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Goats (Dir: Christopher Neil). Starring: Graham Phillips, David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga, Ty Burrell, Keri Russell, Justin Kirk, Dakota Johnson, Anthony Anderson. Fifteen going on 30, Ellis (Phillips, TV's The Good Wife) heads east to an elite boarding school, leaving behind two unusual, emotionally stunted guardians: his narcissistic New Agey mom, Wendy (Farmiga), and Goat Man (Duchovny), a mellow goat herder and botanist who permanently resides in the pool house. As Ellis flourishes socially and academically in New England—and reunites with his estranged, straight-laced dad (Burrell)—life in Tucson fades away. The emotionally needy Wendy takes up with a douchey mooch (Kirk) while Goat Man remains strangely incommunicado, mostly because shipping pot through the U.S. mail is too risky. The large number of subplots plus the lack of a compelling central conflict prevent this coming-of-age tale from gaining momentum. Just when we're covering territory we like, Neil, an acting and dialogue coach making his directorial debut, sends us somewhere else. The problem is, I don't think he knows the final destination. Mark Jude Poirer adapted the screenplay from his novel. [R] **
Killer Joe (Dir: William Friedkin). Starring: Matthew
McConaughey, Emile Hirsch, Thomas Haden Church, Juno Temple, Gina Gershon. In
debt to the wrong people, Texas dirtbag Chris (Hirsch) hatches a plan to make
amends. The beneficiary of his mother's $50,000 life insurance policy is his
little sister, Dottie (Temple). Kill mom, whom no one will miss, and everybody
gets a share, including Chris's moron father (Church) and shrewish stepmother
(Gershon). To perform the act, the cash-strapped Chris hires crooked Dallas
detective Joe Cooper (McConaughey), who takes the child-like Dottie as a
"retainer" for his services. And things get complicated (and
delightfully weirder) in this atmospheric, really dark comedy featuring
a stunning, coiled spring performance from McConaughey, who has spent a good
portion of 2012 reminding us that his charisma has value beyond intolerable
romantic comedies. Directed with gothic flair by Friedkin (The French
Connection), this white trash film noir masterpiece doesn't have a lick of
pretension. Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tracy Letts wrote the script,
which is based on his off-Broadway play. [NC-17] ***1/2
360 (Dir: Fernando Meirelles). Starring:
Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Ben Foster, Gabriela Marcinkova,
Juliano Cazarré, Maria Flor, Dinara
Drukarova, Jamel Debbouze. A gigantic
international cast participates in this philosophical think piece on
connections and life paths written by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The
Queen). Law and Weisz are unhappily married in London. She's having an
affair with a hunky photographer (Cazarré), whose fed-up girlfriend
(Flor) returns to Brazil. On her way home, she meets a recently released
prisoner (Foster) and an older gentleman (Hopkins) on a fruitless search for
his missing daughter. Hopkins' character, now in Phoenix, then attends an AA
meeting with a young married woman (Drukarova), who loves her boss (Debbouze),
a morally conflicted Muslim dentist. And that doesn't include the subplots
involving the gangster's bodyguard, a clueless prostitute, and her bookish
sister. Morgan and Meirelles (City of God)
encounter the two issues that befall many ensemble films: abruptly ended
storylines and characters of inconsistent quality. What's frustrating with 360
is that the gaudy architecture dilutes the power of the film's message.
Form doesn't follow function. Excellent performances—especially Foster and
Hopkins—occasionally cut through the condescension. [R] **
The Queen of Versailles (Dir: Lauren Greenfield).
Florida's Jackie and David Siegel were determined to build their gaudy version
of paradise: a 90,000 square foot mansion modeled after Versailles. (Their
current house is a paltry 26,000 square feet.) Among the features in America's
largest house: 10 kitchens, a ballroom, and a baseball field, which is totally
practical since it doubles as a parking lot. Then, the stock market took its
awful tumble, decimating David's time-share empire and causing the family to
make sacrifices. "They might actually have to go to college," says an
exasperated Jackie of her kids' suddenly not-so rosy futures. Greenfield lets
her subjects speak for themselves, and she gets material better fit for a
Christopher Guest feature. Jackie, now economical, loads multiple carts during
a Christmas shopping run at Wal-Mart. The Siegels' nanny is overjoyed to move
into the kids' old playhouse. David's solution is to work until he's 150—and
he's serious. In this stellar, sober effort, Greenfield avoids turning
high-maintenance Jackie and gruff workaholic David—whose marriage strains under
the pressure—into caricatures. They're just hopelessly adrift, the result of
countless years of distancing themselves from a reality they never planned on
encountering. [PG] ***
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