PARKING LOT RAGE: Nick (Will Ferrell) tampers with his boss's car in Everything Must Go.
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IN A BETTER WORLD This Danish drama recently won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which means it places a distant second to Melissa Leo's scenery-chewing in The Fighter as the least deserving recipient at this year's ceremony. That's not to say it's a bad movie, but it's hardly satisfying to see the prize go to what's essentially a sincere afterschool special with subtitles. Elias (Markus Rygaard), nicknamed "Ratface" by the thugs at his Danish school, endures daily abuse until new student Christian (William Johnk Juels Nielsen) becomes his protector and friend. When he's around, Elias' dad Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a doctor who spends a lot of time treating impoverished locals in Africa, tries to instill a pacifist nature in both boys, but Christian, full of anger and resentment over his mom's death, resists, instead involving his weak-willed friend in acts of rebellion and retribution that grow increasingly dangerous. Perhaps had they focused solely on the boys, director Susanne Bier and scripter Anders Thomas Jensen might have pulled off a sturdy story involving moral quandaries; indeed, this portion of the film generally works, bolstered by excellent work from the two teen actors. Alas, the inclusion of the African sequences not only renders the plotting overly schematic (the parallels between the two halves are often glaringly simplistic) but creates an imbalance that the film never corrects — make no mistake, schoolyard bullying is awful, but it still can't compare to a warlord slicing open the bellies of pregnant women with machetes simply because he can. The final half-hour is the sinker, as certain characters are let off the hook, everyone bonds in warm embraces, and life lessons are handed out like candy on Halloween. **1/2
INSIDIOUS While it's probably time to call for a moratorium on both haunted-house thrillers and creepy-child sagas, Insidious milks a bit of innovativeness from both these sub-genres before self-destructing. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne make a believable couple as Josh and Renai Lambert, who move into an old mansion with their three kids in tow. An accident in the attic leaves son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) in a comatose state, and soon afterward, all sorts of supernatural shenanigans begin occuring. No problem; the Lamberts simply pack up and move out. But when strange things start happening at their new abode, they suspect that it wasn't the former house itself that was haunted... Director James Wan and scripter Leigh Whannell don't allow a PG-13 rating to temper their work: Rather than relying on gore, they manage to conjure some genuine tension by keeping both the characters and the audience off-kilter for much of the running time. But the film slips drastically with the introduction of two paranormal investigators whose painfully unfunny comic relief (we're not talking Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd) disrupts the unsettling mood. Late arrival Lin Shaye (a grotesque foil in Farrelly movies) is excellent as the two clods' all-knowing boss, but her elaborate — and exceedingly daft — explanations regarding the otherworldly occurrences further deflate the project, and the frantic finale is simply overkill. And the less said about the awful last-minute twist, the better. **1/2
JUMPING THE BROOM Screenwriters Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs start with familiar material: the developments that occur when the families of Sabrina Watson (Paula Patton) and her fiancé, Jason Taylor (Laz Alonso), finally meet on the weekend of the wedding. Sabrina's family is wealthy and living in a Martha's Vineyard mansion; Jason's family is lower-middle-class and stuck out in Brooklyn. The principal fighters are Sabrina's brittle mother (Angela Bassett) and Jason's loudmouthed mom (Loretta Devine). Under the auspices of Pastor T.D. Jakes (who produced the film and appears as Reverend James), director Salim Akil and the writers juggle a wide range of characters and subplots, and to their credit, they fumble very few of them. Until Devine's overly protective mom is unfortunately turned into the film's closest thing to a villain during the third act, all of the characters are allowed to be believably flawed, allowing us to see the right and wrong on both sides of each issue being presented. The tension between the mothers is palpable, and there are several relatives and best friends on hand to provide comic relief (Mike Epps is particularly pleasing as Jason's laid-back uncle). Jumping the Broom is no Soul Food, but as a worthy seriocomedy about African-American family dynamics, it's nourishing enough. ***
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