Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

Good "Friend": Keira Knightley and Steve Carell
fall in love one last time.

“Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” is an unlikely romantic comedy wrapped up in a grim, doomsday tale of mankind having only three weeks left to survive thanks to a runaway asteroid hurtling towards Earth.

Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie opens in New York City where a soft-spoken insurance salesman named Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell) loses his wife when she abruptly abandons him after hearing the latest news about the impending apocalypse. Left all alone, Dodge wearily drags himself back to his empty apartment with only his sad memories to keep him company.

Meanwhile outside, the end of the world has seemingly splintered the harried denizens into categories ranging from suicidal (people hurling themselves out of windows), to destructive (streets become a dangerous snarl of rioters, looters and arsonists), to hedonistic (wild parties feature unlimited, guiltless sex and drugs).

Desperate to escape, Dodge leaves the Big Apple and heads for Delaware, where his onetime high school sweetheart, an enigmatic figure named Olivia, may still have feelings for him. Accompanying him is Penny (Keira Knightley), an attractive and amiably scatterbrained neighbor who hopes to travel to England to see her parents one last time.

It’s not a stretch to predict that Dodge and Penny will eventually fall in love, but what’s more interesting about their relationship is how the affection between them grows based largely on shared feelings of sadness and regret. Both are fresh from breakups (Penny just split with her boyfriend) and both feel a deep need to reconnect with parents (Dodge is still tormented by his dad leaving him as a child).

“Seeking” recovers from a messy first fifteen minutes—in which the madness and chaos of looming planetary destruction threatened to overwhelm any attempt at thoughtful introspection—and becomes a quiet contemplation of subtle themes, especially abandonment and loneliness. The romance between Dodge and Penny is like a gentle mingling of two lost, fragile souls, sweet and poignant. Even a cute, small dog that tags along with the two characters during the film has been deserted, having been left tied to Dodge’s foot when he passes out in the park at one point.

The key performances are highlights. Keira Knightley is warm and wonderful as the sometimes bubbly yet vulnerable Penny. And as the melancholy Dodge, the always impressive Steve Carell continues—along with “Dan in Real Life” and “Crazy, Stupid Love”—to establish himself as the latest likable everyman of the cinema, a Jimmy Stewart for the new millennium.

Despite being fairly fatalistic, “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” remains a genuinely sweet love story with a surprisingly original bend. These days, maybe you have to die to get a fresh idea in the movies.

Katy Perry: Part of Me (2012)

Fun "Part": Katy Perry stars in her own pop-doc.

“How can you ever be too cartoony?” giggles Katy Perry early on in “Katy Perry: Part of Me,” a breezily entertaining pop-doc about the highly popular singer known as much for her wacky costumes and colorful sets as for her string of number one hits.

The movie, a half biopic, half concert film, features an array of footage of the amiable 28-year-old pop princess—on stage performances, backstage meet and greets, interviews and candid moments—during several stops on her exhaustive 127-show tour in 2011. Along the way, it chronicles Perry’s meteoric rise from anonymous gospel singer to international superstar.

Directed by Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz, the most notable revelation emerges in the backstory of how a young girl from Santa Barbara, Calif. somehow went from being the daughter of religious parents (her mother and father are both pastors at a Pentecostal church) to the widely beloved artist of such hits as “I Kissed a Girl,” the lyrics of which—with its hints of sexual liberation, erotic curiosity and provocative playfulness—doesn’t exactly scream god-fearing conservative.

And yet, when Perry talks about her musical inspirations—like the edgy Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, whose dark, angry work helped define the alternative rock movement of the 90s—it's clear that the pop diva’s style is less about shedding her religious roots than about being the next generation’s voice of female empowerment.

Less interesting in “Part of Me” are the moments that focus on Perry’s personal life, such as a short marriage to the British actor Russell Brand. The couple’s breakup occurs during the tour and accounts for a few maudlin scenes of Perry, now tear-stained and devastated, trying to pull her emotions together at the last minute before a show.

Still, just as the star's marriage seems to dissolve in a flurry of heartbreaking texts, supportive messages come streaming from a gaggle of followers on Twitter, in a neat juxtaposition that allows the film to say something about the way modern communication instantly links fans and celebrities alike.

Of course, there’s plenty of music to both satiate hardcore fans and impress casual viewers. Perry’s brand of engaging bubble gum pop doesn’t have the versatility or depth of Madonna (another of Perry’s idols), but it is polished and infectious.

