The folks out at Image Entertainment shipped us  out a copy of Money Matters to cover, and if you thought yesterday’s entrant, The Littlest Angel, was heavy handed, then brace yourself for a fist made of iron with this one. It only just hit shelves today, but chances are there won’t be a whole lot of interest going on unless you already enjoy this kind of thing.

Money Matters follows the title character–yes, it’s about a girl named Monique “Money” Matters–who finds herself neck deep in a whole lot of very urban problems. Her mother’s trying to keep a roof over their head, which isn’t easy since she often finds herself living with a series of less than sterling men, and daughter Money is having plenty of girl-growing-up problems of her own in the midst of a Catholic school that is often less than supportive. But as mother and daughter struggle toward their own ends, never really knowing just how similar said ends are. But when Money ends up meeting a new girl that offers up a surprisingly friendly posture, that friendship will push a few boundaries in its own right. How will it all end up? Well, you’ll find out.

This is the kind of movie that made Don’t Be A Menace To South Central While Drinking Your Juice In The Hood possible in the first place, a movie so thick with lessons and morals that it might as well have some guy come by the camera, look into it, and shout “Message!” every time they try to make a point. The only problem with that approach, however, would be that by the end of the movie the poor schmoe assigned to the role would keel over from exhaustion, because he’d be shouting every couple of minutes.

Money Matters is thicker than hip-deep caramel and moves just about as fast. It’s dull, pompous and spectacularly preachy. It’s clearly trying to be a powerful independent movie, and that is, in a nutshell, Money Matters’ biggest problem. It’s trying, it’s clearly trying, it’s trying so hard that it’s next to impossible to take it seriously because it’s so busy taking itself seriously that there’s no room for anyone else. Even better, it’ll be another one of those movies where pretty much every guy–from the drug dealing boyfriend to the rapist ex-boyfriend to the child-molesting Catholic priest–is a complete waste of skin who exists for no other reason than to give Money and her mother yet another Challenge to Overcome. It’s every inch as bad as Tyler Perry, but almost worse for its clear lack of a shooting budget.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Money Matters a three out of ten for trying way too hard and taking itself way too seriously. Being “indie” is not an excuse for building a half-decent narrative and making a story more than a handful of people want to hear about.

Speaking as someone who has only recently cleared the threshold into thirty-somethingdom himself, I understand where The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something, a copy of which the folks out at Maverick Entertainment sent out for review, comes from. And there’s a pretty good chance that most of you–including you not quite thirtysomethings–will get it too.

The first couple of minutes of The Long Slow Death Of A Twenty-Something actually manage to describe the plot pretty well, and so, I’ll quote them. “Ben Baker was a mediocre person at a mediocre job with mediocre friends who he wasn’t even sure he liked.” But the thing about Ben Baker is that he’s just about to turn thirty, and when that happens, a person generally tends to start looking back at their life up until then–a process which they really couldn’t do until then because they were largely too busy actually living it to even notice it had gone–and evaluating where they are against where they want to be. And more often than not, they’re not happy with the result. That will be the case with Ben Baker, and what he does following this realization is going to be…well…something to see.

A bit of background: this is actually directed and written by Larry Longstreth, whose work I’ve been watching since his animated shorts (Batman’s Gonna Get Shot In The Face is still easily one of the best DC pseudo-parodies I’ve seen in the last few years), so if you’ve been following along since the Bullcrank days, you’re going to be feeling this.

The newcomers, meanwhile, should be prepared for an adventure in the grandest Kevin Smith tradition, with all that that entails, including lengthy profanity-laced monologues at seemingly random intervals, and more than enough weed and ex-girlfriend jokes to choke an entire herd of horses.

Admittedly, I haven’t laughed like this since early Kevin Smith, which is, as we all know, better than later Kevin Smith in the same way that milk a day past its expiration date tastes vastly better than milk served chunk-style. The part where they show a LARP both as the characters see it and as how everyone else would see it is a sheer and unquestioned delight.

This is a conflict that most folks have likely had at some point, in which everything looks wrong. When acting like a grownup feels like an act, and doing what you always did feels less like a routine and more like a rut. The end result may not be as conclusive as one would like, but it’s authentic, realistic, and the exact kind of thing that we’ve all probably lived through.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this funny and thoroughly authentic portrayal of a man on the cusp of something a full ten out of ten. It’s entirely too good not to see, and should be required viewing for everyone between the ages of 25 and 35, or anyone who’s ever looked back on their life and asked the inevitable question: How the hell did I get here?.

A brilliant surprise, Irish playwright’s debut feature film In Bruges was one of the highlights of 2008. The film managed to breathe life into the exhausted British gangster sub-genre (which Guy Ritchie ran into the ground). Since then, McDonagh’s film career was a little quiet as he continued his theatre life. But now details are emerging of his next project.

