Movie Reviews: All About Steve, Loren Cass, Ink, Walt & El Grupo

THE OTHER MAN Whatever initial life there might have been in a story by German writer Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) has been crushed to a pulp by writer-director Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) in this flat thriller about a software executive (Liam Neeson) hunting down the lover of his absent wife (Laura Linney), an upscale shoe designer. It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple’s quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking, full of neo-noir fuss and bother to no particular end other than the banal question of whether one can love two people at once — or even just one who, pardon the unpardonable pun, is a bit of a heel. The short answer is yes; the long one involves many obligatory shots of computer sleuthing in gray old London. Then it’s off to more picturesque foreign parts, where Antonio Banderas, fetchingly attired in designer suits, plays Latin lover and lots more besides. “I make things more beautiful than they are,” he smirks, and even that’s only a little bit true. Any genuine poignancy to be wrung from this callow tale is post-hoc and inadvertent — the sad sight of Neeson grieving for a missing wife. (The Landmark; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Ella Taylor)

SANDSTORM If you’re unfamiliar with the practitioners of Falun Gong — peaceful spiritualists who have been persecuted by the Chinese government since the ’90s — then you’ve obviously walked blindly past their regular Midtown Manhattan demonstrations, where members disperse fliers while re-enacting bloody scenes of torture and caged confinement. With production values so cheap they couldn’t even afford the shoestring, writer-director Michael Mahonen’s well-intentioned but embarrassingly feeble 2004 drama comes off as the public-access video equivalent of those protests, unpaid nonprofessionals and all. In symbolic retribution for the abuses against the Falun Gong, nature inflicts a sinister sandstorm upon Beijing, confining police officer He Tian Ying (awkward first-timer Rong Tian) and his sickly wife indoors without water and electricity, their food and medicine supplies rapidly diminishing. In flashbacks that could’ve been shot in different corners of the same ugly room, we learn the reasons for his guilty conscience, as his superior forces him to oversee the murderous terrorizing of a proud Falun Gong subscriber. At best, it’s a perfunctory narrative, complete with title cards that clunkily hit the same bullet points that might appear on one of those rally fliers. No matter how many human-rights organizations have acknowledged this indignity, Sandstorm is basically a biased social-issue doc having an identity crisis. (Music Hall) (Aaron Hillis)

SORORITY ROW The first credit to roll for Sorority Row, director Stewart Hendler’s highly unnecessary remake of a 1983 slasher, is for a character identified as the “Bra-clad sister.” A few entries down are “Slutty sister,” “Ditzy sister” and “Sarcastic sister.” I’m not sure you need to know much more than that, but here goes anyway: Among these luminaries is a group of sorority seniors whose idea of a revenge prank is convincing a young man that he has killed his girlfriend with an ill-timed roofie. The vaguely sensible one among them (played by Briana Evigan, whose resemblance to Demi Moore puts her co-star — and Moore’s actual offspring — Rumer Willis to a strange sort of shame) protests the group’s plan to cover up the death of their fellow sister when the prank tanks, and takes the lead when a graduation gown–wearing maniac begins killing off everyone associated with the death. A very thin feminist subtext about the meaning of sisterhood only highlights how badly this film botches its attempt to have it both ways: naked, bleeding cuties combined with “final girl”–ish, butt-whipping empowerment. Call me the sarcastic sister, but the only things screaming in any convincing way here are the cheap look, epileptic direction and off-key, “edgy” humor. It’s all so ‘80s, I could die. (Citywide) (Michelle Orange)

TYLER PERRY’S I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF If you are the director, producer, writer (adapting your own stage play), and co-star of a film, you really show how bad you can do all by yourself. Usually thrilling in their lunacy, most Tyler Perry movies can at least keep up their momentum through the combination of an overstuffed plot and the presence of Madea, the big-boned granny who will rip out your urethra tube if you sass her. Perry’s latest — about a boozy nightclub singer, April (Taraji P. Henson), begrudgingly sheltering her niece and nephews — has so many dead moments that singing spots by Gladys Knight, Pastor Marvin Winans and Mary J. Blige simply highlight, rather than alleviate, the inertia. Madea, tonic in February’s Madea Goes to Jail, appears onscreen for only about 15 minutes, at least sharing an inspired bit about Siegfried and Roy on Noah’s “arch.” If the Atlanta impresario is just bored with cranking out two adaptations a year of his earlier stage work, the audience is getting restless too: I counted at least three walkouts at the 11 a.m. public screening I attended. Though Perry may have stuck with his chitlin-circuit material for too long, I still can’t wait to see what he does with the choreopoem in an upcoming project — directing Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. (Citywide) (Melissa Anderson)