Category Archives: Movie Review

“On the Road”: Hey Jack Kerouac, now for the tricky part

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“On the Road” is now playing at Sundance Cinemas: R, 2:05, three stars out of four.

Who would dare try to make a movie out of “On the Road”? How could you not, in the eyes of the many faithful followers of Jack Kerouac’s counterculture epic, not screw it up? This is an autobiographical book about which not only the events it’s based on have been mythologized, but the writing of the book itself is the stuff of legend. Kerouac famously blurted out “On the Road” in a three-week literary bender, taping the pages into one long scroll so he could write in one uninterrupted explosion.

Yet if anybody dare attempt it, it would be director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera, whose 2004 film “The Motorcycle Diaries,” featuring a young Che Guevara, traveled the same highways as Kerouac’s mix of free-wheeling travelogue and consciousness awakening. They haven’t made a film version of “On the Road,” because that would be impossible, but they’ve made a film for “On the Road” fans.

British actor Sam Riley plays Kerouac’s fictional avatar, Sal Paradise, who in the free-wheeling haze of post-war America drifts into the orbit of Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), who, in Kerouac’s memorable phrase, spend “a third of his life in the pool hall, a third of his life in jail, and a third of his life in the public library.” A two-fisted philosopher-drunk, Dean drapes an arm around Sal and takes him on a nonstop adventure — jazz clubs, poppers, wild parties and above all else, the open road. With Dean’s child bride Marylou (Kristen Stewart) in tow, the film cruises back and forth across the country, its essential fuel Kerouac’s words, delivered by Riley in a convincing imitation. It’s all episodic, with characters drifting in and out of the film without explanation, including Tom Sturridge in what looks like a Ginsberg knockoff, and Viggo Mortensen as a stone-cold William S. Burroughs imitation.

Hedlund is good as Dean, although I think the part works better if you think of him as Kerouac’s reminiscence of Dean (or Neal Cassady, actually) rather than a fully-dimensional person. Dean in the archetype Sam aspires to be, living fully in the moment. But that comes at a cost to everyone around him, including the women — Marylou, Camille (Kirsten Dunst), the mother of his child, and assorted women along the way. The film doesn’t judge, which I think I mistook for acquiescence until “On the Road” kept going, and Dean gradually, and finally, finds himself isolated from the world. The last meeting between Dean and Sal, now married and prosperous, is a heartbreaker. Dean got what he wanted from Sal, Sal got what he wanted from Dean, and the two men go on their way.

Surprisingly, but perhaps wisely, Salles doesn’t try to recreate the heady stream-of-conscious rush of reading “On the Road.” Instead, it’s staged as a rather traditional road picture, with title cards telling us what state we’re driving through, or what the month and year are. Which seems a little odd for a book that was originally written not only without chapter headings, but without even paragraph indentations. There’s something just a little too tidy about it (even the film’s fever dream, brought on by Sam’s bout with dysentery, is an awfully tidy fever dream), especially because there’s no real story to follow here, only encounters and images. But it gives the viewer time and space to really savor those moments, brought to life with Eric Gautier’s gorgeous camerawork, taking us out in the middle of the desert or deep inside the tangled bodies of a Manhattan house party.

The beauty of the images gives “On the Road” a touch of nostalgia, for a long-lost Beat Generation that felt it could change the world, or at least abstain from it. The movie version of “On the Road” won’t have the impact on a person that the book ever did. But it does go some way to explaining why the book did.

“Ginger & Rosa”: A special friendship goes nuclear

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“Ginger & Rosa” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 1:29, three stars out of four.

Elle Fanning has one of those faces you can’t help but watch. Her expression can become opaque and thoughtful, and then suddenly blossom into a smile that seems so unforced and unexpected that it seems to surprise even her.  She was good in “Somewhere” and even “We Bought A Zoo,” but you almost can’t wait for her to grow up to see what kind of actress she’ll be when she gets older, more complex parts.

