http://www.okgazette.com/oklahoma/articles.sec-130-1-drama.html How weird that in its brief theatrical run, K-11 attracted more attention for who the director is (the mother of Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart) than for its outlandish subject matter (transgendered inmates). That oversight is as insane as this movie, which is new to Blu-ray.
]]> Not yet a household name, Jeffrey Brown long has been one of America's greatest young cartoonists, garnering attention and a following by writing and drawing what he knows best: himself. The indie favorite strays from the autobiographical to the fictional in his screenplay debut, Save the Date. It's a solid first try.]]> Don’t trust the viewers.

Trusting them appears to be the cardinal sin of Zero Dark Thirty, a masterful, absorbing film dramatizing the CIA's 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has been at the center of controversy for its depiction of U.S. intelligence agents using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” otherwise known as torture.]]> With magic-themed movies The Incredible Burt Wonderstone and Now You See Me on the way, Hollywood is all about the abracadabra these days. If that exposes more eyeballs to 2011’s The Great Magician, good.]]> In a short career largely dominated with genre films — from Final Destination 3 to this past summer’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter — Mary Elizabeth Winstead always has exuded a certain something. But nothing that ever suggested the level of performance she delivers in Smashed. ]]> It’s curious that the Internet Movie Database (among other sources) has classified The Loneliest Planet as a “thriller,” since the film forgoes not just all that genre’s trappings, but narrative altogether.]]> Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is my least favorite of the director’s half-dozen films. That said, he has yet to make a bad one. ]]> John Hughes, for all the love people heap on his ’80s teen movies, was far too easy on high school. Maybe your high school experience was different than mine — and, if so, congrats. For many of us, however, those years were a marathon of self-pity, heartache, passion and anything else you’d find on an album by The Smiths.]]> Vanguard director Takashi Miike is not one to repeat himself, and in Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, he hasn't — not really. Yes, the film is the Japanese filmmaker's follow-up to 2010's 13 Assassins; yes, both are remakes and focused on samurais. But they approach the genre from such varying ways that other than excellence, the similarities end there.]]> Nearly every scene of the made-for-HBO Game Change, I recall from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's excellent nonfiction book of the same name. But the movie directed by Jay Roach (of the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises) tells only half — maybe even just one-quarter — of the story, ignoring the 2008 presidential-campaign narratives of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards for the one it finds most compelling: that of Sarah Palin and John McCain, and not the other way around.]]> If John Hillcoat is setting out to build a directorial career on downbeat and depressing films, he's doing a fine job. From The Proposition and The Road — especially The Road — and now Lawless, bleakness is his bread and butter.]]> Please believe me when I say that my dislike for Magic Mike has nothing to do with being heterosexual. It has everything to do with mediocre acting and a mess of a script. And I say this as one of the civilized nation’s biggest Steven Soderbergh’s apologists who will defend the goodness of Haywire and Contagion to the point of fisticuffs if we must.]]> In an age of cinema jammed with reboots, remakes and raunch, it's a welcome revelation to come across the heartfelt Your Sister's Sister on Blu-ray and DVD, in which low-budget indie meets comedy of manners. ]]> Mathieu Demy's Americano opens with a little death, followed immediately by a big one, as Frenchmen Martin (Demy) receives one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls that deliver the worst of bad news: His mother has died.]]> Nothing can bring out one’s inner Richard Nixon like a flight of baby-boomer whimsy that rubs your nose in 1960s nostalgia. Peace, Love & Misunderstanding, a gentle-minded paean to the Woodstock generation, might just make you want to punch a hippie. ]]> Life can change in the blink of an eye, according to the opening minute of the turgid romance The Lucky One. It's the kind of empty observation that has become such a cliché, it no longer holds weight. But somehow, against God and every force of nature, grotesquely arrogant novelist Nicholas Sparks has built a lucrative career stringing such things together.]]> When Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film, Full Metal Jacket, hit theaters in the summer of 1987, I was all of 16 years old. Even I could tell it was far better than Oliver Stone’s Platoon, which by then had won four Academy Awards; by comparison, Jacket would be nominated for one, Best Adapted Screenplay, and lose it to The Last Emperor. ]]> Judging by the 1962 portrayed by The Chapman Report, everybody smoked cigarettes, LPs of poetry readings were a hot commodity, and the female orgasm had yet to be invented. While this film from legendary old-Hollywood director George Cukor (My Fair Lady) was determined to be earnest and serious in its time, it's quite a hoot today.]]> My wife barely can stand — and sometimes refuses — to watch TV shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm because they make her too nervous. Therefore, she would hate Michael and Silver Tongues, two new-to-DVD entries in discomfort cinema. I recommend them both, while acknowledging they are far from the easiest of watches.]]> Strangely, the biggest shock surrounding Best Laid Plans isn't that someone thought to redo John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in the world of underground mixed martial arts, but that it works as well as it does — or hell, that it works at all.]]>