A parable about forgiveness and salvation told through incredibly bloody, gruesome torture sequences? Saw III (Lions Gate) sounds an awful lot like The Passion Of The Christ, doesn't it? The latest in the ever-popular death-by-Rube-Goldberg-contraption genre tries to bring a touch of humanity to a series obsessed by mechanized death, but calling the effort disingenuous would be a massive understatement…
There's nothing particularly fresh about Sherrybaby (Universal), an indie drama about a drug addict's bumpy road to recovery, but Maggie Gyllenhaal's courageous lead performance makes the clichés go down a little easier. As she tries to fight her way back into her daughter's life, Gyllenhaal is feisty and pugnacious, but also bull-headed and creepily girlish, and finally so nakedly vulnerable that she breaks hearts…
The Guardian (Buena Vista) boasts many stunning water-rescue action sequences, fittingly low-key performances from Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher, and some genuinely stirring derring-do. Unfortunately, it also boasts a staggering collection of military-movie clichés, from the training montage to the inter-service bar fight to the awkward but redeeming relationship with a prickly civilian. Maybe all the bits borrowed wholesale from Top Gun and An Officer And A Gentleman wouldn't rankle so much if the film wasn't a bloated 126 minutes long…
Two of the best documentaries of 2006 are now available on DVD from the top-notch arthouse label Magnolia: Cocaine Cowboys covers the heady heyday and bloody dissolution of the Miami drug trade, from the '70s to the '80s, while Jesus Camp considers the similarities between the youth-indoctrination activities of American evangelicals and their Islamic extremist counterparts. Both are superior examples of cine-journalism, covering their subjects exhaustively, sensitively, and with a bent towards stirring the audience's emotions…
Veteran documentarian Kirby Dick ruined a perfectly amusing documentary about the Kafkaesque ridiculousness of the MPAA ratings system by turning the cameras on himself and shifting the focus onto his own battles with the rating system over This Film Is Not Yet Rated (Netflix), complete with reenactments and Michael Moore-style muckraking investigations. It's unfortunate Dick's rating travails are so much less entertaining than the ratings-board horror stories shared by subjects John Waters, Kimberly Peirce, and Matt Stone.