EW review: Audiences should be 'Scared' -- away

(Entertainment Weekly) -- When you hit Paul Walker in the face with a hockey puck, does he not bleed?

This is but one of many thorny questions raised by "Running Scared," a giddily awful, awfully giddy action noir that follows a low-level mafioso (Walker) on his hunt for a hot gun lifted from his family basement by a troubled neighbor-child, who in turn uses it against his abusive stepfather, who just happens to be the meth-making Russian-mobster-next-door, not to mention a fanatical John Wayne aficionado.

Actually, to say this movie ''follows'' anything is severely misleading: "Running" is a fevered smashup, as if Hollywood dug up Sam Peckinpah's corpse and forced it to adapt Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the screen.

But this isn't a Hollywood movie at all. Writer-director Wayne Kramer ("The Cooler") is the latest ''outsider'' to prove there's no blockbuster cliche independent filmmakers don't covet. Marinara accents? Check. Hooker con corazon de oro? Si.

But give it this: "Running Scared" is pugnaciously ugly, unvarnished hackwork, and it commits to its nightmarish puerility with a vengeance. The picture pulsates with a genuine, un-focus-grouped bloodlust. A child with a gun is its central image -- and it's assumed that this will not horrify, but empower. Pederasts appear suddenly and improbably, caper demonically, and are banished ballistically. It's as if someone smelted his personal ''issues'' into bullets, spun them into a cylinder, and fired them directly into your brain.

EW Grade: D+

'Paradise Now'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Could it be that the rightful winner of this year's foreign-language Oscar is the only movie released even before it was nominated because it's so good? That's as optimistic a theory as any about "Paradise Now," and I'm happy to promote it.

In thinking about suicide bombers as real people, filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad not only takes on a brutal, troubling subject; he also builds a great, artistically strong, authentically ''foreign'' movie. Whether Oscar likes its foreign movies this foreign is anyone's guess.

EW Grade: A-

'Little Fish'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

Occasionally, if you walk into a movie late, what's happening on screen can look more dramatic and intriguing than if you'd seen it from the beginning. Forced to watch the characters without the usual labels (neighbor, lover, boss), you may, for a moment or two, close in on something about them -- a gesture, a laugh -- that's truer to the exploratory nature of movies than if you'd already had their roles neatly pegged.

I didn't arrive late at "Little Fish," but it's that intimate dislocation that Australian director Rowan Woods achieves. He sets up scenes that are supple, accomplished, and utterly absorbing yet leave the audience with lingering questions that only heighten our involvement.

Why does Cate Blanchett, submerged in a swimming pool, look like she wishes she could stay there, and why is she working at an Asian video store? And what's going on when Blanchett, in party-girl mode, sprawls on a couch, looking sexy and happy for the first time, as Hugo Weaving, with overly bright eyes and a goatee shaggy enough to house a colony of flies, does a dissolute dance of mock seduction?

The film isn't being cryptic for the sake of it. Woods spends a good 45 minutes setting up an Altmanesque mosaic of characters, letting us assemble their relationships one puzzle piece at a time. But that's because he's showing us how these folks present themselves to each other. "Little Fish," set in the Sydney suburbs, is a tale of addicts and former addicts: people either caught in the grip of heroin or trying to escape its pull.

Some, like Blanchett's 32-year-old Tracy, desperate to launch her own business, have been clean for several years, but "Little Fish" (the title refers to tiny fish-shaped packets of liquid smack) is less about the cruddy rituals of scoring and shooting up than it is about the junkie's mode of being, his dependence on secrecy and lying, which can linger long after the habit has been kicked.

The moment that Tracy fibs about being okayed for a bank loan, we know she's still caught in the drug spiral. Lionel (Weaving), her party comrade, is a retired soccer hero who turned her on to heroin and is still in its thrall, and Brad ''The Jockey'' Thompson (Sam Neill), his supplier and former lover, is a criminal kingpin who spreads rot wherever he goes. It's a shock to see Neill, in a leisure suit and comb-over, play a lethal slime, and he's great at it.