She gets her most fully realized role to date in “Ginger & Rosa,” a delicate coming-of-age drama from writer-director Sally Potter. Potter is known for making more experimental and daring films like “Yes”: “Ginger & Rosa” is much more conventional, a finely-observed tale of friendship tested and outgrown.

Ginger (Fanning) and Rosa (Alice Englert) were fated to be friends from the day they were born, when their mothers met in a maternity ward in London in 1945. Both mothers knew their share of disappointment; Rosa’s mother (Jodhi May) raised her children on her own, while Ginger’s mother (Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men”) may as well have; her philosopher husband Roland (Alessandro Nivola), a pacifist and writer, was often too busy chasing after a cause (or a girl he met through the cause) to be a father. He doesn’t even like Ginger calling him “Dad.”

Now it’s 1962, and the girls are inseparable. Potter opens the film with gorgeous images of friendship — perhaps made all the more beautiful because they’re set against the ruins of post-Blitz London. The girls, now teenagers, sneak cigarettes together, shrink their jeans in the tub, hang out with Mod boys in fast cars. At first it seems like Potter is going to make “Ginger & Rosa” a nostalgia trip to adolescence and an England long gone.

But the bond between Ginger and Rosa starts to crack a little. The Cuban Missile Crisis looms, and Ginger starts to become more worried about the threat of nuclear war. That unforced smile vanishes, and she goes to anti-nuke rallies and meetings. Rosa, meanwhile, is sexually maturing much faster than the more tentative Ginger, and begins flirting with the dashing Roland. To everyone’s surprise (including the audience), he reciprocates, and Ginger is forced to accept this development with an air of false sophistication, as if it was natural for her best friend and her father to become romantically involved.

The title of the movie is misleading, because this is really Ginger’s story, and Fanning’s show. She manages the British accent convincingly (her bright orange dye job slightly less so), but is even better at showing the contradictions and complexities of adolescence, careering from confusion to anger, trying to play the part of a world-weary adult while still a trusting child at heart. She has some especially lovely scenes with Oliver Platt and Timothy Spall, who play a gay couple she befriends, and some raw emotional scenes with Hendricks as her mother.

“Ginger & Rosa” flirts with melodrama, especially as the Roland-Rosa relationship plays itself out. But Fanning brings such a groundedness and authenticity to the film’s central role that you stick with her every step of the way.

“No”: And now a word from our sponsor — freedom

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“No” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. 1:50, R, four stars out of four.

In 2009, one of the last films to get a first run at the Orpheum Theatre was a strange and unsettling little movie from Chile called “Tony Manero.” It followed a sad-eyed serial killer named Raul, who was obsessed with “Saturday Night Fever” and dreamed of winning a John Travolta lookalike contest on TV. In a Chile under the thumb of General Augusto Pinochet, where the police were more concerned with quelling dissidents than protecting the citizenry, Raul was free to indulge in both of his obsessions — murder and disco dancing — with impunity.

Director Pablo Larrain made Raul’s ridiculousness intertwined with his depravity, which is part of what made “Tony Manero” so disturbing. “Manero” ended up being the first part of a trilogy by Larrain about life under Pinochet, and the third part, the Oscar-nominated “No,” arrives in Madisn this week. It’s also a strange mix of the horrific and the silly, but this time silliness is on the side of the angels in a brilliant and highly entertaining film that’s part political thriller, part media satire.

The year is 1987, and Pinochet has been in power for 15 years. He wants the country to look forward, forget about the dead and the disappeared, and he wants the rest of the world to recognize him as a legitimate political leader, not a brutal thug. So he takes the unusual step of scheduling a referendum, a simple “YES” or “NO” on Pinochet’s rule. He figures he can’t lose — most of his opponents think the election is a sham, anyway. The entire election campaign will last 28 days, and every day both sides will get 15 minutes of airtime on Chilean television to make their case. (Say what you will about Pinochet’s crimes, but that sounds awfully refreshing in a country where we’re already talking about candidates for 2016.)

