Haywire opens with a scene in which Mallory Kane (the retired mixed-martial-arts fighter Gina Carano), an erstwhile member of a private contractor's elite, government-sponsored fighting force, has a tense meeting with Aaron (Channing Tatum), a beefy colleague who's come to retrieve her from the field. Before the inevitable beatdown ensues — she's gone rogue after being double-crossed by her boss, so she's obviously not going anywhere without a fight — it becomes apparent that this isn't your typical action programmer. The tip-off isn't in what you see, but what you hear. Or, rather, what you don't hear. The two leads converse in near-complete silence, as if they're floating in space instead of sitting in an upstate diner. The waitress says a few words, meekly, but the expected sound bed of dishes clanking and walla FX is conspicuously absent.
Continue reading Haywire.
Easy A is a pleasant enough high-school movie, and it's certainly a sign of bigger things to come for the terrific Emma Stone, who tucks the whole film under her arm and runs with it. Stone plays the kind of teenaged girl who's as bright and hot as the noonday sun but is still a wallflower at her high school. In other words, she's a work of fiction – and one who starts getting noticed by her classmates only when she gains a reputation as a loose woman, displaying a red letter A on her chest.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an exotic multiplex confection – a romantic comedy with elements of its visual grammar swiped from comic books and videogames. It's tempting to say that people who are sick of conventional Hollywood love stories will find a bracing alternative here but, unfortunately, Scott Pilgrim isn't much of a love story, unless the affair you're interested in is the one between a boy and his cultural totems. If that's the case, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World should be hugely entertaining. It's a visual knock-out with the sensibility of a pinball machine, caroming from one set piece to the next, turning on lights and spinning little flippy things and ringing bells. It's not 
Count me among the great admirers of Todd Solondz’ 
This no-frills film-festival favorite from Greece is a single-family scenario. Like last year's excellent Belgian film Home, with which it shares a certain dark comedy (but not the earlier film's reluctant optimism), it features a wife and children who exist largely apart from the larger world into which the male breadwinner ventures on a daily basis. But where that separation in Home was generally a question of geography, in Dogtooth it's a matter of patriarchy.
