Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie

on April 20, 2015 at 2:59 pm

MAN FROM RENO

The best mysteries are founded on a universal sense of deception. If everyone is lying, including the detective, picking out the kernels of truth becomes all the more satisfying. Man From Reno attempts to evoke this pleasure in the labyrinthine, to mixed effects. A California sheriff and a Japanese novelist find themselves linked in a bilingual, bewildering case of mistaken identities, gangsters and turtles in the toilet — all painted over with a shadowy film noir gloss. It sounds great on paper, and it mostly is, but the execution isn’t quite there: The plot is too uneven and proud of itself to truly suspend a viewer’s disbelief.

Opens April 24 at Kahala Theatre

THE WATER DIVINER

Russell Crowe stars in and directs this Australian war epic about a father — blessed with the uncanny ability to find water in the barren desert — who travels to the battlefield of Gallipoli in Turkey to find his three sons, all lost in the ravages of World War I. Crowe paints a compelling portrait of grief amidst the horrors of war, touching upon humanity at its basest and highest, with cinematography that sweeps grandly over barren deserts. Of course, to balance that out, there’s an obligatory yet superfluous love story, a decided lack of subtlety in theme, and historical gaps that are almost too large to be forgiven.

Opens April 24 at Kahala Theatre

LIKE SUNDAY, LIKE RAIN

A sheltered, precocious child ends up, through happenstance, with a world-weary but down-to-earth nanny, and both end up teaching the other a little more about life. It’s an old trope, and Like Sunday, Like Rain brings very little more to the table. Leighton Meester is sweet and inoffensively charming, much more palatable than Julian Shatkin, who plays a little boy who sounds like an adult’s idea of what a smart child sounds like. Meanwhile, everyone else they know is literally a horrible, one-dimensional person. If you don’t find Meester and Shatkin’s bond endearing, then there’s really not much else going on here at all.