You’re familiar with the twist ending.   How about the twist in the middle?  That’s not something you see very often.  And “The Debt” shows why.

This is a film about three Mossad agents on the track of a notorious Nazi killer – the Surgeon of Birkenau.   It’s 1966, and they’ve tracked him to East Berlin. The agents are Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington and Marton Csokas.   They are all young and in over their heads, but highly motivated by personal loss.  The Holocaust wasn’t that long ago.

The three shack up near their target and wait for a plan to materialize from their superiors.  Things heat up between them, as both men vy for Chastain’s affections.  Worthington is silent, idealistic, and intense.  Csokas is smooth and calculating.  She falls for one, but sleeps with the other.  I won’t tell you why, and the film barely will, either.  I wish we had more time to spend with these characters; or rather, I wish they were more sharply drawn.  The actors are doing sufficient work, but there’s just not much to work with.

That’s only one of the problems with the script.  The main problem, as I mentioned above, is that it plays all its cards before the third act.   Things are happening, from the beginning, in flashback; in the outer layer Chastain has aged into Helen Mirren, and her daughter is about to publish a book about how she killed the Surgeon of Birkenau.  But things are not quite what they seem, or, at least, the official account of what happened isn’t quite right.  In the final act, Mirren sets out to make the two match up better (have I mentioned how much I HATE trying to write about movies with surprise twists?  It’s like talking through clenched teeth) and the plot goes really slack.  The conclusion feels foregone.  This film was over a long time ago.  With a bit of finagling and some sleight of hand, the two storylines could’ve played out in parallel, and the twist could’ve come at the end.  That would’ve have been a much more complex, and probably superior, film.

It has plenty of charm, and tension, in its first two acts.  Director John Madden clearly owes a debt to Steven Spielberg’s “Munich;” most notably in the mise-en-scene of late ’60s Iron Curtain big cities.  That film is superior to this one, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it.  For about two-thirds of the way, I thought this was going to be one of the best films of 2011.  But the third act is a big letdown.  ”The Debt” is good, not great.

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Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond sets out in “Reel Injun” to document the evolving image of the Native American on the big screen.  He aims to explore not only how Hollywood images have shaped white culture’s perceptions of Indians, but how it’s shaped perceptions among the Native Americans themselves.  “I grew up playing cowboys and Indians,” he says, “and never realizing that I was the Indian.”  He couches his documentary’s journey in a journey of his own, setting out in his “rez car” to visit iconic sites across North America.  He visits the Pine Ridge reservation, where he rides a horse across the Great Plains, and declares “finally I feel like a real Indian!”

Early depictions of Native Americans on film were curiously academic. The Indians are viewed with a degree of respect, but also clinical detachment In films like “The Silent Enemy” (which is starvation, not the Indian,) the desire seems to be to document a dying people before they are gone forever. But in the ’30s, with the introduction of John Wayne and John Ford Westerns, the Indian became a brutal enemy.  Westerns capture a certain American ideal about themselves; the rugged wanderer braving the massive, dangerous Wild West, and inside that mythology, the Indian is nothing more than the embodiment of the savage side of Nature — it’ll kill you as soon as look at you.

John Ford made almost all of his movies in Monument Valley; his Indians dressed (vaguely) like Plains Indians, but lived in the American Southwest.  His movies have become so iconic that thousands of tourists visit Monument Valley every year, not because it is a beautiful, majestic place, but because it’s a place they’ve seen in the movies.  I’ve been to Monument Valley, and can report back: almost none of those tourists are white Americans.  They are Japanese and European.  I spent a night there once and the only person I met who spoke English was the Navajo guy running the food stand.  Hollywood’s idea of the Native American has been exported to the entire world.

There’s always been a legend that the Native Americans in John Ford’s films joked around by speaking in their own language; Ford never cared, as long as they “sounded Indian.”  Perhaps the highlight of the documentary is a sequence in which what they actually said is finally translated.  It’s pretty funny.

Things didn’t change much until the countercultural revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s; then Indians became “groovy” and “spiritual” and everyone wanted to claim some Indian heritage somewhere in their past, or past lives.  Depictions of Native Americans in cinema changed as well; they became stoic, spiritual warriors; the embodiment of all that modern society had left behind.  Natives became heroes and icons, but they still were little more than symbols.  They weren’t real people.

Diamond interviews Lakota activist Russell Means, who was in the middle of the 1973 Wounded Knee standoff when Marlon Brando denied his Oscar for “The Godfather,” instead sending Sacheen Littlefeather to the podium to (very politely) scold Hollywood for the treatment of American Indians by the film industry — and by the government.  Means recalls how those at Wounded Knee were watching the awards program on the TV at the trading post, and their spirits, almost defeated, were supremely lifted by that act of courage and defiance.

Westerns fell out of popularity in the late ’70s and ’80s, and there wasn’t much work for Native American actors, even as extras.  One notable exception was the 1976 Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” in which Chief Dan George managed, through keen comic timing, to put a slightly more human face on Native peoples.

After a brief stop to examine the problems of 1990′s “Dances With Wolves” — perhaps the biggest “Indian” film ever made– Diamond moves on to the more recent Indigenous film movement, which allows him to end the documentary on a deeply moving and hopeful note.  He interviews Adam Beach, and looks at films depicting like “Smoke Signals,” “Pow Wow Highway” and “Dance Me Outside,” which depict Natives as real people with both strengths and weaknesses, not as icons or symbols.  But these films are still made about Indians for the wider majority culture: Diamond, and the people he interviews, wax poetic about “The Fast Runner,” a film made by Native people, for Native people, telling a Native story.  This is Native cinema.

The image in “Fast Runner” — of Atanarjuat escaping from his certain death and running naked across the ice — captures the moment of Native cinema that we are in now.  After years of being beaten down and used, Natives have escaped the suffocating confines of Hollywood, and are breaking free, making, with great vulnerability, exhilarating films that tell their own stories, in their own ways.  As the radio DJ in “Smoke Signals” broadcasts, “It’s a good day to be indigenous.”

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Ready for a break from your typical Christmas movie, with its forced magic, emotional manipulation, and vague commentary on the Christmas spirit?  Here’s a film that will go down like a big drink of seltzer water, cleansing your palate, resetting your clock, and making you positively long for another Tim Allen ho ho ho.

Set in northern Finland among the reindeer-herding Sami people, “Rare Exports” takes place in the days leading up to Christmas.  In the shadow of a small mountain, a small community scratches out their existence, fighting off the wolves and the weather and waiting for a lucky break, or one that will finally kill them.  There are no women in the community.  One wonders how they procreate.  There are children.

An American scientist is excavating their mountain; he believes it is actually a burial mound.  Something goes terribly wrong at the excavation site.  Livestock in the community start to disappear, and one of the men (Jorma Tormilla) builds a wolf of trap — that is, he digs a pit, fills it with spikes, and hangs a pig’s head over it.  His little boy (Onni Tormilla – he really is his son?) doesn’t think it’s wolves.  He thinks it’s Santa Claus, unearthed up on the mountain, and out to get all the little kids.  He’s got a book full of grisly pictures to prove that Santa’s not as nice as he appears on TV, and that naughty kids really ought to be terrified.

It’s perhaps worth nothing here that the Santa Claus myth isn’t based on some Scandinavian monster story.  It’s based on 4th century Turkish bishop St. Nicholas, whose generosity towards the poor became legendary.  I have yet to see a movie about St. Nicholas.  All the same, “Rare Exports” is enjoyably creepy flick that turns the Santa Claus myth on its head without descending into cheap slasher tricks and tropes: “Santa’s Slay” this is not.

I can’t say that the ending was terribly satisfying.  ”Rare Exports” began its life as a short film making its rounds on the internet, and when it gained enough attention and popularity, director Jalmari Helander decided to turn it into a feature film. It’s a promising début, showing a mastery of mood and atmosphere; it’s wonderfully creepy and dreadful.  But it’s also clear he didn’t have much of a budget; a film like this ought to lead to a climactic fight between the protagonist and the monster, but the best it can manage is a helicopter flight and an explosion.  We never actually see the real Santa Claus; we only see a 40 foot block of ice with grotesque horns protruding, and then it gets blown up.   Kind of a letdown.

Nonetheless, I liked this film.  I can imagine that many of my friends and family wouldn’t.  (My little brother would.) If you’re of a certain bent, if you need a nice Christmas gargle, or if you’ve ever thought “he sees you when you’re sleeping” was a bit creepy and weird, check this one out.  It’s good fun.

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Errol Morris has lately used his unique documentary techniques to cover some pretty heavy material in fascinating ways: his last film was about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, and before that, he interviewed Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.   He’s also focused his camera on the death penalty in two films, one about an innocent man on death row, and another about the life of an executioner.  But “Tabloid” is a reminder that Morris isn’t always serious-minded; one of his best films, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” covers several men with interesting/bizarre job, one is a lion tamer, another is a robot scientist.  Like that film, “Tabloid” takes a faux-serious look at people we can’t quite take seriously.

This is the true story, truly told of Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon.  McKinney spends a great deal of time on the screen, explaining her side of the story; unfortunately, the Manacled Mormon refused to be interviewed.  Morris does interview a number of other people associated with the case, and they provide a fascinating counterpoint to Joyce McKinney’s perspective.

From the beginning, it seems like there could be no one more normal than this woman McKinney, with her southern accent, blunt mannerisms and way of confiding in the camera like it’s an old friend.  She tells a story about a young man who fell in love with her, and she with him.  His name was Kirk Anderson. They made grand plans to be married and have lots of kids.  Only problem: he was “enslaved” to the Mormon church.  They whisked him away from her, forbade him to talk to her, and sent him off to Britain on a mission.

So McKinney goes after him, as any red-blooded American woman who’s experienced true love would.  This is where it really starts to get weird; she hires some very interesting, and rather seedy, characters to go with her.  They kidnap him — according to McKinney, he was so brainwashed by the church he barely knew who he was — and take him to a cabin in a small England town, where McKinney proceeds to deprogram him– by having sex with him.

Anderson escaped during a trip to town (McKinney, of course, says he was never imprisoned, and went to buy a paper and never returned) and the thing blew up into a court case that was a tabloid writer’s dream come true.  McKinney, sure that she had done the right, loving thing and determined to expose that vast, criminal brainwashing conspiracy that was the Mormon church – told her story with confidence, humor and wit to the court, and the reporters.  She became a celebrity, hung out with rock stars, and received truckloads of fan mail.  Then she disguised herself as a deaf/mute nun and fled the country.

Morris never really tries to determine the actual truth of what happened in this case, and it’s just as well, because, really does it matter?  The entertainment value here is how bizarre the whole thing is, and it’s only made more so by the conflicting stories told by McKinney vs. the reporters, investigators, friends and accomplices involved.  The whole thing is wild and loopy and fun, regardless of who’s telling the truth.  (There’s a great epilogue, too, about a cloned chihuahua, that has nothing to do with the Manacled Mormon case.)

I won’t pass judgment on Joyce McKinney.  I don’t know if she’s telling the truth, or being smeared by the tabloids.  Probably some of both. I don’t particularly care, either.   Hearing the story was good, bizarre, loopy fun.  If that’s what you’re looking for in a movie, this is your ticket.  If you’re looking for the truth about this strange case, you might need to go elsewhere.  I hear she’s writing a book.  Maybe you could look there.

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

“Another Earth” uses a science fiction premise to explore, instead of other worlds, the inner unexplored territory.  A lot of the best science fiction does this, and this film is bound to draw comparisons to “Solaris” and “Moon.”

As the film opens, Brit Marling is a talented high school graduate with a bright future in front of her.  After a graduation party, she gets the behind the wheel when she probably shouldn’t, but hey, high school kids on their way to MIT think they’re invincible.  And they might be, but they forget about the damage they can do to others who aren’t.  Marling runs a light and hits a family in a station wagon, killing the mother and child and leaving the father in a coma.  In her defense, she ran the light because she was staring into the night sky and the mirror-image Earth that had just appeared in the sky.

The science here is a bit beyond me, and beyond the scope of the film; it doesn’t bother to explain much, but we gather that the other Earth truly is a mirror-image; every person here has a doppleganger there.  Perhaps it has appeared from a parallel universe; perhaps it is still in that universe, and somehow a window has opened between it and ours.

Marling goes to prison for what she’s done, and emerges a much sadder, less ambitious young woman.  She gets a job as a janitor at her old high school.  But she can’t stop thinking of the surviving father (William Mapother) of the family she killed.  So she approaches his house, apparently to apologize, but then chickens out and pretends like she’s from a maid service, sent to clean his house.

Now this is where “Another Earth” walks on thin ice.  Of course a relationship develops between the two, and even as I write this, it sounds like “While You Were Sleeping” syndrome — the awful, groan-worthy movie convention where one character keeps meaning to tell the truth to another, but never does until the moment of crisis, at which point everything falls apart and has to be put back together again in time for the happy ending — but “Earth” manages not to fall into the frozen lake of cheesiness and sentimentality it skates across.  Yes, the above plot line is followed, to a T, but somehow, it manages to feel believable and not contrived.  Marling keeps cleaning his house, and sees it as a way to make his life a tiny bit better, and that doing so might be a better way to do penance than an apology.  The romance between the two of them never stops seeming unlikely, but at least it’s handled with a certain amount of poetry and restraint.  They are both lonely, hurting people.

And don’t forget the science fiction angle: apparently, everything on the two planets was exactly the same, until that moment Earth 2 appeared in the sky, when the causelines split.  And since that moment was just before Marling killed Mapother’s family, it means that, up there, something different could’ve happened.  This, really, is the entire function of the sci-fi; to provide a way to meditate on what might’ve been, had one or two small details been slightly different, to give the characters, and the audience vicariously, the opportunity to wonder – what if?

It also offers Marling something real to offer Mapother, when the truth finally comes out.  There’s a starry-eyed billionaire planning a trip to the other Earth, and he launches an essay contest, the winner of which gets to go with him.  Of course Marling wins, but she gives her trip to Mapother.  This seems to be both hopeful and terribly problematic; if his family is alive up there, then so is his doppleganger; they already have him, so to speak, and there will be no place for him, not for long.  Which means he will see his family again, but also, that he will have lose them again.  Is that worth it?

The movie never explores this; it’s my own wanderings.  ”Another Earth” is the kind of movie that invites your mind to wander over its possibilities, to contemplate the questions its characters are contemplating.  That might be its greatest strength — it poses interesting questions in a dramatically thoughtful way, and invites a level of engagement from its viewer that few movies can match.

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

“I should’ve known that if a guy like me tried to talk to a girl like you, somebody would end up dead.”

“Tucker and Dale” is a fun, light-hearted romp through horror conventions and comedy.  It’s proof that you don’t need a genius or shockingly original idea to make a good movie, you just need to do well with what you’ve got.  In that way (and in that way only,) it’s like listening to Pavarotti sing “Amazing Grace.”  Not a difficult song, but performed well, it sparkles and shines.

Those are strange words to use for a film about hillbillies and their bloody encounter with a group of college kids in the woods.  ”Tucker and Dale” turns the horror conventions of films like “Cabin Fever,” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Deliverance” on their heads.  The kids, led by blonde bimbo Katrina Bowden and nasty WASP Jesse Moss (hint: don’t get too attached to any of the other kids) encounter country boys Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine at a gas station, and immediately assume they’re creepy psycho stalkers.  When of course the truth is that Tudyk and Labine are from the same city as the college kids, just a different part of the city – the part where bowling alleys outnumber coffee shops.

What proceeds is pretty predictable and anything but surprising, but it’s handled right, and that’s everything.  Tyler Lubine in particular, accomplishes a lot through his teddy bear charisma, and the script is peppered with some solidly laughable one-liners.  One small problem is the unlikely relationshp that’s supposed to develop between Labine and Bowden; Labine is certainly likeable and pulls off a certain kind of hillbilly smart, but falls way short of sexy.  And Bowden never seems like more than a reasonably nice sorority girl.  She might be the kind who does volunteer work at the homeless shelter one weekend a month, but she’s not the type to fall for the residents.

But really, that’s a small gripe.  ”Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” isn’t brilliant or amazing or original or creative, but it’s a fun movie all the same, perhaps because it knows it’s little more than an extended comedy sketch, and is willing to play within those bounds.  There’s plenty to say about ambition in the movies, but sometimes it’s fun to watch a movie that’s not afraid to admit it doesn’t want to be much more than a regular movie.  If it were a person, it’d be the kind of guy who gets excited about beer and a good fishing spot.

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One of the problems with making films about holocausts, mass murders, and acts of genocide is one of scale.  On the one hand, if you introduce a number of vivid characters, get your audience to like and relate to them, and then kill them all off, your audience is going to feel manipulated.  But if you keep the characters more anonymous, who cares if they die?  All you have by the end is a pile of bodies your audience thinks they ought to care about, but can’t quite manage.

“City of Life and Death,”  which is about the 1937 Nanking massacre, when Japanese soldiers raped and murdered somewhere between 20,000 and 300,000 people, never quite masters the problem of scope.  There are simultaneously too many characters and not enough; we are introduced to a bunch of people and try to follow their storylines, but aren’t given enough time with them before horrible things pile on in order to really be able to tell one family from another.

The rape of Nanking is a controversial and emotionally charged event in Asia, and credit Chinese filmmaker Lu Chuan for handling it with an even hand, showing the monstrosities committed by the Japanese without painting them as monsters.  Or, at the very least, showing how they became monsters by committing monstrous acts, and not the other way around.  The Chinese are horrified because they are being killed without rhyme or reason; the Japanese, at least some of them, are horrified that they’re killing without rhyme or reason.

There are some great sequences in “City of Life and Death.”  But there are also long, confusing and convoluted sequences where you’re wondering who this is, where they came from, and why you should care about them.  Generally, I would suggest watching a movie like this twice, to sort out all the characters and shorelines.  But this is a film about a holocaust.  Not the kind of thing you want to watch more than once.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Some movies are out to make statements and are meant to stand on their own; others are genre exercises, taking familiar movie tropes and working them in a different key, like John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things.”   Some movies are obvious, intentional tributes to other films; others sort of just end up that way.

“Attack the Block” is the latter or both. It’s a reworking of the alien-invasion genre, imagining if the aliens only invaded one apartment complex in the ghettos of London.  Because nobody pays attention to what goes on in the slums, the alien invasion goes unnoticed by the rest of London, not to mention the rest of the world.  It’s up to a gang of teenagers to fight off the aliens and save mankind from destruction.

In that way, “Attack the Block” is also a homage to Steven Spielberg’s movies of the ’80s, exactly the same films that “Super 8″ paid homage to earlier this summer.   The difference between this film and that one is that “Attack the Block” doesn’t have to work as hard.  I enjoyed “Super 8,” but it was so determined to recreate/recapture that “E.T.” magic, it kind of made just want to watch “E.T.” instead.  By reimagining– replacing the 12 year old suburbanites we have 15 year old hoods —  instead of attempting to recreate, “Attack the Block” gives itself some room to breathe, relax and find its own pace.

OK, so it’s not exactly “E.T.” in the ghetto.  The aliens aren’t friendly; they’re out to kill, and “Attack the Block” certainly takes its cues from scarier alien movies in its action scenes.  But what makes this fun and entertaining is its almost complete lack of responsible adults, and that’s certainly borrowed from Spielberg.  It’s a coming-of-age story even as it’s an alien invasion flick.   It’s a thrill, it’s entertaining, and it’s one of the most purely enjoyable action films I’ve seen in a while.

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Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

“Viva Riva” feels a bit like a Quentin Tarantino film, set in the Republic of the Congo, starring Dwyane Wade.

Well, maybe not a Tarantino film.  Maybe a Tarantino knockoff, like so many of the films that were made in the late ’90s, after QT hit it big with “Pulp Fiction.”   It doesn’t have the structural creativity, dark humor, or obsessive fascination with films from the ’70s that mark Tarantino’s work.  It does, however, have the pleasantly shambling pace, a large and engaging cast, and a clear sense of style.

And the fact that the protagonist, played by Congolese actor Patsha Bay, looks alarmingly like the Miami Heat scoring guard, just makes it all that much more fun.  If you’ve ever considered Wade a thug and a gangster who managed a breathtaking heist that simultaneously painted a target on his back and made him rich enough to do whatever he wanted, this movie is for you.

Of course, in “Viva Riva,” it’s a truckload of gas, and not LeBron James, that gets stolen.  Riva arrives back in Kinshasa, his hometown, having stolen the gas from a ganster who dresses all in white and loves scarves despite the heat.  He stashes the gas, waiting for gas prices to go up even more — he’s rich now, but he’ll be even richer tomorrow — and sets about seducing the least available woman in Kinshasa; she’s the property of the city’s most powerful gangster.  This guy just can’t buy enough trouble.

Because it’s set in a sprawling 3rd world city and it’s about gangsters and crime, “Viva Riva” bears comparisons to one of my favorite movies, “City of God.”   But the comparison just shows how unique and masterful a movie “City of God” is;  this one’s certainly entertaining, but doesn’t have the range, scope, depth or intensity of that movie.  It’s a fun ride, but really isn’t anything more than a movie about guns, women and gangsters.   Which isn’t a bad thing.  It’s pretty darn entertaining flick.

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Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

“Incendies,” which was the Canadian entry into the Oscar race for Best Foreign Film, feels like the kind of movie which has its genesis with a writer staying up too late, drinking too much, and saying to his best pal, “You know what would be messed up?   What if _____________ ?   THAT would be messed up.”

And then he works backwards to make the messed up thing plausible, and then he works to make it political/symbolic, and then he works to make it artistic/important.  And even if he achieves all of those things – and he does, in “Incendies,”  he can’t escape the fact that the original idea was the product of a drunken, over-tired mind.

Adult twins are assigned a task by their recently deceased mother, through her will: you can’t bury my body properly until you deliver a letter to your long-lost father, and another one to the brother you never knew you had.  Both live (probably) in a country halfway around the world.  Good luck.

The male half of the wonder-twin pair just wants to scrap the whole thing; probably he realizes the journey is going to be emotionally exhausting, that he’s likely to learn some things about his crazy, high-maintenance mother he’s rather not know, and it’s all going to have some larger political/moral/spiritual point to it that’s probably pretty obvious but is going to be melodramatically illustrated anyway, because that’s why people send letters from beyond the grave and embark on quixotic quests, isn’t it?  Sometimes you’re better off just staying home, sitting on the couch, and watching a movie.

But they embark on the quest anyway, and they discover the shocking truth, and I’m not going to tell you what it is, because that would “spoil” it, but I will say this: it’s icky.  And highly improbable.  And feels like something that a writer thought up way too late at night after drinking way too much red wine.

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