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SUNSHINE CLEANING: Another straight-from-Sundance flick with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters whose aimless lives get pointed in the right direction when they open a crime-scene clean-up business. The concept is ripe for a wacky Hollywood comedy, but the film rarely zigs in that direction. Instead it opts to zag down some rather tragic family history and personal hang-ups. Adams is an ex-high school cheerleader having an affair with her married ex-quarterback boyfriend. Blunt is a self-masochistic loafer still scarred by her mother’s suicide. Their father (played by Alan Arkin) is a failed businessman always counting on the next flip of the coin. It’s not really fair to label Sunshine Cleaning as a downer, but it certainly is optimistically challenged. What it does offer is another stunning example of how good an actress Amy Adams truly is. Equally adept at performing opposite Smithsonian exhibits brought to life or more intense serious dramas, Sunshine Cleaning owes most ...

ADVENTURELAND: One of the most common rites of passage as a director is restaging your own rites of passage as a young-adult. Writer / director Greg Mottola takes us on a ride down his own memory lane as an ambitious post-grad who’s forced to take a summer job at a local amusement park. The games and rides are all run by equally unenthusiastic twenty-somethings living at home with Mom and Dad while they develop an unspoken familial bond toiling in their mutual misery. Except James (Jesse Eisenberg), who finds the girl of his dreams (Kristen Stewart) while handing out giant-ass Pandas. Adventureland shares vague similarities with Mottola’s previous hit, Superbad, in the sense that it the story is deceptively aimless. There are brief bursts of comedy, mostly from Adventureland onwer-operators Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, but by and large Mottola’s not interested in making anyone laugh this time around. Like its alt-retro soundtrack, Adventureland doesn’t really fall into an eas...

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA: The last collaboration between director John Carpenter, director of photography Dean Cundey and actor Kurt Russell - a combo that produced Escape from New York and The Thing – this tongue-in-cheek, supernatural, kung-fu action-comedy couldn’t be more different from their previous films if it tried. In fact, it was so different the theatrical reaction at large in 1986 was a collective “What the F___?” But like most of Carpenter’s early work, cable and video cemented the film as a bonafide cult classic with more quotable lines that a Will Ferrell movie. Russell plays Jack Burton, a beefcake blow-hard truck driver who gets conned into rescuing a kidnapped Chinese girl from a 2000-year-old sorcerer. Along the way he must face the seven Chinese hells, three elemental warriors and a parade of supernatural creatures. Over-the-top in almost every respect, Big Trouble is unlike anything else in Carpenter’s oeuvre, which up until then included mostly horror fil...