To make their case on television, the “NO” camp reaches out to a flashy young advertising executive, Rene Saaverda (Gael Garcia Bernal). Rene’s father is a political dissident exiled in Mexico, and Rene has steered clear of politics, making flashy, cheesy commercials for soft drinks. At first, he’s reluctant to have anything to do with “NO” campaign, but eventually signs on. His boss, played by Alfredo Castro, who was Raul in “Tony Manero,” is already working for the “YES” campaign.

The central joke of “No” is that Rene is a creature of advertising, of jingles and slogans, cute puppies and cleavage, into a deadly serious political campaign. When the “NO” camp shows him their first attempt at an ad, featuring horrific footage and statistics of all those Chileans tortured and murdered, his response is unequivocal: “It doesn’t sell.” Instead, he comes up with a hliarious mash-up of Coke and fried chicken commercials to sell democracy to the people. Bernal very deftly and amusingly plays Rene as sort of a vacuous advertising guy, a divorced dad who still rides a skateboard to work, whose political consciousness slowly gets reawakened.

From there, “No” is by turns comic and dramatic as it shows the escalating media arms race between the “YES” and “NO” camps, as Rene’s simple, optimistic campaign starts to gain traction with the population. On the one hand, Larrain is clearly making fun of the banality of advertising, how even the most serious issues have to be reduced to easy-to-digest sound bites for a population — you want to depose a dictator, but you don’t want to bum anybody out. On the other hand, there is skill and craft involved in advertising, and as silly as some of the images that Raul comes up with are, when we see them on the TV screen, they’re effective. Finally, the people get a turn to create their own propaganda.

Larrain made the intriguing decision to film “No” as if it was made for 1987 television, shot in pre-letterbox full frame on crummy video. The effect is jarring at first, but ends up being very clever, because it makes the transitions from new to archival footage (much of the original ad campaign is used in the film) absolutely seamless. By the time we get to a scene where a “NO” rally is attacked by truncheon-carrying police officers, we’ve been so immersed in this world that the horror and chaos of the moment feels even more immediate.

In the end, “No” leaves us with a satisfying mix of emotions. The film ends on a triumphant note, but is it a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism, or of one catchy slogan over another? Even Rene doesn’t seem to be sure.

Wisconsin Film Festival preview: “Awful Nice”

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“Awful Nice” screens at 9:15 p.m. Thursday, April 18 at Sundance Cinemas. Writer-director Todd Sklar and co-writer and star Alex Rennie will attend. Advance tickets are available at wifilmfest.com.

If the title “Awful Nice” doesn’t sound familiar to you from your first mad dash through the 2013 festival calendar, that’s because it probably wasn’t there. Festival programmers just booked Todd Sklar’s film last week, after the calendar had gone to press.

It shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle, because this has to be one of the funniest films at the festival. And not just the sort of knowing-chuckle funny that one expects from indie comedies about estranged brothers, but huge, rolling waves of laughs. I watched “Awful Nice” in probably the most unfriendly environment for a comedy — on Vimeo, alone, on my desktop — and I was rendered helpless from laughing again and again. Sklar and Rennie have connected indie comedy to the tradition of broad slapstick humor, of punches thrown and windows smashed, and it’s just a riot.

“Awful Nice” is at heart rooted in a familiar tale of estranged adult brothers. Jim (James Pumphrey)  is the responsible one, a failed author with a family to support. Dave (co-writer Alex Rennie) has always been the family screw-up, drifting from one failed scheme to another, convince that his childhood collection of sports memorabilia will make him rich someday. How’s that plan working out for him? In the opening scene, Jim descovers Dave passed out naked in a wigwam, surrounded by strewn peanuts and a live tarantula.