Completing the circle of sleaze is Tracy's brother (Martin Henderson), who lost his leg in a mysterious accident, and her former flame/dope partner, a Vietnamese Australian named Jonny (Dustin Nguyen), who has just returned to Sydney to work as a stockbroker. He seems the sleekest of straight arrows -- which in this film means look out.

"Little Fish" unfolds as an urgent sprawl of fractured hopes and casual deception. The actors are terrific, especially Weaving, who plays bottoming out as a tragedy spiked with gallows humor, and Blanchett, who digs deep into the booby-trapped nature of recovery. The revelation, however, is Rowan Woods, a major filmmaker in the making.

EW Grade: A-

'Dirty'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The rotten cops in the baroque urban downer drama "Dirty" treat their hometown of Los Angeles like hell. Literally, like a place of damnation, where all hope is lost, and no boundaries separate those sworn to uphold the law from those who break it.

Of course, because this is movie SoCal, and crooked LAPD partners Salim Adel (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Armando Sancho (Clifton Collins Jr.) patrol streets that have already received memorable lessons in visual style from "Training Day," "Crash" and "Collateral," hell is paved with edgy, desaturated colors, jittery camera swings, nervous flashbacks, and fancy image pushing; in this art-designed dystopia, every gangster's got style. (Wyclef Jean and the hip-hopper Taboo play kingpins.)

But at the end of the antiheroes' ropes, at the end of writer-director Chris Fisher's genre exercise, guns have been drawn, blood has been spilled, cops have been thwarted from going straight, and nothing has changed.

That's the real hell of "Dirty," the sin that damns it to inconsequence: Nuthin' affects nobody, from the gangs running dope to the antigang unit's brutal street tactics to the top brass (Keith David and Cole Hauser) who simultaneously offer Adel and Sancho protection and set them up. Everything's window dressing.

Much is made (at least between themselves) of the fact that the duo in blue consists of ''a bean and a ******'' -- Sancho himself is a former gang member while Adel is simply an amoral mofo with a taste for boosting the expensive gadgets of the citizens he waylays. (He also sexually molests a female motorist while her male companion looks on helplessly, a play of degradation that feels cribbed from the "Crash" handbook.)

But when the florid speeches of volcanic rage and frustration draw to a close -- and when Collins (the memorable Perry Smith from "Capote") and Gooding (an actor here reinvigorated by the indie-film chance to hurl obscenities after a run of studio pap) complete their acting exercises -- we still have no clue who these men are and what sent them down their intersecting moral dark alleys.

''This is the day, cuz,'' Adel assures Sancho, the two of them jawing about making one last big splash before getting out of the racket. Nope, in the smog of "Dirty," this is just a day.

EW Grade: C+

'Winter Passing'
Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling

"Winter Passing" is also being called ''the serious Will Ferrell movie,'' but he's not especially serious in it. Put it this way: His character Corbit is one of those movie types who's into ''kar-a-tay,'' which is a joke that must officially die.

In a secluded house in Michigan's snowy Upper Peninsula, Corbit is the stunted adult who plays guitar and cares for an even more stunted adult, a shriveled recluse of a writer named Don (Ed Harris, in a desert-island hairdo), when Don's mournful daughter Reese (Zooey Deschanel) Greyhounds over from New York City to visit.

For the first 20 minutes, before she gets to Michigan, the movie works. Writer-director Adam Rapp (Anthony's bro, making his film debut) captures downtown New York in a rare and lovely light: November afternoons drained of sun, cluttered apartments with ratty blankets over a mattress on the floor, that kind of thing. Deschanel, black hair falling all over her face, is a perfect fit for this. Then in Michigan, a kind of lugubrious shtick takes over. Maybe they should have visited her.

EW Grade: C+