Like a lot of artists, Perry seems to save her best for the concert setting, feeding off the audience’s affection and enthusiasm with a mix of energy, swagger and confidence that makes her shine as brightly as her big, blue eyes. Even though she performs in a childlike, carnival world of swirling pastels and cotton candy colors, the way Katy Perry owns the stage makes her act at once smart as well as sweet.

The Skeleton Twins (2014)

Uneasy Twins: Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig star in the
uneven suicide comedy "The Skeleton Twins."

The two lost and troubled souls at the center of “The Skeleton Twins”—a well-acted, sometimes funny but shaky blend of comedy and drama directed by Craig Johnson from a script by Johnson and Mark Heyman—are a brother and sister tandem who have not seen each other in ten years, drifting apart despite a seemingly happy childhood together. Things have not gone particularly well since the split.

The brother, Milo (Bill Hader), hasn’t been able to get his acting career going after moving to Los Angeles; while his sister, Maggie (Kristen Wiig), lives in New York and is married to a nice guy (a grinning, sycophantic Luke Wilson) that she constantly cheats on. Although they occupy spaces on opposite ends of the country, the twins are linked by a tragedy—the suicide death of their father—that continues to torment them; however, in a macabre twist, it also manages to bring them closer.

Shortly after the movie begins, Milo is recovering from his own suicide attempt, lying in a hospital bed with bandaged wrists. Maggie has flown in to see him, having received the phone call regarding his condition just in time before gulping a deadly handful of pills.

Later, there will be more suicide scares, ranging from understated (Milo contemplates a belly flop from the roof of a building) to lurid (Maggie ropes herself to heavy weights before plunging into the deep end of a pool), in a film that seems bizarrely eager to establish a record for most times characters attempt to kill themselves.

The initial near-death sequence sets the stage for the twins’ reunion that’s by turns cathartic and messy, as warm and sentimental memories mingle with painful and long-buried secrets. Meanwhile, the pair continues a pattern of bad choices. Maggie has several dalliances with a hunky Scuba instructor; while Milo, who is gay, looks up the sleazy, duplicitous former English teacher  he first met while still a minor.

Wiig and especially Hader do a surprisingly good job playing serious, but “The Skeleton Twins” is a mix of misery and mirth that awkwardly pinballs between suicide and comedy, infidelity and whimsy. The result is a kind of queasy comedy that’s at best disorienting and at worst disingenuous.

Still, it’s not without some highlights. The two best and funniest scenes remind the viewer of the brand of short, sketch comedy that Wiig and Hader excelled at on Saturday Night Live. In the first, Milo and Maggie have a silly exchange after inhaling a few rounds of laughing gas at her dental office; and in the second, they perform an impromptu lip-syncing to the hopelessly infectious ‘80s pop tune “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” that’s as cute as it is hilarious.

You’ll remember those moments long after forgetting about the rest in “The Skeleton Twins.”

Wild (2014)

"Wild" at Heart: Reese Witherspoon plumbs
the depths of pain along the Pacific Crest Trail.

Somewhere along her extraordinary 1,100 mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) pauses to tend to a sore foot and ends up inadvertently knocking one of her boots over the edge, sending it tumbling hundreds of feet down the side of a steep mountain. Unable to retrieve it from the abyss below, she lets out a feral, expletive-laced scream of frustration while launching the second, now useless shoe over the cliff.

It’s a brief step in the wrong direction for the main character, but fortunately, the outstanding film about her has no such flaws. Based on Strayed’s first person memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the movie version of “Wild”—a spellbinding and masterful biopic directed by Jean-Marc Vallee from a screenplay by Nick Hornby—finds the right note from the opening scene and never steps wrong.

Unable to cope with life and still brutally mourning the death of her mother (Laura Dern) four years earlier, Cheryl, at 26, divorces her husband and leaves home in Minnesota, setting off for Southern California with a hulking backpack of supplies. Despite not being an experienced hiker, she immerses herself in a perilous, solitary walk—Strayed would later call it a journey of self discovery—beginning in the dangerous heat of the Mojave Desert, traversing the snowy mountains of Northern California, and finishing, ninety-four days later, in the rainy wilderness of the Oregon-Washington border.

We learn more about Cheryl’s turbulent, often agonizing past through the film’s distinctive, hypnotic use of flashbacks, which often spring suddenly from images that seem to pop up and ambush Cheryl’s mind. There’s the strong bond with her struggling but wise mother ("You've got to find your best self,” she tells Cheryl at one point, “and when you do, hold on to it for dear life"); the devastating illness that quickly and cruelly claims her mother’s life at an early age; and later, Cheryl’s self destructive plunge into a dark world of cynicism, meaningless sex and heroin use.