Their father (nicknamed “The Colonel” for unspecified reasons) has just died, and Jim wants to drag Dave back to Kansas City for the funeral. For $150, Dave agrees. They haven’t seen each other in years, and always seem one careless remark away from a drag-out fistfight. Unfortunately, it seems the only remarks Dave knows is careless remarks, and the two grown men keep erupting into hilarious scuffles, looking like two kids wrestling in their parents’ rec room. The first act of “Awful Nice” is hilarious because of that constant button-pushing tension between the two brothers. There’s one fantastic, bizarre scene at a family dinner when Jim and Dave suddenly get into this bizarre drinking contest, madly gulping down every liquid on the table — beer, water, gravy — before devolving into the expected fisticuffs. They’ve never evolved past the “he did it first!” phase of brotherly relations.

The boys have to go down to Branson, Missouri to sell the family lake house, and find it trashed beyond belief. Dave decides it’ll be a great bonding experience if the brothers fix up the place, and Jim reluctantly agrees. The only problem (okay, one problem among many) is that neither has any idea how to do home repair. So instead they putter around the house and then head out on the town, getting sucked into Branson’s seamy underbelly (as opposed to its seamy overbelly), including British prostitutes and Russian mobsters.

“Awful Nice” plays it really broad at times, and Jim and Dave often reminded me of nothing more than classic slapstick comedy duos — the slow-burn straight man Jim as Bud Abbott, excitable loser Dave as Lou Costello. And, come to think of it, there has to be a “Three Stooges” short where the numbskulls had to fix up a house, right? Also, the supporting characters play things gleefully over the top, including comedians and podcast favorites DC Pierson and Brett Gelman as Russian mobsters, and “Law & Order: SVU” star Christopher Meloni, wearing the worst hairpiece you will see at the Wisconsin Film Festival, as The Colonel’s old business partner.

But as wild and silly as the movie gets, it still connects to the age-old tale of sibling rivalry, of how family relations bring out the worst and best in everyone. It’ll be a blast to see with a full house at the festival.

“The Host”: What’s gotten into you lately? A day-glo alien caterpillar?

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“The Host” opens Friday at Point, Eastgate and Star Cinemas. PG-13, 2:05, One and a half out of four stars.

Character actors ought to get a special rate when they’re required to make complete nonsense sound convincing in a movie. Even the silliest movie calls in a Stanley Tucci (“Jack the Giant Slayer” and the upcoming “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) or a Tim Robbins (“Green Lantern”) to try and peddle the ridiculous.

William Hurt ought to get triple the going rate for making “The Host” a little better than it ought to be, right from the prologue, in which we see a shot of Earth, as Hurt says, “The world had never been more perfect. But it wasn’t our world anymore.” Ka-ching!

The world, in the silly and drippy sci-fi romance based on Stephenie (“Twilight”) Meyer’s novel, is now largely controlled by aliens, little thingies that look like fibre-optic caterpillars. They burrow into a human’s body and control them; outwardly, the only sign a human has been “occupied” is that his eyes glow like the power button on my Dell, and he forgets how to use contractions.

Meyer’s books have always had something of a conservative streak lurking beneath their supernatural mash sessions (what’s “Twilight” but not an extended pro-abstinence metaphor?), and it feels a little more overt in “The Host.” The aliens’ idea of a perfect society looks a lot like a latte-sipping liberal’s, with no war, the environment “healed” and a suspicious amount of Volvos and VW beetles on the road. With its tale of “real’ humans fighting against a collective that thinks it knows best, “The Host” overlaps with those “one world order’ Christian thrillers that Kirk Cameron keeps starring in.

Fighting these aliens, who favor white suits and shiny cars in the tradition of sci-fi aliens for generations of bad movies, is a ragtag human resistance. Melanie (Saoirse Ronan) is one of the still-humans; she’s captured by the aliens and has a squiggly new roommate implanted into her brain.

