REMEMBER ME Putatively a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: A Brooklyn subway platform, 1991; a racially charged stickup; an 11-year-old girl watches her mother be shot. It's the first sign that here is a film that won't be content to just chart the little measures by which two people become able to love — in fact, it'll barely do that at all. Flash-forward 10 years, to the halcyon days of the Strokes and whatever other significant events happened in NYC circa 2001. Pattinson is histrionically depressed Tyler Keats Hawkins, a coasting, scruffy NYU student coming up on his 22nd birthday. Meanwhile, that little girl on the subway platform has grown up to be not Batman but fellow NYUer Ally (Emilie de Ravin), whose still-bereaved, overprotective cop dad (Chris Cooper) busts Tyler one night. Some coincidences later, Tyler will pick up Ally on a revenge dare, ensuring an eventual variation on the ever-popular teen-movie "Was I a bet?" breakup. There's an insult-to-injury quality to a plain bad movie with a "seize the day" message (Remember Me's tagline: "Live in the Moments"), which heckles you with all the other things you should or could be doing while you're marking time waiting on the credits, wondering if the movie will ever end. Well, it does — oh, mama, does it ever, with a crazy long bomb heave toward epochal significance. (Far be it from me to spoil the surprise; let's just say Robert Pattinson dies in 9/11.) (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)
SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE This isn't entirely without its selling points, chief among them T.J. Miller, who's a cross between Seth Rogen and Jason Segel — paging Judd Apatow, now. Miller plays Stainer, a mop-topped giant and best bud to Kirk (Jay Baruchel, an Apatow player from way back), a TSA lackey and a "hard five" who catches the eye of Molly (Alice Eve), a lawyer turned party planner who's a "hard 10" and, natch, out of Kirk's league. Molly, burned by her hunky flyboy ex, wants safe and sweet. Stainer, burned by his own former flame, is aghast at the coupling; short on self-esteem himself, he insists it'll never work, and it doesn't for long stretches precisely because Kirk buys Stainer's sincere rap — he doesn't want his boy hurt. Stainer's the real goofy, damaged soul of this slight comedy, directed by Jim Field Smith, who tries with modest success to blend the sticky-sweet with the plain ol' sticky (the first time Molly grinds on Kirk, he's a bit early on the draw — and, look, here comes the dog to lick his pants). Baruchel's bit is the same one he's been perfecting since he enrolled in Undeclared — puppy-dog pouty and cute and clever and good God, he's this close to turning into Michael Cera. Miller's the find. He's out of this movie's league. (Robert Wilonsky) (Citywide)
TOE TO TOE Spreading social awareness is a valuable pursuit, naturally, but when filmmakers take it upon themselves to don the cape of an activist hero while constantly reminding audiences of their nobility, the message feels cheap. Anthropology-minded writer and director Emily Abt unintentionally exuded that attitude in All of Us (her heartfelt but po-faced feminist doc about African-American women with HIV), and while her first narrative feature shows improvement, it still straddles the line between progressive exploration and self-congratulatory melodrama. On the lacrosse fields of a D.C. prep school, the rich, white, troubled and therefore slutty Jesse (Louisa Krause) befriends, partly out of novelty, Tosha (Sonequa Martin), a determined black girl on full scholarship, who wants to escape her inner-city neighborhood. The camaraderie quickly sours — or, at least, develops love-hate complications and believable class and racial tensions — when a handsome Muslim horndog (Raising Victor Vargas' Silvestre Rasuk) comes between them. The performances are top-notch and occasionally moving, but Abt nearly smothers it all with some embarrassing coming-of-age teen-angst false notes, plus clichéd Ivy League ambitions, a cartoonishly neglectful mother, STDs, unfair expulsion, martyrdom for both the rich and the poor and a nonreciprocal lesbian crush. Adolescence sure gets harder every year. (Aaron Hillis) (Sunset 5)