If some of the themes in “Wild” are about coping with grief and the fragility of life, the grueling physical journey at its center becomes the ultimate visual metaphor for Cheryl's struggle to find psychological and spiritual clarity. It’s a task she accomplishes by facing her fears on the trail, but also—in a nod to the creative process—by facing her memories through journal writing.

So much of the film is just Cheryl hiking along, breathlessly making her way along the trek, alone with her thoughts. The outdoor imagery is never less than exquisite—Vallee captures the beauty and scope of the rugged landscape with lovely and lyrical wide screen compositions—but it’s the emotions and memories (often beautiful, at times inscrutable, sometimes haunting) that make “Wild” stirring and powerfully moving.

With movies like “Legally Blonde,” Reese Witherspoon has been operating beneath her capability for a long time. But here, she fully showcases her wide range of expression—perfectly and fiercely conveying shades of contempt and desperation, vulnerability and fear, sadness and rage—in a gritty, uncompromising and brilliant performance. Those who've been waiting patiently since "Election" for her to get a role to really sink her teeth into are finally rewarded with one of the finest performances by an actress in recent memory.

“She was the love of my life,” Cheryl says to someone at one point, about the woman who was taken away from her too soon. “Wild” is a love letter to the lives of people that touch us deep enough to make us want to walk a mile, or a thousand, just to keep thinking about them.

Twilight (2008)

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson in "Twilight."

After waiting seven years to watch “Twilight,” the question for the novice viewer is not what took so long, but rather, can one possibly endure the four more entries required to complete the series? The answer, much like the forbidden romance between the characters in this teen vampire saga based on books by Stephenie Meyer, is filled with expectation but tempered with hesitation and doubt.

The original actually works to a degree thanks to director Catherine Hardwicke, who does a good job establishing the ominous feel of the story through atmospheric visuals and a resolute sense of locale. She also knows something about teenage troubles, having directed the astonishing “Thirteen,” a haunting drama about a young girl’s harrowing slide towards self-destructive wildness and promiscuity.

Here, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is a morose teen from a broken home who has just moved away from her mother in Phoenix to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. Removed from the sunny milieu of the desert, the eternally glum Bella seems right at home against the gray backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, with its weeping rains and interminably overcast skies, fittingly photographed by Hardwicke using dull hues and washed-out colors.

Bella’s world turns once she locks eyes with the similarly gloomy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysterious, laconic classmate who just happens to be a 100-year-old vampire. They make an unusual couple. For some girls, Edward’s personality would be a deal breaker (“Your mood swings give me whiplash,” she says to him in one of the funnier lines), but no use splitting hairs when you’re already willing to overlook the fact that your new boyfriend is a product of the living dead.

If part of “Twilight” is about a fear of intimacy or teenage sex, the theme is neatly fulfilled by the trappings of the vampire story. Bella wants to get closer, but a kiss on the neck—or, ostensibly, any other exchange of bodily fluid—can easily lead to a bite, turning her into a plasma-lusting phantom. So Edward keeps his distance, sort of.

But this subtlety doesn’t last and as the film moves into its chaotic second half—away from the emotional shadings and slight nuance of the first—tired clichés and comic book action sequences take over. Hardwicke can handle emotional tension but loses a grip once the film descends into overt mayhem. The result is poorly staged and choppily edited fight scenes that look like something out of a bad video game.

As this chapter grinds to a close, a posse of sinister vampires would like nothing more than to plunge their teeth into the mortal flesh of Bella, who takes quite a beating as the rival undead clash in a violent flurry of shattered windows and flying bodies. The villains are anything but vanquished; after all, this is only the beginning.

Digging a bloodied shard of glass from her leg at one point, you wonder what exactly the willowy brunette Bella, who could do much better, sees in this morbid fugitive from a coffin. She could save herself—and us—a lot of anguish by just telling him to take his ashen face and perfectly coiffed hair for a long walk back to the cemetery.

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley
Cooper in "Silver Linings Playbook."

Pat, the main character played by Bradley Cooper, is on his way home to his parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs during an early scene of director David O’ Russell’s uneven, quarrelsome romantic comedy “Silver Linings Playbook.” Suffering from a form of bipolar depression that leaves him alternating between condescending narcissism and outbursts of violent rage, he's hoping eight months spent in a mental care center in Baltimore will help him cope with life.

Not likely, especially when he refuses to take any medication (he says it makes him foggy) and clings deliriously to hope that his estranged wife Nikki will eventually take him back. Currently, she has a restraining order against him after he caught her cheating in the shower with another man and Pat nearly beat the man to death. Images from that episode are supplied in a bloody flashback that seems borrowed from a Quentin Tarantino movie.