But this alien (named Wanderer, lately shortened to Wanda) hadn’t reckoned on Melanie’s force of will, and this turns into an internal tug of war, with Melanie’s angry thoughts and retorts to Wanda heard in voiceover. This might have worked in the novel, where dialogue can overlap seamlessly, but it’s a terrible decision for a movie, with the nagging Melanie coming across like the Great Gazoo to Wanda’s Fred Flintstone (“Don’t steal my boyfriend, dum-dum!”)

Melanie convinces Wanda to escape the aliens, and together Melanie/Wanda head to the resistance hideout in the desert, run by Hurt in full old-coot mode. (I mean, his name’s Uncle Jeb, he can’t help but be coot-ish.) The humans see Wanda’s glowing eyes and peg her as an alien, but eventually accept her into the camp because . . . there’s no movie otherwise? I honestly couldn’t figure that part out, or why Melanie insists that Wanda not tell the humans that she’s in there too.

The trailers show action-packed car chases and gunfights, but that’s just one extraneous scene. Most of “The Host” is a long, leisurely-paced hang in the resistance hang, as the humans learn to like and trust Wanda, and together Wanda and Melanie try and figure out how to reverse the alien infestation. Melanie reconnects with her old boyfriend, while Wanda starts flirting with another boy, which, since they’re in the same body, should make double-dating super awkward. Oh, and a bunch of aliens in shiny cars and helicopters, led by Diane Kruger, tool around the desert looking for them without much success. I guess nobody told the aliens how the satellites worked.

I like Ronan, and I feel a little bad that the movie requires to do so much frenzied arguing iwth herself, eliciting titters from the audience. Hurt is always fun to watch, and Niccol does have a distinctive visual style, best shown in the surreal image of a golden field of wheat growing  deep inside a cave.

But the source material is just too thin and mushy, with Meyer more interested in a tired love triangle than the narrative possibilities of the world she created. The aliens are kind of interesting — they’re not evil, and genuinely think they’re doing the planet a favor by occupying it. But the film is more interested in attractive teens getting all moony-eyed with each other (even if some of those moony eyes are glowing) and trying to start the inevitable franchise. Good luck with that; “The Host” is a movie about a girl with two minds, and it barely has one.

“Like Someone in Love”: Tokyo as a gleaming city of exteriors

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“Like Someone in Love” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated, 1:49, two stars out of four.

In his new feature, “Like Someone in Love,” expatriate Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami aims to put the viewer in the shoes of his characters.

Literally. The opening scene is shot from the viewpoint of someone sitting in a restaurant, fielding phone calls from a jealous boyfriend, exchanging chitchat with a friend at the next table. It’s only after a few minutes that we see whose eyes we’re looking through — a Japanese college student named Akiko (Rin Takanashi) who moonlights as a call girl.

The implication, I suppose, is that the men in her life don’t really see her, but the women they wish to see in her. Her pimp, who looks like an overworked banker, sees her as a commodity to be used. Her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase) sees her as an idealized, faithful supplicant, and of course flies into a rage upon realizing that isn’t true.

The third man she meets in the film is a customer, an elderly professor named Takashi (Tadashi Oduno). He sees Akiko as more of a surrogate granddaughter than a prostitute, preferring to eat and converse with her. When she heads for the bedroom, he seems to crumple quietly inside, his self-created illusion punctured.

Kiarostami returns several times to this first-person perspective with other characters, but the problem with “Like Someone in Love” is that, while we can see the world through their eyes, we rarely access how they think or feel about it. They remain frustratingly opaque, slipping into broad stereotype (kindly old man, angry young man, hooker with a heart of gold) rather than deepening.

Coming on the heels of last year’s dazzling and confounding “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami’s new film feels  like a bit of a step down. Having escaped his native Iran when the mullahs were cracking down on artists and filmmakers there, Kiarostami seems to have entered a new period as a “world director.” “Certified Copy” was set in Italy, “Like Someone in Love” in Tokyo.

