Movie Reviews: Miss March, Race to Witch Mountain, Sunshine Cleaning

THE PERFECT SLEEP An ungainly fusion of dutiful homage and snarky send-up, The Perfect Sleep steeps itself in the trappings of film noir while tripping over itself to slather the whole thing in irony. The movie layers its fatalistic drama with absurdist horseplay and a few moments of Lynch-ian mysticism, but it’s an awkward mix at best; even when The PerfectSleep is trying to be funny, it’s far too self-conscious to really be much fun. First-time director Jeremy Alter and writer-star Anton Pardoe wear their cineaste credentials on their sleeves in this convoluted tale of a brooding assassin (Pardoe) wreaking vengeance on old enemies while rescuing a childhood sweetheart — before inevitably discovering you can’t go home again. The film’s visuals are elegantly noir-ish, the plot as bizarrely convoluted as The Maltese Falcon’s, but the filmmakers strain at showing us how clever they can be. The Perfect Sleep lurches from reality to metareality, as the cartoonish characters wear us down with wide swathes of expository dialogue, and the entire film is layered with a faux-noir voice-over that manages to sound both hard-boiled and fey. The nonstop narration has something to say about everything that shows up on the screen (some may feel they’re already listening to the film’s DVD audio commentary), at one point even pausing to admire a shot straight out of a Jean-Pierre Melville crime drama. “Sorry if it seems kinda cliché, but the French dig this kind of visual,” the narrator marvels. “And I dig the French.” (Sunset 5) (Lance Goldenberg)

RACE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN This remake of Disney’s 1975 classic Escape to Witch Mountain is pure, if mildly enjoyable, boilerplate: A spaceship crashes on Earth and its young sibling-duo passengers must return home in order to save their own planet and ours; a curmudgeon cabbie is corralled into helping them and has his heart thawed in return, even scoring a G-rated love interest; sinister U.S. government operatives miss the big “save the world” picture in their quest to capture and experiment upon the “illegal aliens.” Director Andy Fickman, working from Matt Lopez and Mark Bomback’s rote, hole-laden screenplay, fills Racewith impressive action sequences and winning performances from a cast working hard to turn types into characters. (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, the OG Witch Mountain children, have cameos.) The crowd of preteens with whom I saw the film clapped, laughed and cheered throughout; their parents leaned more toward lukewarm chuckles. The remake’s core strength, ironically, derives from its most cynical departure from the source material — the shoehorning of Dwayne Johnson’s taciturn cabdriver into the story. This remake, reportedly written with Johnson (not the tale’s child characters) in mind, is a calculated bid to turn the Rock into a more family-friendly commodity. That calculation may be transparent, but it pays off: Cracking one-liners and alternating between world-weariness and growing affection for his charges, Johnson is wonderful — much better than his material. (Citywide) (Ernest Hardy)

GO THE SECRETS Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher sets his fledgling feminist film at a Jewish seminary in Safed, where students Noemi (Ania Bukstein) and Michel (Michal Shtamler) form an unlikely friendship. Humorless Noemi is the Tracy Flick of Orthodox Jews, whereas glamorous Michel — raised in France from the age of 12 — smokes, flirts and wears knee-high boots. But the former’s book smarts and the latter’s chutzpah find common cause when the two are assigned to deliver food to Anouk (Fanny Ardant), a terminally ill woman previously convicted of murder: Soon, the girls are bonding and breaking tradition, secretly performing a series of kabbalistic tikkuns upon Anouk in a ritual cleansing before she dies. After a giggly sleepover takes a sapphic turn, an unexpectedly emboldened Noemi progresses further along the path of self-actualization. Her quest for liberation, seeded in the knowledge that her recently deceased mother suffered from depression due to Noemi’s oppressive Orthodox rabbi father, finds full flower as she continues her studies, refuses to marry and sticks to her sexual guns. Although overlong by about 20 minutes, The Secrets mostly handles its subject matter with grace and charm; its heroine’s proud defiance even mitigates a questionably celebratory conclusion. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Kristi Mitsuda)

SHERMAN’S WAY Director Craig Saavedra and writer Tom Nance’s collaboration plays like something out of an indie-film paint-by-numbers. Take a richie-rich, straight-laced stuffed-shirt (Michael Shulman as set-for-life college student Sherman), stick him in a beat-up roadster heading cross-country that’s piloted by a wacky wash-up (James LeGros as forgotten Winter Olympian Palmer “The Bomber”), toss in a few eccentrics and hotties-to-trot along the way, and, voila, off to the film festival circuit we shall go in search of shallow-end enlightenment. The acting doesn’t help — just how many cue cards were used in this production, anyhow? And, though no fault of its own, the film now feels like a rinky-dink redo of HBO’s new Eastbound & Down series, starring Danny McBride in more or less the same role as LeGros — the former star athlete who thinks he’s big shit but is nothing more than a dumb shit on his way to the footnotes. (Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7) (Robert Wilonsky)