Film Reviews: Bridge to Terabithia, Daddy’s Little Girls and more

CAFE SÉTAREH Taking his cue from Jafar Panahi’s masterful women-in-prison drama The Circle, director Saman Moghadam offers up his own roundelay of Iranian women in lonely or oppressive circumstances — only here, instead of a jailhouse, their lives intersect at the titular coffee shop in an old part of Tehran. In the first story, the shop’s proprietress, the weary Fariba, slaves away to support her abusive husband’s drug addiction. In the second, the beautiful young Saloomeh prepares to marry the auto mechanic Ebi, who, worried that his job isn’t good enough for his bride, turns to crime. On a somewhat lighter note, the spinster landlady Moluk’s satellite TV always seems to be on the fritz whenever Fariba’s handsome brother Khosro is passing by. A popular (as opposed to “art house”) Iranian filmmaker with an elegant visual style and an astute grasp of soap-opera theatrics, Moghadam (Maxx) keeps Café Setareh bouncing along for a while, but as he shifts the story’s perspective from one woman to the next, he covers so much of the same narrative ground that we feel like we’ve seen it all before. By the time the third story comes around, you may crave a shot of espresso to keep you alert. (Music Hall) (Scott Foundas)

DADDY’S LITTLE GIRLS For his newest film, writer, director and occasional actor Tyler Perry stays behind the camera, choosing not to appear as his signature character — the meddling, no-nonsense granny, Madea. That old bitty can be annoying, but her brand of vim and vinegar is sorely missed in this sweet but dull romantic comedy. Set in Perry’s home city of Atlanta, Daddy’s Little Girls tracks the slow-building romance between Monty (Idris Elba), a mechanic battling his trashy wife for custody of their three daughters, and Julia (Gabrielle Union), a snooty uptown lawyer. Perry has great casting instincts, and in Elba and Union he’s matched two gifted, equally gorgeous actors, both of whom seem ready to make sparks fly. If only their director would let them. Instead, Perry clutches tight to his message-heavy, family-friendly storytelling template, with Monty and Julia forever kissing chastely, then rushing out to a neighborhood watch meeting about those pesky drug dealers on the corner. Perry means well, but his knowledge of the ‘hood isn’t exactly The Wire. He does, however, know a few things about onscreen sexual chemistry: One of these days, if we’re lucky, he’ll stop being a good Southern boy and set his lovers free to be their down and dirty grown-up selves. (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)

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• Christian Alvart
• Kay Kay Menon
• Chuck Wilson
• Scott Foundas
• Hannibal Lecter

DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGENES) As much a political as an aesthetic event, Rachid Bouchareb’s drama about the plight of Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II has been compared to Edward Zwick’s Glory. Structurally, though, the movie recalls earnest, period war movies like William Wellman’s 1945 Story of G.I. Joe, as it follows the brutal attrition of a single Algerian army unit fending off Nazis from Morocco through Italy and on into France, where their sacrifices for “the motherland” are rewarded with discrimination on every front. Days of Glory is as moving as it is ingenuous, with each doomed character symbolizing a different response to the collective dilemma these men face as Arabs with divided loyalties. Given their treatment, and the fact that the movie was made in part to shame the French government into restoring pensions it had cut when the former colony got its independence (the ploy worked), one has to wonder just how unalloyed Algerian loyalty could ever have been to its occupier. For the answer to that, look back, and forward, to The Battle of Algiers. (Royal) (Ella Taylor)

EKLAVYA: THE ROYAL GUARD See film feature

GHOST RIDER  Not as dreadful as the studio’s decision to withhold press screenings until less than 24 hours before opening day would suggest, but not especially good either, the latest big-screen adaptation of a long-running Marvel comics character is perhaps the most drearily conventional of the lot. It’s as if the writer-director, Mark Steven Johnson (responsible for the uninspired Daredevil and, incongruously, for scripting the Grumpy Old Men franchise), felt he were translating a sacrosanct text and that to sully it with so much as an ounce of irreverence or innovation would earn him eternal damnation in fanboy hell. So, instead of a buoyant, imaginative superhero movie on the order of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films or Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, we get a lumbering, paint-by-numbers origin story about how the Evel Knievel-style motorcycle jumper Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) sells his soul to the Devil (Peter Fonda) and, years later, finds himself transformed into a ghoulish nocturnal bounty hunter forced to do his master’s bidding. In theory, Blaze should be a uniquely morally conflicted anti-hero, but in Johnson’s hands he’s just another righteous avenger with a wicked cool ride and a nifty costume (or lack thereof, since he actually turns into a giant skeletal fireball). The movie itself is neither serious enough to take seriously nor fully clued-in to its own goofiness, despite the presence of American Beauty’s Wes Bentley as a demonic baddie who looks like a goth teen with overly permissive parents, and Eva Mendes as a latina Lois Lane one deep breath away from busting out of her costume and the movie’s PG-13 rating.  (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)