The best scenes in the film use Tokyo, such as a long wordless taxi ride where the cool exteriors of the city glide by as Akiko looks on. But the film is all exteriors; where “Certified Copy” explored the deep, contradictory mysteries of the human heart, there doesn’t feel like much going on beneath the surface here.

After skimming along these surfaces, “Like Someone in Love” ends with a moment of sudden, shocking violence. It  doesn’t feel organic, more like Kiarostami figured he had to end his film somehow, and this jarring choice was as good as any. “Like Someone in Love” feels like a minor effort, an exercise in style rather than an experience.

Wisconsin Film Festival preview: “Sister”

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“Sister” screens at the Wisconsin Film Festival at noon Saturday April 13, at the Union South Marquee Theatre, and 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, at Sundance Cinemas. Advance tickets are available for both screenings. Visit wifilmfest.org for tickets and other information.

At first, the boy looks like any other on the ski slope. Decked out in a snow suit, his skis thrown over his shoulder, making chit-chat about the conditions on the slope. He could be the  youngest son in any wealthy and European family spending the holidays in the Swiss Alps.

And then we see him duck furtively into the chalet, into the locker room where skiers’ backpacks are kept. He rifles through the bag quickly, efficiently, and when comes across food, cookies or sandwiches, he stuffs them into his mouth like a starving man.

So begins “Sister,” a thoughtful and quietly wrenching drama from director Ursula Meier, one of several new Swiss films playing at this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival with assistance from the Consulate General of Switzerland’s Chicago office.

The boy is Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), and he isn’t a tourist. He lives in town in a grubby housing complex with his sister Louise (Lea Seydoux). Louise is in her early 20s, but is basically a child, spending her days chasing after unsuitable men, and then relying on 12-year-old Simon to pick up the pieces.

In fact, Simon is the one keeping them afloat through petty thievery and cons, stealing skis and goggles off the slopes and then selling them to the next batch of tourists who come into town. He’s cynical and streetwise — young Klein gives an amazing performance — but his sister is his weak spot. He’s hopelessly devoted to her, even if its her irresponsible ways that keep them from getting out of that filthy little apartment.

Meier very deftly shows the two worlds of this Swiss resort — the rich tourists who blithely sail in and out, reveling in the beauty of the Alps, and the working-class townies who live below, oblivious to the mountains, focused on making just enough money to live on. Separating the two worlds is the gondola, which Simon rides to “work” each day, and becomes a symbol for the yawning gulf between rich and poor. Gillian Anderson, of “X-Files” fame, has a small role as a wealthy mother who Simon briefly cons, and as much as Simon wants to steal from her, it seems more important for him to have her affection, to be treated, briefly, like someone who belongs there.

Back at home, the relationship with Louise is much more volatile (and contains secrets we don’t learn until late in the movie). Louise is helpless, until she finds the next man she thinks will take care of her, and then all but ignores Simon. In one heartbreaking scene, Simon offers her a fistful of his ill-gotten euros if she’ll just cuddle with him for one night. It’s hard to know whether it would have been worse for her to take the money, or refuse.

But these two people are a family, somehow, and “Sister” ends with a beautiful, wordless final shot that symbolizes their bond, always linked, never quite connecting.

“Stoker”: An Oldboy brings some new tricks to American film

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“Stoker” is now playing at Sundance Cinemas; R, 1:47, three stars out of four.

At first I thought that the projectionist at Sundance Cinemas had framed the image wrong. In the first few scenes of Park Chan-wook’s “Stoker,” Mia Wasikowska is repeatedly filmed so that there’s a few feet of empty space above her head. At first, I thought it was a framing problem, but when the adults in the film appeared, they’d be framed normally, their heads grazing the top of the frame.

It ended up being one of many clever visual decisions by Park, the South Korean director behind “Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance” making his English-language debut. Other than a taste for twisted family relations and uneasy violence (and a plot point that feels like a direct homage to “Oldboy,” although to reveal it would spoil both movies), what connects “Stoker” to his earlier work is a determination not to waste any shot. Every frame of a film is a chance to say something, try something.

