Mystery Team seems like a great 4-minute sketch–three intrepid kid detectives grow up but never grow out of their roles. Smack ‘em down among your typical foul-mouthed contemporaries, play up their naivete against risque shenanigans. And you can imagine this great sketch going horribly wrong at feature-length — fading into a coma from fatal whimsy, or yukking it up with the yucky yuks. But MT manages to have its chocolate milk and drink it, too. Despite the occasional twee or arch bit, despite a willingness to sink their hands deep into the muck (and to dig out some great laughs), this is a character-driven comedy — and about as idiosyncratic and winning as I’ve seen in some time. The first 20 minutes drag — it seemed like that high-concept sketch — but as the characters develop, the cast gets increasingly good at selling strange jokes, and the film delights in unforced delivery of very funny lines.

slick, entertaining, and also appalling.

The first installment of the British miniseries Red Riding — 1974–is better than any film I’ve seen thus far this year. It’s a little flawed–a little too in love with impressionistic love scenes, but emphasis on me nagging when I should be crowing. Performances across the board are phenomenal, particularly a late-arriving heavy played with thick shaggy mane and thick shaggy Yorkshire accent by Sean Bean. It’s gorgeously filmed, almost impossible to tell it was television, given such rigorous attention to ’70s-influenced widescreen compositions and a showboat tracking shot or two. The story begins with and ostensibly centers on a possible serial killer, taking little girls, but that mystery is a thread through a thicket — dense social and political context, a thick ash-cloud gray-sky atmosphere, and a poisoned moral universe….

I got the UK dvd set, but I’d say this’d be very much worth catching in the theaters, as it sneaks around the country.

Watch for director Ti West. I haven’t seen his other movies yet, which include Cabin Fever 2, and something interesting looking called The Roost, but his House of the Devil is a pitch-perfect throwback horror movie, almost never hitting a wrong note.

Even the posters look right on the money:

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This looks like fun, and check out the cast.

After wasting my time, like Chris, on the B13 sequel — how can you do a follow-up to a movie celebrated primarily for its parkour antics and pretty much dump the parkour? — I shifted my queue around to try and expand my horizons a bit. This was not entirely successful, but both of the following films offer intriguing performances and filmmakers playing to their own uncommercial instincts. Worth seeing, yet… (more…)