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

STEAM Aimed squarely at the Fried Green Tomatoes crowd, this female-empowerment flick gives the Lifetime Network a good name. Three women meet in a steam bath, and I’d like to report that they simply talk and talk and talk for the next two hours. Instead, unfortunately, they enact three separate minidramas that Steam intercuts to no good purpose. Ruby Dee is a stoic widow, estranged from church and kin, who finds love with a kindly widower. Ally Sheedy is a divorcée, intimidated by her spiteful ex, who finds love with her son’s peewee football coach (a younger man!). Newbie actress Kate Siegel is a college girl, dominated by fanatical Catholic parents, who finds love with — get ready for it — a lesbian. The three vignettes proceed in parallel, mechanical terms: new passions, unexpected obstacles, hopeful resolutions. Writer-director Kyle Schickner embraces every cliché with gusto. (Behold the cruel intolerance of the patriarchy!) Among his heroines, only the careworn Sheedy manages to suggest that life ain’t so simple. If she and Chelsea Handler, as her sarcastic BFF, somehow managed to escape Steam and head over to Showtime, there’s a chance that Weeds might be hiring. Just so long as they leave this one off their résumés. (Sunset 5) (Brian Miller)

SUNSHINE CLEANING More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams–Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought. A film about sisters who go into the crime-scene-cleanup business, it’s a muddled mess: terrific performances (from Adams, especially, as the ex–high school cheerleader now at the bottom of the pile) buried beneath contrivances and clichés, not to mention Alan Arkin cast yet again as the foulmouthed gramps dispensing four-lettered advice to a troubled youngster (Jason Spevack, as Adams’ son, who’ll lick anything and anyone). Director Christine Jeffs, working with Megan Holley’s screenplay, renders the light and dark as a muddy shade of sitcom-pilot gray. This has the makings of a great Showtime series — feels a bit like Weeds but with cleaning fluid instead of bong water. Too bad what’s intended to play as funny (girls and gore) stumbles into slapstick; what’s meant to play as profound (girls and dead-mommy issues) sinks into the overwrought. Yet another willful, comically tortured “indie” coated with Hollywood’s happy-ending sheen — or perhaps, at this point, it’s simply hard to buy the perky Adams and pretty Blunt as schlumpy losers trapped in the bland flyover with an Oscar winner stuck in rerun mode. (ArcLight Hollywood; Landmark) (Robert Wilonsky)

13B This Bollywood thriller opens promisingly enough with a bustling montage of p.o.v. shots that suggest household appliances are spying on a hale-and-hearty fam, recently installed in a sunny high-rise. Television, the graying bogeyman of J-horror and its American retreads, emerges again as the star in-house menace: A soap-opera serial uncannily mirrors the apartment’s daily dramas, mesmerizing the clueless female contingent. Already rattled by a balky elevator and a prayer room whose walls repel nails, beleaguered-good-guy husband Manohar (R. Madhavan) is horrified when the show foretells wife Priya’s miscarriage, making it must-see TV. Thus does the first half of 13B feel like watching the same belabored movie twice, as the sleeve-tugging sound cues and close-ups snuff out suspense. When the building turns out to stand on the site of a bungalow massacre, the theme of punitive destiny tied to passive narcissism gives way to a convoluted 30-year-old family curse involving two separate retarded siblings. In case you’re wondering where the song and dance fits in, director Vikram Kumar and company serve a starvation ration of two lackluster beach numbers, saving the censored-in-India “Sexy Mama” jam for the credits — wherein Madhavan rocks a giant “13B” gold chain. (Norwalk 8; Naz 8) (Nicolas Rapold)

THIS IS THE LIFE Ava Duvernay’s documentary This Is the Life is so immediately and fully engrossing that it meets its ambitious goals for the viewer — to illuminate a brief, paradoxically undervalued but globally influential L.A.-based music scene while broadening the accepted parameters of hip-hop — and without feeling lectured to. It’s rare that being schooled so deeply is so pleasurable. The Good Life hip-hop scene started in the early ’90s in South-Central L.A.’s Good Life health-food store, run by neighborhood stalwart Bea Hall and her son. The duo wanted to create a venue for local (soon citywide) youth to express their musical creativity in a safe, positive atmosphere. Their most famous rule: No profanity allowed. Soon, a movement was afoot that spawned hip-hop iconoclasts like Pigeon John, Abstract Rude, Medusa, Volume 10 and the venerated Freestyle Fellowship, all making some of the most artful, experimental rap music ever. Duvernay’s film also persuasively argues that mainstream artists such as Ice Cube lifted more than a little from the ground being broken. This Is the Life vaults into the upper echelons of must-see hip-hop documentaries: It’s smart, informative, and hugely important historically, filled with rare performance footage that still crackles. The underground-icon talking heads (shot in their homes, against freeway backdrops) wax poetic, philosophical and enthusiastic. “Something like that couldn’t happen in any other city, in any other part of the world, at any other time,” says Cut Chemist. “It was perfect.” (Downtown Independent)(Ernest Hardy)