KILLERS
If you count the number of hairstyles Katherine Heigl wears in this dreary romcom-with-guns, the tally is likely to be four or five. Ashton Kutcher's facial expressions, one. His shirtless scenes, two. Her scenes in a bra (but never topless!), three. Sex scenes, zero. Tom Selleck's moustache, one, but all parties agree it's magnificent. Yet the most damning number is this: In a movie whose plot hinges on normal suburban friends and neighbors suddenly transforming themselves into ruthless assassins gunning for Kutcher (a retired CIA hit man), all of them hoping to claim a $20 million bounty, a full 45 minutes elapse before the bullets start flying. Before then, his future wife (Heigl) smiles sweetly and shops for a dress; we visit Nice, where Kutcher — one of the film's producers—speaks a little French; and Selleck, as the disapproving fatherin-law, glowers at Kutcher. But actually, as he gets to live out his 007 fantasies, Kutcher's not bad; it's Heigl who comes off worse, with her eye-batting, boob thrusting and complaining. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the married killers had a sexy, mercenary balance of power between them; they were equals, superior beings who chose to live among us. Killers' couple only wants to embrace the drab. "I'd kill for a normal life," Kutcher says. Unfortunately for us, he does both. (Brian Miller) (Citywide)
GO WHIZ KIDS
From Hoop Dreams and Spellbound to worthy Hollywood biopics extolling charismatic teachers who bully or cajole their inner-city pupils to success, American cinema continually, though with varying degrees of skepticism, quizzes the persistent, elusive American dream of meritocratic upward mobility. In Whiz Kids, Tom Shepard, a proudly uncloseted former science nerd, follows three American teenagers as they prepare to enter the Science Talent Search, a national competition dangling a hefty $100,000 prize. Two of the kids are the children of supportive parents from Ecuador and Pakistan. The third is a resourceful young West Virginian girl who has invented a way to rid contaminated local water of chemicals dumped by Dupont, where her extremely encouraging father works. Whiz Kids is a much less flashy film than Spellbound, and it's slightly hampered by the fact that these budding scientists are less cinematically wacky and eccentric than that movie's word nerds. But Shepard, who has made documentaries defending Jehovah's Witnesses and uncovering antigay policy in the Boy Scouts, is adept at teasing out both the dream's promise and its limits. Dwelling as much on setbacks and hurdles as on the glitter of competition, this quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation — curiosity, persistence, endurance — than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end. (Ella Taylor) (Music Hall)
WINTER'S BONE
"Never ask for what ought to be offered," 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tells her brother in Winter's Bone, Debra Granik's dark and flinty Ozark fairy tale. Those are words to live by for Ree and her people, scattered across the hardscrabble southern Missouri woods. But in Winter's Bone, a tough-minded girl is forced by circumstance to demand exactly what no one wants to offer: the truth. Ree lives in a small house with her siblings and their mentally ill mother. When the sheriff brings news that Ree's father put the family's house up as bond after an arrest for cooking meth — and that he has subsequently gone on the run — Ree goes looking for Dad to convince him to turn himself in. Met at every turn by narrowed eyes and tight lips, Ree soon gets the picture that asking questions is, as one neighbor puts it, "a real good way to end up et by hogs." While the first half of Winter's Bone is essentially a slow-paced procedural with a pint-size detective, Ree is no Nancy Drew. She gets by on instinct and determination rather than wit, and we come out the other end of Ree's quest impressed, but also disquieted, by her strength. It's uncertain to what end that strength might be used. Ree is tough enough, and mean enough, to rule those woods in a few short years if she sets her mind to it. (Dan Kois) (ArcLight Hollywood, Landmark)