Currently in pre-production (according to Twitch Film), McDonagh’s next film is called Seven Psychopaths. It involves a struggling writer looking for inspiration, which he finds in his friends dog-kidnapping scheme which somehow gets entwined with a dangerous gangster. And although that sounds a little bizarre, what’s most heartening is the cast attached: Colin Farrell as the writer, Micky Rourke as the gangster, and Christopher Walken and the wonderful Sam Rockwell play the writer’s friends. With the film in prep, don’t expect to hear or see much of this until next year at the earliest.

And for those who can’t wait for that McDonagh brand of dark humour, Martin’s brother John Michael McDonagh wrote and directed The Guard, which is out now in cinemas

This week saw the announcement of an array of films for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which starts on September 8th.

Leading the pack is Luc Besson’s latest film. Surprisingly, it doesn’t involve guns or hot naked bods. Rather The Lady is a biopic of Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy politician who spent over a decade under house arrest and away from her family in the militant Burma. This change of pace for Besson will be an interesting pic. Also debuting will be Alex Payne’s long-awaited follow-up to Sideways, The Descendants, which stars George Clooney, as well as Cronenberg’s Freud/Jung tale A Dangerous Method, and Cannes darling The Artist. And for a complete list of films check out the official site.

The Toronto Film Festival is an essential industry event, and often a platform for releasing some of the biggest independent and arthouse films of the year. It often marks the start of movie awards buzz, and indeed the winner of last year’s festival People’s Choice awards was a little film called The King’s Speech.

Once again, the folks at the IFC have sent out an advance look at a chunk of movie goodness in the form of The Shrine. And while The Shrine will be short on sense, it will be incredibly long on horror action.

The Shrine follows, indirectly, a backpacker who goes missing in Europe, and directly, the film crew who goes in search of his whereabouts and eventual fate. Of course, you can pretty much guess that what happened to the backpacker wasn’t anything good, but when you get a look at just what happened to him–and what will likely happen to the pursuing film crew–is going to be a whole lot deeper and nastier than anyone (least of all the aforementioned pursuing film crew) would ever expect.

I’m always fond of anything coming out of the IFC, and while they’ve had their missteps in the past, they’ve also put out a whole lot of prime content. So when The Shrine got started a little on the slow side, I was eager to forgive. After all, this was IFC we were talking about, and these guys knew their stuff.

My patience was rewarded with a delightfully creepy scene about twelve minutes in. Suddenly, this took on a whole new life of gleeful fury.

Sinister, sinister, sinister. That’s the order of the day right here, it’s a constant string of non-stop sinister. Between the sheer amount of time they’ll spend in Eastern European bizarrity, and the nature of what’s going on (that naturally I can’t tell you very much about), there will be a lot of time here in which you feel that something is gravely wrong beneath the surface. And toward the end, that whole “beneath the surface” is going to burst out into a whole and breathing and thoroughly terrible life. Seriously, if you’re watching this thing, and you ever think it’s slow and boring and deeply unpleasant, I’m telling you, stick with it. The last half hour of The Shrine is going to be a hallucinatory hell ride the likes of which have not recently been seen in film. Seriously, it’s going to be the action movie equivalent of The Exorcist.

And that’s what really makes this interesting; this is going to go from slow and sludgy start to a horrendous, action-packed, terror-fraught ending that isn’t going to make a lot of sense, but will be all the more terrifying for the note of confusion it inspires. The final explanation doesn’t do a lot to help, sadly, but even then it’s sufficiently sinister to make it a huge extra blow.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, in response, peels itself off the wall and gives the often confusing yet deeply horrifying The Shrine an eight out of ten. It may be slow, it may not do a great job of explaining everything, but man, will that last half hour ever blow your mind.

Let’s forget that icky period from 2002-2005, and we can all agree that the Coen brothers are two of the most unique and brilliant film-makers working in cinema today. But their brilliance goes beyond awards (the surprise Oscar win for No Country for Old Men) and box office success (True Grit made almost $250 million worldwide). The Coens are a talent at truly surprising their fans by making wildly different and unexpected films. The followed No Country with the excellent A Serious Man, and now their next project may be a musical biopic.

According to the LA Times, the Coens are working on a story told in the world of Manhattan’s folk music scene in the 1950′s and 1960′s. They are basing the script on the life of Dave Van Ronk, pioneer of the Grenwich scene and mentor to a young folk singer known as Bob Dylan. Indeed, Van Ronk is referenced extensively in Dylan’s Chronicle memoirs.

The Coens hinted that music will be central to the film, and it will contain more naturalistic dialogue. While music featured heavily in O Brother Where Art Thou, it’s a big departure for the brothers going for looser dialogue, considering their scripts are normally incredibly tight and refined. But it’s also an incredibly exciting prospect to see established film-makers push themselves into new territory.

The only disappointing part about all this is that their planned adaptation of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union will be on hold for a while.

I hope everyone is having a great week! I am excited to announce the winner for this very awesome giveaway. Wendy Wallach is our winner. She says, “Loving these giveaways, and I am Wendy.”  I am so happy you are loving these giveaways. They are a lot of fun.

