1/2
MONSTER-IN-LAW (PG-13) Monster-in-Law is the next generation of Meet the Parents/My Best Friend's Wedding-genre movies, drawing on both crude and cute humor. Jennifer Lopez stars as Charlotte Cantilini, an artist who, while working to further her career, meets the love of her life in the form of a handsome, charming doctor, Kevin (Michael Vartan of Alias fame). Unfortunately, he also happens to be the son of Viola Fields, a Barbara Walters-esque television interviewer played by Jane Fonda. Of course, no one is good enough for her baby, so the over-protective Fields devises a underhanded plan to botch her son's imminent nuptials. Fonda manages well enough with the younger cast, slipping into the role of a conniving and overbearing mother with ease. Lopez performs in her usual endearing, clumsy love-interest mode to moderately funny effect. The film also stars Wanda Sykes as Ms. Fields' personal assistant. After two television shows and a successful career in stand-up, Sykes has proven herself worthy of carrying an entire movie; Monster-in-Law has her holding together the less-humorous scenes between Lopez and Fonda, only appearing in frame long enough to deliver punchy one-liners. Also stars Will Arnett.
-Matthew Pleasant
NOBODY KNOWS (PG-13) Based on a true story that shocked Japan in the late '80s, Nobody Knows offers a refreshingly unsentimental and unsensationalized account of four young brothers and sisters getting by more or less or their own. Twelve-year-old Akira (Yagira Yuya) is the man of the house, while a flaky, promiscuous mom flits in and out of the kids' lives, disappearing from the scene altogether by the film's mid-point. Abandoned and unschooled, both formally and in the ways of the world, the kids create their own insular community, and Nobody Knows takes place almost entirely within that private world of the children's apartment, with only occasional forays into the outside world. Director Kore-eda Hirokazu (After Life, Mabarosi) coaxes some amazingly rich and natural performances from his young, non-professional actors, adding to the documentary-like effect created by Yutaka Yamazaki's supple but never slick, handheld camerawork. Also stars Kitauru Ayu, Kimura Hiei, Shimizu Momoko and Japanese pop star You (yep, that's her name) as the mother.
PALINDROMES (NR) Todd Solondz's new film is a close encounter of the most discomfiting kind, an inscrutable act of artistic brinksmanship where the sublime and the shockingly tacky become the strangest of bedfellows. The big conceit here, the one bound to divide even the most sophisticated audiences right down the middle, is that Solondz takes Bunuel's old Obscure Object of Desire trick and amplifies it fourfold, casting eight different actors to play Aviva, the runaway 13-year-old girl who is Palindromes' main character. Palindromes is, in many ways, an updated, more perverse Perils of Pauline, with Aviva yanked from the bosom of her cozy suburban family and out into the real world, where she encounters a series of strange and often unpleasant things. Solondz sometimes seems to be trying to pass off a sick joke as something more, but most of Palindromes hits its mark, and the people we meet are mostly complicated creatures, worthy of compassion as well as ridicule. It's clear that Solondz has a fascination for the grotesque and the mean-spirited, but the best parts of Palindromes push past that, to a place that calls cruelty into question by appearing to revel in it. Stars Ellen Barkin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christopher Penn, Shayna Levine and Debra Monk. Playing at Sunrise Cinemas at Old Hyde Park.
1/2
PULSE: A STOMP ODYSSEY (G) The producers and creators of the Broadway hit Stomp set their sights high with this 40-minute, large-format IMAX film. Pulse is not exactly an adaptation of the urban-oriented Stomp show, but, rather an ambitious pan-global survey of sound and rhythm in all its manifestations. The film was shot on five continents, and, although it is essentially wordless, it's anything but silent, communicating a world of nuances through a seemingly limitless variety of clicks, whispers, woops, warbles, grunts, growls and howls. We get elaborate ensemble dances from Africa, Native American chants, Lower East Side break dancers, a Hindu ceremony in Southern India (complete with a small army of decorated elephants), the bell ringers of England's Winchester Cathedral, dueling marching bands on the Brooklyn Bridge, a flamenco troupe on a rooftop in Granada, and even a group of underwater percussionists. It's an inspirational and sometimes overwhelming sensory assault, with the only problem being the filmmakers' annoying penchant for rapid-fire editing that often diminishes the integrity of the performances (especially on that huge IMAX screen, where we're constantly swiveling our necks in an effort not to miss anything). The movie's powerful sights and sounds are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. Playing at Imax Dome Theater at MOSI in Tampa.