April showers bring May flowers, or, in movie flora, Wolverine and Star Trek. Maybe it’s the rainy weather, but I haven’t been overly motivated to write about anything I’ve been seeing. It happens every time this year: Our screens get choked with films that aren’t quite big enough for the summer, but are too small to attract much awards season fuss at the end of the year. That’s not to say that there aren’t good pictures around. I’ve heard the positive word-of-mouth on Adventureland, the kind of “in-betweener” that critics and audiences motivated to find it embrace, and State of Play is the sort of starry studio movie I’m usually game to spend a couple of hours with. But I haven’t made it to either one, and with each passing week they inch closer and closer to the vast and all-devouring maw that is my Netflix queue.

Mindful of my duty during this dull patch, I have seen a few movies, mostly, I admit, at the art house across the avenue from me. (Even that takes effort.) There was the artful Bobby Sands bio-drama Hunger, an account of the IRA hunger strikers in Britain in the early 80s that you really need to see during Lent; it’s a co-production from Mel Gibson’s company, and the scourging and misery in his Passion of the Christ has nothing on it. I almost generated a few column inches, but couldn’t do it; the bloody toilets and the maggots and the shit on the prison walls and the ascetic aesthetic of the rigorous filmmaking just sort of defeated me as the deadline drew near. You don’t leave a movie like Hunger; you escape from it, better for the experience, maybe, but drained and crumpled.

Sin Nombre, that rare film cooked up at the Sundance Institute that doesn’t feel completely empty of spontaneity and love of craft, is more the thing, and as immigration thrillers go it has to be more involving that the ill-fated Harrison Ford movie Crossing Over, which crossed over into oblivion. The train-set sequences, as a family of migrants and their unlikely protector, a gangland enforcer escaping from his comrades, run the gauntlet from Honduras to Mexico and the U.S. border, are excitingly shot and have a genuine you-are-there immediacy. It’s the kind of debut feature that audiences will seek out as the filmmakers make a nombre for themselves with bigger-budgeted fare. I ran out the clock on this one; by the time I was ready to say a few words, it was already gone, but it may still be out there on the indie circuit. (more…)