Capsule movie reviews: ‘The Best and the Brightest’

“The Best and the Brightest” might have had some real teeth — and some real smarts — in the hands of a savvy satirist such as Christopher Guest. Unfortunately, writer-director Josh Shelov’s sendup of the Manhattan private school culture flies off its comic rails after an engaging start, never to land back on solid ground.

Shelov’s glib, overly crass script, co-written by Michael Jaeger, finds cautious computer programmer Jeff (Neil Patrick Harris), his more adventurous wife, Sam (Bonnie Somerville), and their 5-year-old daughter, Beatrice (Amelia Talbot), moving from Delaware to the Big Apple for reasons that seem, frankly, less than urgent. Once there, however, Jeff and Sam learn an elite kindergarten slot for Beatrice is nonexistent, so a steamrollering admissions consultant (a nimble Amy Sedaris) is employed and it’s down the rabbit hole.

Whatever-it-takes trickery, a dirty-poetry ruse, a swingers’ club foray and other unsavory bits ensue in service of wedging Beatrice into the tony Coventry Day School, but it all feels desperate and wildly off-message, even for a spoof.

The deft cast, which also includes Jenna Stern as Coventry’s uptight headmistress and Christopher McDonald and Kate Mulgrew as uniquely married, startlingly un-PC school board members gamely navigate the dubious material, though a low-key Harris makes us long for his usual exuberance.

— Gary Goldstein

“The Best and the Brightest.” MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual content and some nudity. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

Kristin Canty’s “Farmageddon” is well-titled. It’s an eye-popping wake-up call revealing how the USDA and FDA have increasingly waged war on America’s small farmers even when they can prove they are contributing healthful products to our food supply.

The farmers and organic food proprietors have been subjected to outrageous harassments and seizures that escalate into outright terrorism over some violation, often minor, of the myriad regulations that engulf the producers and seem designed primarily to drive them out of business.

Perhaps the worst of the cases that Canty investigates is that of a Vermont couple who owned 28 sheep, imported from New Zealand and worth $5,000 apiece, who had their healthy herd confiscated and executed — even though it could have been proved that they were in fact not infected with mad cow disease.

In interviewing farmers and agricultural experts on all sides of the issue, Canty suggests persuasively that corporate agriculture can exert tremendous political pressure on governmental regulation agencies to the disadvantage of the small farmers, even though diseases in the food supply chain occur almost always within big industry.

All of the small farmers interviewed in the film are clearly dedicated and responsible. Yet it’s unfortunate that Canty, so effective a rabble-rouser, didn’t spend more time with her most detached interviewee, David Acheson, a food-safety consultant and a former FDA food safety chief, who takes a broad overview.

It would have been good to know more specifically his ideas on solutions to protecting small farmers’ rights and the right of the public to have access to healthful food, whether it comes from the supermarket or the small farm.

— Kevin Thomas

“Farmageddon.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. At Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica.

Publicized as the first feature made entirely with the Flip camera, David Guy Levy’s DIY indie “A Love Affair of Sorts” is exactly what such a technology-specific effort promises: epic navel-gazing and interminably low-stakes visual artistry.

Levy’s debut as a director stars himself (told you so) as a painter with a Flip camera (sigh) who coerces a beautiful Hungarian stranger named Enci (Lili Bordán) he meets in a bookstore to also use a Flip camera (sigh, sigh) so that they can record each other playing getting-to-know-you.

Normally a producer in the indie world, Levy might fancy himself a brave chronicler of the distancing and disaffected (he’s not), but he’s truly no screen presence, seeming bored, smug, thought-free and whiny by turns as he unrealistically draws Bordán’s at least mildly intriguing Enci into a relationship.

Levy’s only real gambit to make his movie a conversation starter is a reality-blurring detour into the making of the making of, a case of micro-meta that comes too little too late after an hour of numbing, character-less exchanges and shakily held shots of the leads angling to be on camera.

Though the title hints at a tale of infatuation, Levy sheds little light on interpersonal conflict or why we’re such an addictively self-documenting modern society.

— Robert Abele

“A Love Affair of Sorts.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

Director Michel Leclerc and his co-writer Baya Kasmi illuminate the ethnic, racial and religious issues that have beset France from World War II to the present — through, surprisingly, the unfolding of a classic romantic comedy plot. “Le Nom des Gens” (The Names of Love) is so inspired and insightful that it is frequently hilarious yet does not shy away from tragedy. Leclerc and Kasmi’s ability to explore complex, volatile social issues with such exuberant humor won them a screenplay Cesar — France’s Oscar — earlier this year.

Sara Forestier’s Baya Benmahmoud and Jacques Gamblin’s Arthur Martin exemplify in the extreme the axiom that says opposites attract. Baya is the uninhibited young daughter of an Algerian refugee (Zinedine Soualem) and a rebellious French heiress (Carole Franck). Arthur, an ornithologist, is the serious middle-aged son of a nuclear scientist and Algerian war veteran (Jacques Boudet) and a Jewish mother (Michele Moretti) traumatized by the deportation of her parents during the Holocaust.