I think that relentless attention to detail can be disorienting, even irritating for some audiences, and I was surprised to see “Stoker” getting low marks from some critics, who dismissed it as an exercise in amped-up style over substance. It’s true that in “Stoker” the story itself is basically a simple, eerie Hitchcockian thriller about a strange family in a strange house. But given that, the story is oft-told, wouldn’t you want the teller to find an imaginative way to tell it?

Wasikowska plays India Stoker, a strange 18-year-old girl grieving the death of her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) in a car accident. She was always much closer to her father than her boozy mother (Nicole Kidman), and with Richard gone, the two women circle each other in the old crumbling house uneasily. Adding to the tension is the appearance of Richard’s long-lost uncle, Charlie (Matthew Goode).

Looking like the world’s spookiest Gap model, Charlie insinuates his way into the affections of India’s mother, but seems more interested in winning over the suspicious India. The trouble with an otherwise fine screenplay (by “Prison Break” actor Wentworth Miller) is that the audience is way ahead of the characters in these early scenes; we know Goode is up to no good, and it’s just a question of discovering what kind of no good he’s up to.

But it’s only after “Stoker” is over that we realize how busy Park was in those seemingly inactive early scenes, setting up cryptic images (a water pistol in a briefcase, India making snow angels on her bedspread) that won’t pay off until later, and setting the film on a course that’s more unnerving and transgressive than we had perhaps been expecting.

There’s violence, but the film is almost always better when the violence is shown off-screen or merely alluded to. More effective is the way Park will swing the camera back and forth between the characters, illustrating the changing power dynamics at work. Even a noticeably showy flourish, like strands of Kidman’s red hair dissolving into fields of wavy grass for a flashback, are effective.

And the film is anchored by a nervy performance by Wasikowska; “Stoker” is as much anything India’s coming-of-age story, Charlie’s presence “stoking” the fires beneath her Wednesday Addams exterior. As the film goes on, India literally rises higher and higher in every frame, until the last scene in the film, when her face fills the screen, the camera that had been looking down at her now gazing up reverently.

“Any Day Now”: I see my light come shining

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“Any Day Now” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas; R, 1;37, three stars. I will host a post-show chat after the film’s 6:50 p.m. Tuesday screening.

“Any Day Now” has so many ways to break your heart that it seems less a question whether Travis Fine’s indie drama will do it, but how. This is a sensitively-acted film that engages directly with several “issues” that resonate on today’s op-ed pages — gay adoption, treatment of people with disabilities — but does so without being didactic or preachy.

The setting is California in the late 1970s, and Rudy (Alan Cumming) is a drag queen who dreams of a singing career, his fleabag apartment a marked contrast to his glamorous day job. Rudy meets a closeted assistant district attorney named Paul, who seems as uncomfortable as his skin as Rudy is at ease in his. They hook up, but are a little surprised to find that not only are they attracted to each other, they like each other, and a relationship starts.

One night, Rudy sees that his junkie neighbor is neglecting her son, a teenage boy with Down syndrome named Marco (Isaac Leyva). On a whim of goodwill, he takes Marco in for the night, and then when the mother disappears, takes Marco in for good. They move in with Paul, and the three become a family of outsiders. But in the late ’70s when homophobia is overt and institutionalized, the authorities would rather see a special-needs child in an institution than a loving home run by a gay couple.

Rudy and Paul face an uphill legal battle to keep Marco, and the movie keeps us guessing whether they will prevail or not. Writer-director Fine sets up a seemingly insurmountable set of obstacles, and almost everywhere Paul and Rudy turn, they face a cold, unfeeling bureaucrat. At times the film plays with our expectations about how legal dramas work; when the couple hires a flamboyant, crusading African-American attorney (Don Franklin), we think this is the moment when the tables will finally turn in their favor.

