By Betsy Sharkey

FILM: Camp X-Ray
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Peyman Moaadi, John Carroll Lynch,Lane Garrison, Joseph Julian Soria
DIRECTION: Peter Sattler

One thing director Peter Sattler gets right in the new film Camp X-Ray is the way life can entrap even without prison walls. Pvt Cole, a young soldier played by Kristen Stewart, joins the army to escape small-town Florida and ends up guarding Ali, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner played by A Separation star Payman Maadi.
From scraps of conversation, you gather Cole was as eager to leave her home’s mentality as much as the reality, only to find a different brand of small-mindedness and repression in this man’s army.
It helps if you think of Camp X-Ray and the prison face-off between Stewart and Maadi as a cautionary conversation unfolding more like a theatre production than a movie.
In their tete-a-tetes, provocative moments emerge as writer-director Sattler zeros in on the unlikely and uneasy friendship that develops between Cole and Ali.
Otherwise, the drama has a tendency to slip into stereotypes a bit too easily, military misogyny, terrorist ideology and xenophobia among them. It’s not that those elements don’t exist in the real world, especially in places such as Gitmo where being detained as a terrorist suspect can feel like a life sentence without the trial. But by boiling too much down to black and white, Camp X-Ray’s ability to say something significant is diluted.
Ali is shown briefly in his pre-prison days, somewhere in the Middle East readying a bunch of mobile phones for something, no clue as to what, when he’s caught in a sweep. Black bag over his head, in chains, he’s flown to Guantanamo. He’s not the leader of his cellblock; he spends his time reading, praying and resisting where he can.
Cole joins the high-security detail as part of the regular rotation of new blood. Her first real encounter with Ali is over books — she’s delivering them, he’s complaining about a conspiracy to keep Harry Potter’s last from him. She thinks The Prisoner of Azkaban is an Arabic book.
With that kind of cultural counterpoint established, Sattler starts escalating the hostilities between Ali and Cole. There is what should be a deal-breaker involving watered-down filth in the face. But watching the punishment that follows, something shifts inside Cole.
The film finds its footing as their fragmented conversations expand. By laying out the arguments in bits and pieces, Sattler keeps the dialogue from overstating the case. If only the other characters were drawn with as much restraint. Instead we have a sea of mostly anonymous, screaming faces in the detainees and, on the other side, jacked-up alpha males in uniform. Sgt Ransdell (Lane Garrison), Cole’s supervisor, is a particularly nasty piece of work, especially after she resists his advances.
The director, making his feature-film debut with Camp X-Ray, comes out of graphic design, and you can see that influence in the way he’s constructed the set. The cellblock, its tight walkways hemmed in by cinderblock and steel rooms, the monochromatic look mirroring the soldiers’ fatigues, does much to create a claustrophobic, minimalist vibe. Director of photography James Laxton goes in close so often it can feel like the walls are coming in.
Within the constraints, Stewart and Maadi find the right rhythms to make Cole and Ali’s exchanges seem real, even Ali’s slight crush — the care he begins taking to trim his mustache — are humanising.
A locked-down soldier is a good fit for Stewart’s interior acting style. The skittish looks the actress slips between hard glares or icy outrage bring a kind of understated electricity to Cole. And the impact that comes when she softens, even slightly, is first rate as she continues to evolve the further away she gets from Twilight’s teenage Bella. But there is an edginess that flows through all of her work — especially effective as a young Joan Jett in The Runaways — and one hopes she’ll never lose that.
Maadi is always an intriguing and enigmatic presence on screen. There’s a latent scowl that gives his look a kind of mystery and possible menace even when there is nothing else to indicate it. But it is the way he uses the eyes under those brows that is so potent. Intelligence, outrage, kindness, bemusement, he delivers it all with a glance.
If you haven’t seen his performance as a distressed Iranian husband in A Separation, which won the foreign language Oscar in 2012, put it on your DVD to-do list.
As to Sattler, though he stumbles in this first outing, at times mightily — the ending is too ludicrous for words — he makes room for Stewart and Maadi to build a different narrative than we’re used to in the war on terror. One that allows a little understanding to creep in. — TNS

A showcase for Kroll

By Roger Moore

FILM: Adult Beginners
CAST: Rose Byrne, Nick Kroll, Bobby Cannavale, Paula Garces, Joel McHale
DIRECTION: Ross Katz

Adult Beginners started life as a showcase for comic writer-actor Nick Kroll, who concocted the story. But any notion that the star of Kroll Show might reinvent himself with this film goes out the window when first we meet Jake, a fast-talking entrepreneur who has hustled every friend he has, and then some, into investing in “Mind’s I”, a Google Glass knockoff that failed.
Jake is just another version of Kroll’s recurring character on TV’s Parks & Recreation.
He’s self-absorbed enough to think fleeing to visit his pregnant, mother-of-a-toddler sister (Rose Byrne) unannounced won’t be an inconvenience.
“I need you to make me feel better,” Summer’s Eve-by-any-other-name whines.
Since he’s broke, his too-understanding brother-in-law (Bobby Cannavale) suggests he and Justine hire Jake a babysitter — their “manny” nanny.
So make way for the potty chair jokes, the hyperactive “devil child” wisecracks, substituting a suitcase with wheels when you can’t figure out how to work the stroller and flirt-with-the-other-nanny-in-the-park (Paula Garces) scenes as this narcissist begins to figure out it’s not all about him.
Kroll is fitfully amusing, and packaged with Joel McHale as his best “bro” and mirror image in the city is good for laughs. But what works best is the extended family dynamic. Byrne and Kroll have a nice estranged sibling chemistry.
The second act complications are predictable, the third act revelations mild. Director Ross Katz, a producer with a couple of Sofia Coppola pictures, including Lost in Translation, in his credits, does little to disguise just how on-the-nose this script is. — TNS

Visually hypnotic, but confusing plot

By Kristin Tillotson

FILM: Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
CAST: Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin
DIRECTION: Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez

A feast for jaded souls of the Tarantino species, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For starts so strong that you don’t want to blink for fear of breaking its shadowy, black-and-white spell.
But Frank Miller, on whose graphic novels this sequel to 2005’s Sin City is based, and co-director Robert Rodriguez get so caught up in their orgy of buns, guns and destruction that they forget about connecting dots to create a semblance of a whole.
This time around, the story blends two of Miller’s classics with new scenarios. The denizens of Sin City are a motley bunch with two things in common — depravity and heavy eyeliner. Mickey Rourke is back as beastly faced brawler Marv, as is Powers Boothe as corrupt Senator Roark, who faces off against Joseph Gordon-Levitt as brash young card shark Johnny (picture that boyish face suddenly looking more like Chet Baker’s in his later years and you get an idea of Sin City’s effect on visitors).
Josh Brolin takes over the role of Dwight (played by Clive Owen in the first film) still besotted by his former lover, Ava Lord. Dennis Haysbert does an amusingly understated turn as Manute, thuggish bodyguard to Ava’s billionaire husband, Damien Lord.
The women characters serve mostly as eye-candy props. As grieving stripper Nancy, Jessica Alba has little to do but sullenly gyrate, and the underused Juno Temple can only simper.
Then there’s Eva Green. As the “dame” in question, Ava Lord, Green (best known for playing Bond girl Vesper Lynde opposite Daniel Craig in Casino Royale), is a delight to watch every second she’s onscreen.—   Star Tribune/TNS

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha