Just a gal and her dog. And bombs. Gabriella Cowperthwaite's moving film, MEGAN LEAVEY

One of the strengths -- there are a lot of them, along with a few weaknesses -- of the new film MEGAN LEAVEY, directed by Gabriella Cowperthwaite (of Blackfish fame) and written by Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt is that it refuses to turn the character of its titular Ms Leavey into anything approaching the typical movie bio-pic "wonderful-person" heroine. Megan is clearly a problemed young woman who has major trouble with what we might call just plain socialization. Her "people" skills are greatly wanting, probably due to that usual combo of nature and nurture. In fact, it seems that she joins the U.S. military because it just might prove pretty much the only way out of her currently dead-end life.

As written by that above trio of screenwriters and directed by Ms Cowperthwaite (shown at left), the movie never sugar-coats Megan's lack of social skills. We're not even certain, by film's end, that she has gained much more of these, other than her newfound and terrific ability in handling military dogs.

And yet we're with this young woman -- hoping for her, even as we wince at her mistakes -- all the way. This is due to the filmmakers' skill at showing us various situations in which Megan finds herself, along with the difficult, if typical, ways in which she tries to extricate herself. Usually with negative results. We feel her pain and understand her anger, even if we also wish she could learn how to control/use it more wisely.

All this is due as much to the rich and rounded, warts-and-more-warts performance from actress Kate Mara (above, front and center) in the title role. Ms Mara keeps us with her at every moment, never more so than when, finally, she begins bonding with those military dogs and slowly discovers the one area in which she truly excels -- below -- training those dogs to sniff out possible IEDs in our still current and probably for-fucking-ever middle east wars and then remaining smart and intuitive enough to understand and interpret the dogs in action.

Ms Mara, Ms Cowperthwaite, and her crew do a bang-up job of all this, in particular one lengthy, sustained scene in which Leavey and her dog do that good work, are hit and injured for their trouble, and then keep on doing more of the work immediately after. Though Leavey and her dog(s) were responsible for many "saves" during her time "in country," this single scene is all we need to understand what her work entails and why it was so important.

Cowperthwaite is not known as an action director, but she certainly proves to be one here, and the scene is as good as anything in the recent The Wall, or any other of our middle-east war movies I can readily recall. Suspense, surprise, shock, action, drama -- the director gets it all. (Along the way, she, her writers and Mara even give us a little humor now and then to interrupt the unpleasantness at hand.)

We also get a little "family" time, during which Edie Falco (above, left) plays Megan's controlling and generally selfish mom, and Will Patton her disliked step-dad. A particularly good performance comes from Common, shown below, who proves anything but in the role of Leavy's strong, stern and caring commanding officer, Gunny Martin.

Love interest is provided by Ramon Rodriguez (below), and although he and Mara work well together and never have a dishonest moment, this part of the film seems somewhat "inserted" to provide a bit more popular appeal and to further "humanize" our girl.

No matter. What I have not yet mentioned and what is most true of this film is that it's an "animal movie" (as was Blackfish), in particular a dog story -- so animals lovers will cream and kvell at the goings-on. Deservedly. Cowperthwaite never tries to jerk those tears. There's no need. They'll come unbidden and of their own accord because of the tale told and the outcome here.

Opening wide this Friday, June 9, Megan Leavey , running just short of two hours, may prove the most successful of all the movies released so far by the little distributor Bleecker Street. It's certainly opening at the most theaters I've seen from this distributor. And why not? It's patriotic and pro-military without being stupidly "America first," animals lovers will embrace it, it's feminist without pushing things, and it's an excellent character study, too -- of a woman who can't/won't fit in and then, finally, does.

Wherever you are across the USA, to view/find the theater(s) nearest you, simply click here. In South Florida, the movie will be opening on oodles of screens, including AMC's Sunset Place 24, Hialeah 12, Aventura Mall 24, Tamiami 18, Pompano Beach 18, City Place 20, St Lucie 14, Indian River 24; at Cobb's Hialeah Grand 18 and Miami Lakes 17; at CMX Brickell City Center 10; at Silverspot Coconut Creek Cinemas; at CFB Majestic 11; at Cinemark Palace 20 and Paradise 24; at Flagship Cinemas 14; at Paragon Ridge Plaza 8 and Wellington 10; at REGAL's Magnolia Place 16, Cypress Creek Station 16, The Falls 12, Oakwood 18, Kendall Village Stadium 16, Westfork 13, Treasure Coast Mall 16, Broward Stadium 12, Shadowood 16, Southland Mall Stadium 16, Royal Palm Beach 18, Sawgrass 23, Wellington Cinema 8, and South Beach 18; and at the Regency Cinema 8 in Stuart.

Gals go horror/slasher in Katie Aselton's and Mark Duplass' numbskull BLACK ROCK

Have you ever asked yourself why it's always the guys who get to go slicing and dicing their way through the gals in almost all these horror/slasher flicks? Nor have I. (It's fairly obvious, no? Brute strength and predisposition, plus increasing paternalism, fundamentalism and the congregating of wealth and power in the western -- hell, the eastern, too -- world.) Actress/
producer/writer/
director Katie Aselton has clearly been wondering about this, and she has persuaded her hubby, actor/producer/writer/director and sometimes editor Mark Duplass, to help her turn the tables, so to speak. The result is BLACK ROCK.

Last year Ms Aselton, shown at left, wrote and directed her first film, the not-bad, love-cum-infidelity tale, THE FREEBIE, so hopes, on my part, were high for this new one. Plus, the idea behind the film sounded at least interesting and a little different. Alas, the result (to re-coin a phrase) proves an embarrassment of wretches.