If that weren't enough, Pat now has to deal with his troubled father (Robert DeNiro), an obsessive-compulsive neurotic prone to comic fits of superstition and dangerously excessive gambling (at one point, he seems to level his entire net worth against the outcome of an Eagles game), and long-suffering mother (Dolores Solitano), whose endless struggle for order amidst chaos suggests rampant co-dependency issues. Like Pat, the whole movie seems to have been skipping on its meds.

Russell, a normally highly competent director whose sharpest and funniest films—“Spanking the Monkey,” “Flirting With Disaster,” “I Heart Huckabees”—often take on characters with significant psychological quirks, struggles to find the right tone. The movie aims for playfully offbeat but misses wildly thanks to the charmless and depressive characters. There are few laughs and little charisma.

Doing her best to lift the heavy clouds of this dreary miasma of mental illness, Jennifer Lawrence arrives somewhere around the halfway mark as Tiffany, a young woman whose husband died in a car accident on his way home from Victoria’s Secret (he was hoping to jump start their sluggish relationship with a gift). And though Lawrence brings a depth, vulnerability and intensity to her scenes (something missing elsewhere in the film), it’s not quite enough.

The impossibly warm and fuzzy ending, in which Pat and Tiffany team up in a dance competition to help DeNiro win a bet—and seemingly to decide whether they are romantically compatible—rings so thoroughly false it seems to belong in another movie. You get the feeling that Russell, who based his screenplay on a novel by Matthew Quick, lost his way trying to adapt from the book.

“Silver Linings Playbook” doesn’t need an audience so much as it needs therapy.

It Follows (2015)

Maika Monroe stars in the eerie horror film "It Follows."

David Robert Mitchell, the forty-something writer-director of “It Follows”—a strange, eerie and highly effective new indie horror film—is around the age to have grown up during the heyday of slasher films during the 1980s. Perhaps the subgenre’s most successful and longest running franchise at the time was the “Friday the 13^th” series, movies that mainly involved the brutal murdering of sexually active teenagers at a secluded summer camp.

The theme of sex as the ultimate young adult taboo gets a reboot in “It Follows,” but in Mitchell’s film, instead of getting mutilated, eviscerated, garroted and hacked to death by a masked maniac, characters inherit a sinister curse after having sex in which someone begins to follow them. This is the fate that befalls our soft-spoken heroine, Jay (Maika Monroe), a college student living in Michigan.

After having a steamily intimate experience in the back seat of a car, Jay’s seemingly nice evening with her boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) turns ominous when he suddenly knocks her out with a mouthful of chloroform. She wakes up gagged and tied to a wheelchair in a dank, empty parking lot. It’s there where he tells her about the curse, explaining that the only way she can break it is to pass it along by having sex with another person. But don’t let the curse kill you, he warns, or it rewinds back to him, or something like that.

Indeed, the movie works surprisingly well even though the details are a little preposterous. That’s because Mitchell’s approach to the material relies more on subtle and atmospheric imagery rather than logic, building anxiety and tension with the use of stylishly creepy visuals, shadowy lighting, strange camera movements and a foreboding soundtrack.

Maybe the scariest thing about “It Follows” is the bizarre anonymity and randomness of the villain(s). Just what “it” is, is something we never quite know; but it often turns out to be a menacing, zombie-like figure—sometimes half-dressed like one of Romero’s living dead—with ghostly features, baleful eyes and a slow, stiff walk that suggests the somnambulist of the “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

One of Jay’s initial encounters takes place at school, when she looks out the window and sees the figure of a creepy old woman—which, as per the rules of the curse, only Jay can see—walking gradually towards her. The scene has eerie echoes of Jamie Lee Curtis seeing the killer for the first time in John Carpenter’s masterful “Halloween,” another film that, like “It Follows” (produced for a mere two million), was made on a shoestring budget back in 1978.

Aside from the doomed sexual metaphors of “It Follows,” Mitchell also tosses in a glimpse at sprawling urban decay when Jay and some supporting characters journey into downtown Detroit looking for clues to the mystery. As they pass burnt, abandoned and dilapidated buildings, they get a look at another genuine horror—the crime, poverty, suffering, hopelessness and desperation stalking the shadows in many of today’s inner cities.

It’s no wonder that at one point, the main character runs away and ends up on the kiddie swing at the park, as if hoping to magically backtrack to a younger time. In the nightmare world of “It Follows,” the thought of growing up is more terrifying than ever.