But “Any Day Now” isn’t that simple, or that immune to how a legal system that has prejudice embedded into itself operates. The film features deeply felt, lived-in performances from all three of its leads. This is really Cumming’s showcase, as he has to reveal several layers to Rudy — the tough-talking Queens cynic inside the drag queen, the caring maternal figure inside the cynic. It’s an extroverted performance — Cumming even sings several songs in the film, such as the one referred to i the title song.

And it matches up well with Dillahunt’s introverted performance. Dillahunt usually plays either goofballs (“Raising Hope”) or villains (you knew there was trouble coming the moment he showed up in “Looper”), and he’s very effective playing a closeted gay man who, if he can’t secure justice and equality for himself, went into the law to try and quietly secure it for others.

But the film’s secret weapon may be Leyva, an actor who does have Down syndrome, and plays Marco with authenticity and dignity. “Any Day Now” is an ode to human kindness, as well as an exasperated cry against a system seemingly designed to discourage such compassion.

“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone”: Now you see the laughs, now you don’t

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“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” opens Friday at Point, Eastgate, Star Cinema, Sundance and Cinema Café.” 1:40, PG-13, 2.5 stars out of 4.

In magic, as in comedy, performers talk about the “build.” It’s not enough to just have a few cool illusions (or funny jokes). The show has to go somewhere, build in momentum and energy, and almost as important as what illusion you do is where it fits in with the other tricks.

“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” has a few good tricks up its sleeve. There are genuine laughs here and there, an overall spirit of sweetness and good humor, and this is the first movie in ages that knows what to do with Jim Carrey. But it doesn’t have a very strong build. The jokes just line up, one after the other, taking their turn and hitting or missing with the viewer.

The sweet tone is established in a prologue in which two lonely kids bond over a store-bought magic kit created by the legendary illusionist Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). The kids become lifelong friends, and grow up to be Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), the hottest illusionists on the Vegas strip.

Over the years, Burt gets super-rich, and super-bored, going through the motions of doing the same tricks over and over. And because there’s nothing Vegas audiences reject more than insincerity, the Burt & Anton show becomes a flop.

Their friendship severs, Anton heads to Cambodia to do “magical relief work” (a pretty funny idea), and the humbled Burt finds himself doing half-assed magic at birthday parties and retirement homes. Meanwhile, Burt has to watch as gonzo-Goth “street magician” Steve Gray (Carrey) grabs headlines with his feats of grotesque magic, such as sleeping overnight on a bed of hot coals, or going without urinating for 12 days straight. I know Carrey is a love-him-or-hate-him proposition for most people, but you have to admire the way he just throws himself full-tilt into the arrogant Gray, who is like Creed’s Scott Stapp if he did card tricks, intoning things like “I tried to warn them” before he performs his “brain-raping” (his term) illusions.

But between this and “Dinner for Schmucks,” I’m not sure Carell’s is well-chosen for broad comic characters like Burt. He just never looks comfortable in his fake mullet and perma-tanned chest – it’s a role tailor-made for a more obviously extroverted star like Will Ferrell or Jack Black (or, frankly, Carrey). He seems more at ease with the chastened Burt after his fall, and the film gets funnier at the sight of this sad-sack magician lugging his cages of pigeons and rabbits from one fleabag motel to another, or showing up for a job interview at one hotel right as it’s being demolished.

Watching Burt rediscover his love of magic, with the help of his assistant Jane (Olivia Wilde) and his old hero Rance, is kind of touching, although screenwriters Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have trouble tying the film’s redemptive arc to its comedy. And, aside from a couple of scenes, they really bobble the chance to create a duel between Burt and Steve Gray, like a comic version of “The Prestige.”

What’s surprising about the “Incredible Burt Wonderstone” is that, for a film about dexterity and sleight of hand, it’s just kind of clumsily executed, lurching from one comic set-piece to the other. Some of them are very funny on their own merits, but if this was a real Vegas magic show, much of the audience might have left midway through to see Celine Dion instead.