From the first, as our three gals get together, their chat is realistic but lame. (Realistic ain't enough, screenwriters; make at least one of your characters intelligent and/or unusual enough to hold our interest.) This pre-event time is our one chance to get to know, maybe even like, these women prior to the "action" starting up. Instead, despite a few moments, as we (along with two of the three characters) are given a small surprise, we're soon bored and tired enough of their companionship to want to get on with the violence that we know from the movie's trailer is coming up.

The three are heading out to an island on which they used to spend time as kids. Once there, they encounter three young men, just out of the military and back from our middle-east wars, one of whom they remember from their school days. What happens is both expected and not. The way it happens is the best thing about Ms Azelton's film. For the fault initially lies as much with the gals as with the guys -- until the point of no return is suddenly reached and then breached.

We've been told often enough how many of our young men come back from our current wars in terrible mental and emotional shape. The movie make a nod to this -- and then uses the guys' precarious state as an excuse for blood, gore, stupidity and sleaze. Think of Black Rock as a kind of paean to our boys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and come back as cretinous killing machines. And while our three gals -- played by Kate Bosworth (two photos up), Lake Bell (above) and Ms Aselton -- are pretty stupid, the guys, it turns out, are infinitely dumber.

Our three ex-soldiers are played by Will Bouvier (above), Jay Paulson (below) and Anslem Richardson (partially shown at bottom, who is definitely the least seen-and-heard member of the cast). The whole group does as well as it can with the material given. Which is never better than pedestrian and eventually works its way into dreadful.

The movie's worst sin is simple unbelievability. You don't buy much of anything in it, particularly once the violence begins. The worst scene is one in which two of our heroines, naked and wet in the dead of night, instead of readying their necessary weapons, decide to have a heart-to-heart. Oy. Black Rock is a movie in which all involved are out of their element and way over their heads.

The film, from LD Entertainment and running a thankfully short 80 minutes, opens this Friday, May 17, in 23 theaters across 17 cities. Click here to find the one nearest you.

The photos above are from the film itself -- 

except for that of Ms Aselton, which is by 

Kevin Winter for Getty Images,

Liza Johnson's RETURN: a quiet, slow-burning, post-war movie that pays off

We've seen the subject of RETURN -- veterans of our current follies in Iraq and Afghanistan coming back to post-war life in America -- handled a number of times previously, usually in documen-tary form and dealing, as most war and post-war movies do, with men rather than women. This new film from first-time, full-length writer/director Liza Johnson focuses on a woman solider, Kelli, played with expanding ferment and confusion by a very good Linda Cardelini, who returns home to job, husband and family -- to discover that everything has changed because she has changed, in ways that she can't understand, explain or even do much about.

This last point is the key to understanding and appreciating Return, TrustMovies believes, and it is to the credit of filmmaker Johnson, shown at right, that she never pushes this view down our throats. We have to come to it slowly, as we watch the story unfold and the character of Kelli disintegrate. Why is this happening? No definitive explanation is given but it becomes clear that some sort of post-traumatic stress is taking its toll. From so much that Americans have already been told about these current wars and their effect on returning vets, we know that PST exhibits itself in varied ways. When gender is included in the mix, the variation is even greater, I should think.

Last year, as part of the excellent festival of new British independent films brought to the USA by Emerging Pictures, one of the films, In Our Name (click and scroll down), dealt with the PTS melt-down of a young wife and mother (Joanne Froggatt, above, right, of Downton Abbey) who comes back from the same war, in which Britian, as one of the Coalition of the Willing, stupidly served. This film, harder-hitting but a bit more melodramatic, makes a most interesting Brit version of Return -- in which a problematic husband, alcohol, a bad economy and PTS join forces in a destructive spiral.

What makes Return as special as it is, is the commendable performance from Ms Cardellini (above) that never begs for sympathy, coupled to the restraint that filmmaker Johnson shows in refusing to enumerate the inner problems Kelli experiences. Instead, both give us sidelong glances as the problems crop up: having trouble coupling to and with her husband (Michael Shannon, shown below, who's good here, as usual, but in a less large and showy role), adjusting to what now seems like pointless manual labor at her employment, and simply feeling lost in all the "real" life all around her.

As the movie proceeds, we slowly derive an understanding of what it must be like for these returnees, who come back to us changed in ways that they cannot fathom, and that only slowly emerge. What to do? Group therapy, as shown here, cannot begin to help. John Slattery (below), of Mad Men, appears briefly as a member of the support group who reaches out a drug-filled helping-hand to co-member Kelli. "What happened over there?" Kelli is asked several times during the course of the film. "I had it better than most" is the only "explanation" she is able to muster.

What we're left with is genuinely, rightfully, hugely depressing: the walking wounded coming back to a society that doesn't want them and pretends that they're either OK or not there, ignoring them to its peril. In past wars cannon fodder knew enough to die and feed the worms. In our new wars, they return to haunt us in perpetuity, enacting a kind of self- and societal-destruction that is perhaps as inevitable as it is unjust. (Our leaders are the ones who should be suffering; as ever, they simply grow more wealthy.)

Return is a wake-up call, to be sure. And as usual with any film that has to do with our current wartime situation, it is just as sure to be ignored. (After all, we have to have our big, costly parade for real heroes like the Super Bowl-winning NY Giants.) In any case, the film opens this Friday, February 10, here in New York City at the Village East Cinema, at IndieScreen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and at the Downing Film Center in Newburgh, New York; in the Los Angeles area, it opens, same date, at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex. Click here for further upcoming playdates and venues.