John Hillcoat (The Road) directs this true story co-written and scored by Nick Cave. Shia LaBeouf (Transformers) and Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises) star as entrepreneurial brothers who make and sell moonshine in prohibitionist Virginia. The brothers already have an ‘understanding’ with the local law enforcement, but when a gangster (Gary Oldman) and a dirty district attorney (Guy Pearce) vie for a piece of the boys’ profits, things get out of hand… quickly and violently.
Logan Lerman (from the Percy Jackson movies) stars as Charlie in this coming-of-age drama/romance about a socially awkward high school boy who finds solace among the ‘freaks’ while overcoming a past trauma that left him hospitalized. Emma Watson (Hermione from Harry Potter) and Ezra Miller co-star as Sam and Patrick, Charlie’s newfound friends. Together, the trio bond over music and star in a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show — very much the counter-culture sort of kids. Things go swimmingly until Charlie starts to fall for Sam, and Patrick’s secret relationship with a member of the football team is exposed to the whole school. As these and other dramatic entanglements threaten to destroy his new friendships, Charlie also begins having painful flashbacks surrounding the death of an aunt.
A man is wrongly convicted and sentenced to a brutal chain gang in this gripping tragedy from Mervyn LeRoy (The Wizard of Oz). Paul Muni (Scarface, Life of Emile Zola) stars as the innocent prisoner who succeeds in a daring escape and becomes a well-respected member of society before the law catches up with him. State extradition laws offer him some sanctuary, but Muni is tricked into voluntarily returning to the labor camp with the hope of wiping his record clean. Once there, all hope of a promised pardon vanishes and he’s forced to plot his second deadly escape.
Errol Flynn and David Niven star as World War I pilots confronting the grimmest odds of survival in this exciting and moving remake of Howard Hawks’ 1930 original. With its wartime setting and nary a woman in the cast, The Dawn Patrol is another great bromance in the grand tradition of war stories — it’s all about camraderie, brotherhood and sacrifice.
Writer/director Miranda July also stars in this Cannes and Sundance Film Festival winner about people trying to connect with each other in an age when culture and technology make that connection more challenging. The film seems to be saying that we are all experiencing this difficulty, but July’s characters are so quirky and awkward that Me and You and Everyone We Know is as much an absurdist fairy tale as it is social commentary. Either way, it’s an interesting film full of bizarre relationships mined for greater truth than for exploitation. Take a six-year old boy’s on-line relationship with a mysterious woman who agrees to “poop back and forth” into each other forever. Or a grown man’s sexually explicit window signage for two teenaged girls that pass by his apartment every day. July doesn’t play these up for laughs, but instead takes them to realistic and surprising conclusions. When the teenaged girls become curious and knock on the man’s door, he hides in fear. And when the boy agrees to meet his sexting partner, the potential nightmare is revealed to be something sweet and tender.
