes, they also look familiar. The UFB is just a sleek, Minority Report future intent on taking advantage of the messily (and more Asian) Blade Runner esque future of the Colony. The synthetics are Star Wars battle droids by way of Tron . The floating car chase is awfully Fifth Element. This is a less cartoonish sci-fi vision, but to what end? The twists and turns of this convoluted tale of a guy who was bad but who may be able to reinvent himself as a better person thanks to having his brain scrubbed is fundamentally goofy, and it takes place in world that swarms with people but that only seems to have a handful of actual characters (when an important, dangerous attack takes place, Cohaagen of course heads it up in person, the way all world leaders do). These are elements that make sense when there’s a fair possibility the story might be all the protagonist’s indulgent delusion, but seem clumsy without it. Total Recall is an indifferent mean of whiling away two hours of your summer — but at least, unlike Quaid, you’ll be in no danger of getting lost in it. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The Real Housewives of New York City travel down to Miami to meet up with “Dirty Ol’ Dad.” The ladies brought their swimsuits, their heels and plenty of crazy as we recap it all in our THG +/- review. Miami is beautiful. The sun, the sand, the surf.
Big moves for Brit filmmaker Joe Cornish : The writer-director of Attack the Block (who also co-wrote Steven Spielberg’s Tintin and Marvel’s Ant-Man script with Edgar Wright) has landed the gig of writing and directing an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash for Paramount, Deadline reports . The alternate-reality sci-fi tale follows one Hiro Protagonist, a hacker/swordsman who discovers a new drug/computer virus called Snow Crash is spreading through the postmodern future… and you know what that means: Time for a round of Cast That Movie! Which actors out there could fill Hiro’s shoes? [ Deadline ]
A former grifter gets out of prison after serving 25 years for killing his partner in The Samaritan, and in a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the movies), tries to go straight, only to get pulled in for one last job. His name is Foley, and he’s played by Samuel L. Jackson, and this film from Canadian director David Weaver is svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink — until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn’t recover. The opening, at least, is stagey but solid. Foley is world-weary and jaded, and leaves prison expecting and getting nothing from the outside. Everyone he knows is either dead or would rather not be reminded of the past he represents, and any money he lent out is long gone. Foley is left to rattle around the Toronto he no longer knows, a city portrayed with self-conscious chiaroscuro to emphasize the story’s noir qualities. The only person interested in Foley is Ethan (Luke Kirby), the son of his old partner and a real piece of work. He has a grift and he has a target in mind — the dangerous but wealthy Xavier (Tom Wilkinson) — and while Foley wants nothing to do with the kid (who initially claims no resentment for what happened to his dad), Ethan keeps after him, taking him out for a drink and dropping a girl, Iris (Ruth Negga), into his lap like it’s another option on offer at the bar. Negga’s an interesting actress — her most prominent role to reach US screens so far has been as the best friend of the protagonist in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto , and here she gets a solid showcase for her very modern, Asia Argento-ish fierceness. Iris is both femme fatale and gamine in need of rescue, the product of an unhappy orphaned upbringing, a smack addict bearing scars from suicide attempts. She pursues Foley with a single-mindedness that he seems to find quietly alarming, and not just because he has his doubts about her motivations — she wields her disastrousness like a club, as if inviting victimization were part of her appeal, as though being self-aware were enough to address her many problems. The relationship that develops between her and Foley doesn’t crackle with chemistry and gets partially smooshed into a montage, but it does have some edgily interesting moments, as when he tells her she doesn’t need to shut the door when she goes into the bathroom to shoot up, and keeps her company when she does it. Being a con man is so much more a movie profession than any kind of tangibly real-life one that to say someone is unconvincing at it feels a little silly. But Foley just doesn’t make a believable grifter. He’s meant to have once been legendary (Ethan says he was the “best in the city, according to a lot of the old timers”), though we don’t see those days other than in a brief flashback to the murder. In the present, Samuel L. Jackson is so intrinsically Samuel L. Jackson that the idea of his slipping into a role to loosen someone of his or her cash is amusing — he makes a believable tough guy when he beats someone up in the bathroom of a dive bar, but he doesn’t give off the air of a smooth talker. When we do finally get Foley in action, his technique seems to be acting badly, woodenly talking about offshore accounts in a way that blatantly signals he’s here to gyp his target out of something despite his earlier advice that the trick of the game is that “the mark gets to act like he’s doing me a favor.” Jackson doesn’t so much act as appear in films these days, and while he does some initial modulating of his on-screen persona for the role of Foley, it starts to fall away — the way he delivers the line “Rip that shit off this wall and throw it away!” is so close to the rhythms of “Yes, they deserved to die and I hope they burn in hell!” it’s worthy of a giggle. But he makes a good former convict because he seems too together to wallow in the fact that the world has passed him by. As a mood piece, at least, the film’s introduction is mournfully interesting. The Samaritan is best when it’s letting Foley drink alone at his shadowy, empty bar of choice after the bartender has asked permission to ignore him and watch the hockey game, as he tries to decide whether or not to join the girl in the corner, a girl who’s promising trouble but also redemption. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
