Movie Reviews: New in Town, Taken, The Uninvited

GO  THE CLASS Compare and contrast Laurent Cantet’s terrific The Class (which reopens this week following a late-December Oscar-qualifying run) with Mr. Holland’s Opus and Dangerous Minds. Note the structural similarities: misbehaving students, a charismatic educator who wants them to succeed, and big thoughts about the classroom as urban microcosm. Discuss the difference between Hollywood’s triumphal individualism, and Cantet’s delicate examination of what counts as success — and failure — in a representative corner of the global village. Played with febrile vitality by François Bégaudeau, a teacher who adapted The Class, with Cantet and Robin Campillo, from his novel, François, a junior high teacher in a moderately high-risk area of Paris, uses language as a kind of dance that suits the scattered attention spans and compulsive back talk of the multiculti grab bag that is his class. Cantet, who also made the extraordinary Time Out, builds thickly detailed experiential worlds through which he slowly leaks the pressing problems of our age — in this case, the changing meaning of education in a heavily immigrant environment where a unifying culture has all but broken down. At the end of a very long day, François may have scored some pedagogic victories and one human failure, and we watch the teacher’s retreating back, on which rests nothing less than the fragility of democracy in a racial tinder box. (The Landmark; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

NEW IN TOWN A corporate tool, but a stylish corporate tool, single and ambitious Renée Zellweger is dispatched from sunny Miami to rural Minnesota to close the local factory. She has no personal backstory or identifying characteristics other than her Bettie Page–height boardroom fetish heels. She’s Mitt Romney in a mini, and the business of New in Town is to soften her MBA-hardened heart. In doing so, we get a standard assortment of sitcom-ready characters: oversharing rube secretary (Siobhan Fallon Hogan); gruff foreman (J.K. Simmons); and hunky bachelor (Harry Connick Jr.). The effect is like Fargo without the woodchipper. Economic pain and the downsizing debate soon cede the screen to Zellweger’s snowy pratfalls, Lutefisk-out-of-water gags, and makeover montages (widowed Connick’s got a tween daughter, doncha know). With a cheap, for-hire Danish director (Jonas Elmer) and a co-writer (C. Jay Cox) whose major credit is Sweet Home Alabama, the movie wrong-foots Zellweger from the start. She’s not enough ice queen, like Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, for us to accept her transition into adorable Melanie Griffith. “I will not get attached to this town or anyone in it,” Zellweger says. Ultimately, we feel the same about her. (Citywide) (Brian Miller)

OF TIME AND THE CITY One of the major British filmmakers of his generation, Terence Davies revisits his youth to decidedly mixed effect in Of Time and the City — a personal documentary evocation of post–World War II Liverpool. Davies, 64, is only a few years younger than the Beatles and grew up in a similar, working-class Liverpudlian milieu, but, suffering acute Catholic guilt for his sexual orientation, recalls a wholly different history. Of Time and the City communicates acute, if not bitter, ambivalence: Davies can’t decide whether he wants to remember or forget the childhood ecstasy of attending Hollywood musicals or the “dark desire” of his adolescent fascination with professional wrestlers. Shots of miserable, misbegotten housing estates are accompanied by Peggy Lee’s rendition of the saccharine “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” Korean War footage is set to “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Davies concludes another tour of failed urban development by citing “the British genius for making ‘The Dismal’” — a national characteristic he immediately demonstrates with a lugubriously hummed version of Brahms Lullaby. The filmmaker’s incantatory, pompous delivery seems designed to create maximum distance from the material. He has nothing but scorn for a royal coronation, and the ascension of the Fab Four is greeted with a sarcastic “yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah.” No nostalgic “Penny Lane” or “Strawberry Fields” here. The filmmaker prefers an angrier form of sentimentality. (Nuart) (J. Hoberman)

SAM’S LAKE A group of friends travels with their recently bereaved compadre Sam (The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra’s Fay Masterson) to her cabin at the mountain lake she was named after, only to encounter — natch — a creepy gas-station attendant and a local legend about a Michael Myers–like escaped lunatic. Two of the producers on this would-be “horror” film, Guy Oseary and Mark Morgan, count Twilight among their credits; that, presumably, was enough to buy this 4-year-old production a one-week run in New York and L.A. Perhaps it’ll have some appeal to all the Stephenie Meyer fangirls — much like that author’s take on the vampire mythos, Andrew C. Erin’s film works familiar horror tropes and neuters the hell out of them, here presenting the most metrosexual, well-coiffed family of backwoods killers you’ve ever seen. Also, pretty much all the acts of violence happen offscreen, and there’s no sex. But for some stray profanities, this could be a TV movie, except then, the acting would probably be better. The nicest one can say about Sam’s Lake is that it’s well-shot, and that its major plot twist is genuinely surprising ... if only because it makes no sense at all. (Grande 4-Plex; Sunset 5) (Luke Y. Thompson)