• Photo: Kent Smith

By Matt Brunson

RACING DREAMS (2010)

DIRECTED BY Marshall Curry

STARS Brandon Warren, Annabeth Barnes

A Spellbound or Mad Hot Ballroom for the NASCAR set, Racing Dreams ends up speeding past its niche market and working its magic on anyone with a rooting interest in the dreams and ambitions of this country's youth.

Like the aforementioned pair of documentaries, this one also corrals a group of kids and tracks their endeavors to become the best in their field of interest. In this case, it's the world of racing, with all three subjects top contenders in the World Karting Association's championship series. Twelve-year-old Josh Hobson of Birch Run, Michigan, is a brainy boy whose methodical, sensible approach to the sport repeatedly wins races. Eleven-year-old Annabeth Barnes of Hiddenite, N.C., is a spunky, charismatic girl who dreams of becoming the first female to win a major NASCAR race.

Both kids are interesting to follow, yet the movie belongs to the third focal point. Thirteen-year-old Brandon Warren of Creedmoor, N.C., initially seems the least complicated, a good-ole-boy-in-training whose reckless nature (on and off the track) might prove to be his undoing. Yet as we get to learn more about Brandon and his family — specifically, the grandparents who lovingly raise him and the deadbeat dad who turns up like an unwelcome wart whenever he's not behind bars — we come to realize that this story is the most involving, and most poignant, one in the movie.

The racing footage shot and edited by Marshall Curry and his team is exemplary (the first competition takes place at Charlotte Motor Speedway) and should thrill even those who aren't fans of the sport. Yet even these sequences take a back seat to the sagas of the children, all of whom retain pole position throughout this engaging picture.

(Racing Dreams will be screening on PBS at various times beginning this Thursday, Feb. 23. Go here for local programming details. The film is also available on DVD.)

• Fox
• This Means War

Click on the title to be taken directly to the review.

The Secret World of Arrietty

This Means War

• Paramount
• Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole

By Matt Brunson

ACE IN THE HOLE (1951)

DIRECTED BY Billy Wilder

STARS Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling

One year after scandalizing Hollywood with his bilious classic Sunset Boulevard, writer-director Billy Wilder was up to his old tricks with Ace in the Hole, which did to journalism — and to the average American — what his previous picture had done to Tinseltown.

Remarkably topical, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Charles Tatum, a conniving newspaper reporter who ends up at a small New Mexico rag after getting fired from too many big-city publications. Tatum's hoping for that one story which will take him back to the majors, and he stumbles across it when he learns that a local (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a cave. Starting with this small item, Tatum expertly expands it into a nationwide sensation, a "human interest" piece that eventually draws the attention of other media, a sheriff running for reelection, American families who travel from miles away to gawk at the spectacle, and even entertainers of all stripes (admission is charged just to see the cave, and a Ferris wheel is merely one of the many carny activities set up on the site).

Cynical to its core, this powerful film is prescient in the manner in which it mirrors our nation's current fascination with cheap sensationalism and shallow journalistic practices. A box office flop (even when it was re-released under the title The Big Carnival), this earned an Oscar nomination for its script (penned by Wilder, Lesser Samuels and Walter Newman), while Jan Sterling, as the victim's icy wife, snagged the Best Actress prize from the National Board of Review.

(Ace in the Hole will be screened as part of the "Extra! Extra! Celebrating the Newspaper Picture" film series at 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 18, at ImaginOn. Admission is free.)

• Columbia

By Matt Brunson

This Friday will see the release of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, with Nicolas Cage reprising his role from 2007's Ghost Rider. Since this sequel isn't being screened in advance for critics, we offer CL's original write-up on its predecessor, which was mauled by reviewers but nevertheless earned $115 million from stateside audiences (although its $110 million budget meant it barely broke even here, with the foreign market once again having to come to the rescue). If this review reminds you exactly how much you disliked the original (after all, it's hard to find anybody who champions it), then for God's sake, do us all a favor and stay away rather than convince the studio of the need for a third GR flick starring Cage.

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Is it possible that before making the big-screen version of Ghost Rider (*1/2 out of four), writer-director Mark Steven Johnson had never even read a Ghost Rider comic book? Yes, I know as well as anyone that faithfulness to the source material is a low priority when it comes to Hollywood, whether adapting Stan Lee or Lee Child. But Johnson, whose version of Daredevil wasn't quite as bad as the press made out, here botches what would have seemed to be a fairly manageable assignment.

The comics' original Johnny Blaze wasn't a joke-a-second character like Peter Parker or The Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm. He was more somber and serious, as one would expect from a biker who sold his soul to the devil (to save the life of a loved one) and then found himself living under a curse that transformed him into a flaming-skull creature whenever in the presence of evil. Of course, when you hire Nicolas Cage to star in your movie, it's safe to assume that camp was what was intended all along.

Cage, whose best film in recent years has been the hilarious Wicker Man re-edit on YouTube (check it out here; it has the power to brighten anyone's week), falls back on the eye-popping, head-rolling overacting that has turned him into this decade's Rod Steiger. Amazingly, though, he doesn't deliver the movie's worst performance; instead, he lands in the show position, right under Eva Mendes as the somnambular love interest and the mesmerizingly awful Wes Bentley as one of the least convincing — and therefore least threatening — villains of recent vintage.

On the plus side, the special effects are pretty cool, and it was inspired to cast Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles (Easy Rider, meet Ghost Rider). Otherwise, this is yet another comic book adaptation that goes up in flames before our very eyes.

• Universal
• Safe House

Chronicle

Pariah

Pina

Safe House

• CBS Films
• The Woman in Black

The Grey

The Woman in Black

• Relativity Media
• Haywire

Click on the title to be taken directly to the review.

Albert Nobbs

A Dangerous Method

Haywire

Man on a Ledge

The Oscar Nominations: Extremely Shameless & Incredibly Dumb

• MGM/UA
• Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success

By Matt Brunson

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)

DIRECTED BY Alexander Mackendrick

STARS Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis

Even a three-course meal consisting of lobster bisque, a medium-rare steak and crème brulee doesn't come close to matching the exquisite, juicy taste of the dialogue slung around in this riveting drama written by no less than Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman.

Practically everything clicks in this brutal exercise in which unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) will do just about anything to curry favor with powerful newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). So when Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison) falls for a clean-cut musician (Martin Milner), J.J. becomes jealous (perhaps not since Scarface's Tony Montana has a movie character displayed such an unhealthy attraction toward his own sibling) and orders Sidney to drive them apart through malicious gossip and outright lies.

The contributions of two industry titans, cinematographer James Wong Howe and composer Elmer Bernstein, are key to the film's success — the jazzy score works in tandem with the evocative NYC location shooting — and while Curtis generally leaves me cold, his performance as Falco is arguably his greatest. Yet the rapid-fire dialogue is this film's truly astonishing component, from the classic lines (both from J.J. to Sidney) "I'd hate to take a bite out of you; you're a cookie full of arsenic" and "Match me, Sidney" to lesser known but equally impressive snatches of cynicism (I've always been partial to J.J. opining that "Sidney lives in moral twilight"). The film's only significant debit is its ending, which feels rushed, incomplete and therefore not entirely satisfying.

(Sweet Smell of Success will be screened as part of the "Extra! Extra! Celebrating the Newspaper Picture" film series at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 28, at ImaginOn. Admission is free.)