(CNN) – The GOP nomination may appear to be in Mitt Romney’s reach, but Texas Rep. Ron Paul isn’t leaving the race without knocking his rivals at least one more time. In a new 30-second ad set to begin airing on cable in Texas Tuesday, Paul hits Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as collectively Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : Political Ticker Discovery Date : 09/04/2012 17:43 Number of articles : 2
Im neuen Trailer zeigt sich der neue kleiderscheue Protagonist Dante als Terrorist mit Dauererrektion, sofern man dem fetten Nachrichtensprecher von Raptor News Glauben schenkt. Ist das der Weg, der für Devil May Cry bestimmt war? Mit Ninja Theorys Vision von DmC erklären die Entwickler die Vorgeschichte des smarten weißhaarigen Dämonenjägers. Und wenn man sich den Trailer zum neuen Action-Fest ansieht,… Broadcasting platform : YouTube Source : GIGA 2 Discovery Date : 10/04/2012 04:17 Number of articles : 2
You have to admire the chutzpah, if not necessarily the filmmaking skills, of Jay and Mark Duplass, the duo behind the stay-at-home-son comedy-drama Jeff, Who Lives at Home . With their 2005 debut, The Puffy Chair , the Duplass brothers took an uninteresting story fleshed out with lackadaisical dialogue and, using barely rudimentary camera skills, fashioned a noodly tale about love, life and relationships. It’s easier, maybe, to admire the Duplasses’ boldness more than the actual product, but you have to say this much for them: They sure do keep moving. Jeff, Who Lives at Home is the duo’s fourth feature, and if their sense of craftsmanship hasn’t grown by leaps and bounds in the past seven years, it has surely improved. Which raises the question: At what point do we stop applauding the Duplass brothers for their gumption and stick-to-itiveness and admit that, maybe, their storytelling just isn’t so hot? Or that their characters sometimes seem more like groovy-cute constructs than believable people? For example, the protagonist of Jeff, Who Lives at Home , played by Jason Segal, believes that everything and everyone in the universe is interconnected. Why? Because he keeps watching M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs over and over again. In the movie’s prologue, we hear him in voiceover as he writes in his diary, “It keeps getting better every time I see it.” Even if the movie’s title didn’t give it all away, you could probably guess that’s a setup for a story about a schleppy 30-ish guy who still lives at home with his mother (in this case, Susan Sarandon) but who will somehow find his purpose in life – his own sense of interconnectedness – during the course of the movie. And you’d be right. The whole conceit feels a little too manicured, too neat, even though the filmmaking around it is still pretty Duplassy – in other words, its earmarks are lots of (somewhat) shaky handheld camera moves and a decidedly uncinematic sense of composition. But there is, at least, a story here, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home suggests that the Duplass brothers really do want their movies to be better and better. Like the duo’s last movie, the 2010 Cyrus , Jeff deals with an adult son who isn’t, for vague yet understandable reasons, quite equipped to live in the real world. Sarandon’s Sharon, hoping to give him at least some purpose in life, just wants him to help out a little around the house – she sends him on a mission to buy some wood glue to repair a cupboard door’s broken slat. Jeff heads out to the store via bus, gazing out the window in a state of semi-wonder as it makes its way past some of the nondescript gas stations and fast-food eateries of Baton Rouge. He never makes it to the store: A mishap surrounding his certainty that the name “Kevin” is somehow of cosmic significance leads him into contact with his estranged brother, Pat (Ed Helms), whose wife, Linda (Judy Greer), has just given him the gate for being a fiscally irresponsible loser. (She seems to be right.) Jeff and Pat forge a tentative reconnection, reminiscing about their dead father and gradually – perhaps too gradually – wending their way toward a climax that gives real meaning to their lives. There’s some genuine sweetness in this story: Jeff may be a clueless galoot who overthinks everything, but he’s really searching for something here, and as Segel plays him, he does have a degree of lumpy charm. But even though much of the dialogue in Jeff is improvised, there’s still something deeply calculated about the picture: It has the distinction of feeling unshaped and sloppy and at the same time meticulously planned out in terms of what it’s asking us to feel. The picture demands that we feel protective of Jeff, and so we do. But we’re also supposed to find it gratifying when Jeff learns that the signs he’s learned to read by watching Signs really are signs. How you feel about the ending of Jeff, Who Lives at Home will depend on your capacity for cosmic delight, but I will say that one man’s date with destiny is just another man’s handy plot device. still, there’s one area in which the Duplasses’ instincts serve them well: The movie features a subplot in which Sharon learns she has a secret admirer at work. She’s pleased and flattered, but she has no clue who it is, and she shares her flutter of confusion with her co-worker and friend, Carol (played, with marvelous suppleness and grace, by Rae Dawn Chong). Everything Sarandon does here feels believable and natural — that’s in addition to the fact that she looks lovely, like a woman who’s happy to be living in her own skin instead of trying to shape it into a mask. She’s the kind of actress who can do a lot with a little, and it’s a pleasure to watch the way small gradations of feeling play across her face like the shifting sunlight on a half-cloudy, half-bright day. Her scenes with Chong (whom the Duplass brothers, God love them, also cast in Cyrus ) are superb, and they suggest that the Duplasses’ improvisational MO can work beautifully with the right kind of actors. Like the Duplass brother’s other movies, Jeff, Who Lives at Home worships at the altar of the small moment, without recognizing that some moments are just, well, small. But occasionally, the Duplasses hold their cracked magnifying glass up to something very real. And oddly enough, it’s the crack that makes all the difference. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