So, Wendy and all of you who entered the giveaway, thanks for keeping the excitement in your life. I thought this was a great giveaway.  The Blu-Ray/DVD is now on the streets.

I hope you get a chance to see it, and please return often to Screenhead.  I will be hosting more online giveaways. I hope some day you are a winner.

The movie arrives from seven-time Oscar nominee Mike Leigh.  He delivers another critically acclaimed slice of life starring Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent (Best Supporting Actor, Iris, 2001), Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen.

A happy couple for over thirty years, Tom (Broadbent) and Gerri (Sheen) act as a steady anchor to their unmarried circle of family and friends. But as the seasons change and another year passes, Tom and Gerri’s support is put to the test in this masterful look at life, love and the meaning of friendship.

Oh, a doubly good reason to be happy emerges today, folks, as we’ve got a lovely combination of joy coming our way. The combination in question is “Spanish horror” and “the IFC“, by way of Kidnapped. They may call it Sequestrados over in Spain, but for us, it’s Kidnapped, and it’s all kinds of awesome.

Kidnapped follows a family who’s recently moved into a new house. A stressful time, sure, but when the three of them get reasonably settled in, they have a nice family dinner to celebrate. Of course, it doesn’t last long when a group of armed men bursts into the family’s new house and breaks up the celebration by taking the entire family hostage. They’ve come for money, but they’ll get a lot more than that when the family starts fighting back.

You know when you kick your movie’s first five minutes off with a semi-conscious guy with his hands tied behind his back and his head in a tied-shut plastic bag, you know you’re in for something really big and impressive. It’s too unaccountably bizarre not to be impressive.

But it only gets substantially more so from there, and when I say more so, I mean, “more so”. It’s only going to get more violent, more nerve-wracking, and more downright unnerving from its already mind-blowing beginning. It’s easily one of the most aggressively disturbing thrillers I’ve run into in a long time. You could call this horror, sure as you’re born, but that’s almost a misnomer. This is a pure, wild hunk of thriller, and if you want stuff that will keep you up at night, this one should qualify.

I’ve always said that the scariest movies are the ones that feature events that might actually happen to you at some point. While being chased through the woods by an undead juggernaut with a machete and a kill count the size of Texas isn’t too likely, and thus not scary, getting your house broken into by thugs who mean to take your money and threaten your family to ensure your compliance is the stuff of front page news, and thus, is incredibly scary.

The Spanish have already shown their incredible talent for thrillers and horror film, and Kidnapped will not let you down if you’re fond of the scary. The IFC bringing this one into wider release is a development that’s just insanely welcome, and if you want something that will make you cringe in your seat, this is exactly the stuff you’ve been waiting for.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Kidnapped a full ten out of ten for being an intense and thoroughly plausible thriller that will leave you checking your door locks for days afterward. The IFC’s really got a winner with this one.

It is the first warm day in Northern California. For some reason a Terrence Malick film feels about right. The studio’s featurette hits the mood and rhythm of Malick’s Tree of Life. Though the movie spans many times and places, the heart of the film lies in the childhood of three boys in 1950′s Texas.

Viewers get a sweeping, bird’s-eye view of life through the eyes of the now-grown eldest son, Jack, whose mother and father each gave him a very different perspective on what it means to survive and prosper.

Now disillusioned, Jack must find a way to carry on when life has battered him at every turn. Surreal, haunting, and inspiring, this is a story about the death of innocence and the search for meaning: not only in one person’s life, but in all of creation itself.

I am super excited that Screenhead is hosting a giveaway to help promote SundanceNOW’s exclusive online debut of IFC Film’s new movie The Ledge. By hosting an online giveaway, you have the opportunity to win (1) code that is good for you and your friends to watch the film for free movie on SundanceNOW. You will see it before it hits pre-theatrical video-on-demand and the movie theaters!

You can see the movie now because it is available on SundanceNOW prior to its pre-theatrical video-on-demand launch on May 25, 2011. The film’s theatrical release is on Friday, July 8, 2011.

Once the winner is picked the code will be emailed directly to the winner, so no time will be wasted, instant satisfaction. Since the film will only be available until May 25, 2011, this will be a quick giveaway. You will see the movie right away!

So, I hope you can participate in the giveaway. The details to enter are below.

The Ledge concerns one step that can change a life forever, in the sexy and suspenseful thriller, starring Charlie Hunnam, Liv Tyler, Patrick Wilson and Terrence Howard.

After embarking on a passionate affair with his evangelical neighbor’s wife (Tyler), Gavin (Hunnam) soon finds himself in a battle of wills that will have life or death consequences. As a non-believing atheist, Gavin is lured by her lover’s husband (Wilson) to the ledge of a high rise and told he has one hour to make a choice between his life and the one he loves. Without faith in an afterlife, will he be able to make a decision? It’s up to police officer Hollis (Howard) to save both their lives, but the clock is ticking in this edge-of-your-seat film that will leave you gasping until the final frame.

To enter the giveaway, post your name and we will pick the winner May 19, 2011.