Baya dedicates herself to seducing right-wingers and religious militants into embracing her assimilationist views while Arthur obsesses over possible epidemics spread by birds. With her looks and effervescent personality, Baya’s appeal is overwhelming. With his lean physique and wistful expression, Arthur is an attractive man whose subdued manner automatically presents a challenge to Baya; their affair is sure to be a roller coaster of a romance.

The film warmly embraces multicultural diversity while acknowledging the obstacles to its achieving a harmonious fruition. It is critical of conservative Muslims, the lack of interest in the lives and views of ordinary Arabs, the dire plight of undocumented immigrants and, in the instance of Arthur, his detachment and disinterest in his Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side.

So many actresses are asked to be adorable even in their characters’ most exasperating moments, but few pull it off as well as Forestier, with her spirit of innocent, well-meaning recklessness; her efforts were rewarded with a lead actress Cesar. It helps that she is surrounded by actors as perfectly cast and talented as she is.

— Kevin Thomas

“Le Nom des Gens” (“The Names of Love”). MPAA rating: R for sexual content including graphic nudity, and some language. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes. At The Landmark, West Los Angeles; Laemmle’s Town Center 5, Encino; Regal’s University Town Center 6, Irvine.

There’s not much to say, really, about “Strangers Online” unless you take schadenfreude-inspired joy in cheaply made (and even more cheaply thought out) video dreck.

It’s the story of a stud Internet radio DJ (Noel Palomaria) with Cinemax-worthy girl troubles: sexually rapacious female listeners, an exhibitionistic babe (Eva Frajko) at home, a murdered ex (Nansi Aluka) he may or may not have stabbed to death and an unstable, stalkerish hottie of an intern (Tara Killian).

With sexploitative earnestness, co-writer-director John Huckert whips up an impossibly cheesy blend of gratuitous nudity, readily available kitchen knives and psychosexual mumbo jumbo, and if one were being midnight-movie charitable, this bargain-bin effort could be labeled a homemade homage to pay-cable ‘80s soft-core, complete with the synthesizer riffs, casual misogyny and an unintentionally sad cameo by scream queen Linnea Quigley.

But the only titillation in this ludicrous attempt at an “erotic thriller” comes from whether a terrible performance, logic-challenged plot point or dialogue howler will be your next source of laughter.

— Robert Abele

“Strangers Online.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood; and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena.

From Norwegian writer-director André Ovredal comes the spry, amusing and pulse-pounding “Trollhunter,” a monster movie with a love for mountainous, tree-lined Scandinavian scenery and an even greater love for setting memorably ugly, hulking and destructive mythological creatures against it.

Though it’s filmed mock-documentary style, it nicely rises above this overused conceit. Ovredal quickly wins us over when his college-age film crew characters — investigating mysterious bear killings in Norway’s forests — join forces with Hans (Otto Jespersen), a taciturn, Land Rover-driving mercenary who tracks and kills wandering trolls for a secret government agency that’s keeping the creatures’ existence hidden from the public.

Part “Ghostbusters” and “Cloverfield” — with a satiric touch of social conscience à la “District 9” — Ovredal’s mix of dark comedy, hinterlands travelogue and divertingly rough CGI handiwork yields entertaining results, including Jespersen’s fantastically deadpan performance and the suspenseful, nervously funny interactions with their towering, sunlight-averse prey. (The wonderful troll design work by Håvard S. Johansen and Ivar Rødningen has a texturally icky authenticity.)

It’s to the movie’s credit how sweetly anthropological the film’s take on these fairy-tale stalwarts is, because for now it feels like a bracing, low-key corrective to summer’s in-your-face glut of superpower heroics.

— Robert Abele

“Trollhunter.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes. At the Nuart, West Los Angeles.

A solitary long-distance traveler with prehistoric cachet, the loggerhead turtle makes a compelling subject for a nature film, as the spectacularly shot, aptly named “Turtle: The Incredible Journey” demonstrates, if at times too feverishly.

Director Nick Stringer has availed himself of up-to-the-minute technology and old-school storytelling — the kind with just a touch of anthropomorphizing but, mercifully, no character names — to capture the arc of the marine reptile’s first 25 years. It’s a migration from Florida to the North Atlantic, Africa, the Caribbean and back to the place of birth to lay eggs. The film is fact-packed and kid-friendly yet filled with danger; only one in 10,000 turtles completes that round trip.

The peril begins the moment the sand-encrusted hatchlings emerge, soft-shelled and toothless, to make their vulnerable scuttle to the sea. Via miniature high-def cameras, the documentary captures their race against predatory crabs with extraordinary immediacy. For the rest of the trip, Stringer creates a composite portrait, seamlessly supplementing his in-the-wild footage with digital effects and studio scenes using rescued turtles.

Attempting to amplify the drama but instead calling attention to themselves are an unyielding score and narration that tints toward purple, delivered with mellifluous authority by Miranda Richardson. Yet the film’s conservation pitches are subdued; this is no galvanizing doc like “The Cove.”

Charting the peregrinations of one of Earth’s elders — a creature that has navigated the seas for 200 million years, and is now endangered — “Incredible Journey” makes some missteps, but never falters in showing that the loggerhead’s survival matters.

— Sheri Linden

“Turtle: The Incredible Journey.” MPAA rating: G. Running time: 1 hour, 17 minutes. In limited release.