In this week's new releases: Disney’s live-action “Cinderella” has superb visuals, but lacks energy; Liam Neeson stars in “Run All Night”; and the documentary “The Hunting Ground” aims to shed light on rape on college campuses and the lack of response by college administrators local law enforcement.
★★ “Cinderella” (PG) “Director Kenneth Branagh and screenwriter Chris Weitz clearly have tried to bring the old story into line with 21st century feminist values: Far from a passive victim waiting to be saved by the handsome prince, their Cinderella is a paragon of quiet integrity and insight. But the lovely and fundamentally uninteresting Lily James is no match for the fire and elemental venom exuded by Cate Blanchett’s evil stepmother, who is by far the film’s most interesting character.”
★★ “Run All Night” (R) “The film by Jaume Collet-Serra, who previously directed Liam Neeson in ‘Unknown’ and ‘Non-Stop,’ plays out with the stylish if numbingly schematic brutality of an artsy action flick. Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad ‘Out of the Furnace’ Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food.” – Michael O’Sullivan
★★★ “The Hunting Ground” (PG-13) “‘The Hunting Ground’ continues Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s lucid and infuriating investigation of sexual violence, in this case the crime of campus rape and the scandalous lack of response on the part of college administrators and local law enforcement. From its first moments, compiled from YouTube videos of ecstatic high school seniors getting their acceptance letters, ‘The Hunting Ground’ makes clear that its message isn’t just intellectual, legal and political, but deeply emotional.” – Ann Hornaday
★★★ “Merchants of Doubt” (PG-13) “‘Merchants of Doubt,’ a documentary by Robert Kenner, takes up where the 2006 global warming tutorial ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ left off, probing the dubious annals of climate-change denial and the unholy alliance between corporations, partisan politics, pseudo-science and marketing that has given it traction despite clear scientific evidence and consensus.” – Ann Hornaday
★★★ “Eva” (PG-13) “It’s almost certainly no accident that the Spanish robot drama ‘Eva,’ first released in Europe in 2011, is finally showing up this month in U.S. theaters. Hot on the heels of the disappointing ‘Chappie,’ this Weinstein Co. release is a refreshingly artful tonic to Neill Blomkamp’s overblown sci-fi thriller about a rogue police droid that develops the consciousness and feelings of a human being.” – Michael O’Sullivan
★★★ “Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine” (Unrated) “The 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, in which two men brutally beat the 21-year-old gay college student and left him tied to a fence, transfixed the nation… Fewer people know about Matthew Shepard’s life. Before he became a symbol, he was just a gregarious kid trying to figure out life, which is what Michele Josue aims to show in her poignant documentary ‘Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine.’” – Stephanie Merry
★★★ “The Mind of Mark DeFriest” (Unrated) “Less than 15 minutes into the ‘The Mind of Mark DeFriest,’ the subject of this documentary — a prisoner in shackles — turns to the camera and asks, with a laugh, ‘Do I seem crazy? Can we have an honest opinion from the peanut gallery?’ Don’t answer that question. At least not yet. As you watch the rest of Gabriel London’s compelling film unfold, your opinion about the sanity of its titular subject may change, more than once.” – Michael O’Sullivan
★★½ “Queen and Country” (Unrated) “Like John Boorman’s semi-autobiographical ‘Hope and Glory,’ the sequel ‘Queen and Country’ uses war as a backdrop for hijinks and easily-healed heartbreak. Taking place nine years after Boorman’s 1987 film, which looked at the London Blitz of World War II through the eyes of a boy who doesn’t really understand the gravity of his situation, the new film presents the Korean War from the distant, somewhat sardonic perspective of a young British army conscript more interested in chasing women than in defending democracy.” – Michael O’Sullivan
★★★“’71” (R) “The early 1970s were bloody in Northern Ireland, with the Troubles building toward a fever pitch of bombings, riots and shootings that sent the death toll skyrocketing. It makes for an explosive backdrop in ‘’71,’ director Yann Demange’s gripping feature directorial debut about a British soldier who gets left behind by his unit in Belfast following a chaotic riot in 1971.” – Stephanie Merry
★★“The Salvation” (R) “‘The Salvation’ is a bleak movie about harsh living, and there is plenty of violence, although none of it is particularly gruesome compared to what we see on screen these days. The gunshot wounds that look like ketchup splotches make the villains seem a little less scary, but superb acting from a cast that includes Jonathan Pryce and Eva Green helps rectify that.”
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