WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD
⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rating: R for sexual content/nudity, language and some drug use.
Theater: Edina.

Gregg Araki's cumbersome film version of the novel "White Bird in a Blizzard" is classic "you've got to be kidding" fare. The 1980s yarn, shot in cheesy 1950s-Vision, shows life in a Los Angeles suburb all mixed up by a flood of new sexual freedoms. Leading the parade is 17-year-old Kat Connor (Shailene Woodley, moving in a direction a lot richer in eroticism and lighter in costuming than ever before). Her mother has vanished, but why? Dad, a stressed suffer-in-silence type, isn't explaining the crisis. Araki dramatizes the meltdown over the seductive mama's disappearance in John Waters style, presenting scenes in high, unrealistic design and encouraging broad, campy performances. As deranged Mom, secretive Dad, and an up-for-anybody neighborhood stud boy, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni and Shiloh Fernandez operate in full soap-opera overdrive. As the young ugly duckling determined to release her adult cravings, Woodley donates the film's best performance, even though her character is no Nancy Drew high school sleuth. If she's so capable in a film misfire like this, imagine her next solid production.
COLIN COVERT

1,000 TIMES GOOD NIGHT
⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars
Unrated: Mature themes and war violence.
Theater: St. Anthony Main.

Juliette Binoche gives a technically accomplished performance as an international war journalist. Shooting combat scenes in Afghanistan and Africa, she's so passionate about her photo missions that she regularly risks her life, and sabotages her marriage. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays her increasingly distant husband, committed to raising their daughters and resentful of her dangerous priorities. Torn between saving her family and defending the world, she withdraws from her career — at least for a while. Norwegian director Erik Poppe's first English-language film provides a lot of what you would hope for a film about a legendary photographer. The cinematography is superb. Moving from sophisticated character close-ups, to dreamlike fantasy, to exciting coverage of the photographer's shattering battle experience, the movie is austerely elegant. It's also entertaining and informative, with a lot of information about political issues in conversations. The only shortcoming is the way these shifts bog down the plot. Binoche's career compulsion continually moves her from admirable idealist to antihero, making the last-act embrace by her conflicted oldest daughter just a bit too convenient.
C.C.

THE BLUE ROOM
⋆½ out of four stars
Rating: R for sexual content including graphic nudity. In subtitled French.
Theater: Edina.

How exciting when Mathieu Amalric, the finest contemporary film star in France, makes his thriller directing debut. How disappointing when it's 75 minutes of boredom. Amalric, whose performances usually include wiseguy quips and hotshot confidence, goes bland as an adulterous philanderer whose transgressions ricochet against him. The script (which he adapted from a novel by old-school crime writer Georges Simenon) delivers extended amateurish dialogue as thrilling as an amateur pingpong game. The story's essential theme, murder most foul, is unaddressed until the film is half done. The star character is undecided between his impulsive new lover (Amalric's off-screen partner, Stéphanie Cléau) and his less than thrilling wife (Léa Drucker). Flashback conversations about his link to two deaths move from police detectives to a defense psychologist and a prosecuting judge. Repetitive to the point of exhaustion, the interviews offer a wearying view of the French court system. The film is so bloodless that you don't care which legal side wins. Even the boudoir scenes are drab.
C.C.

23 blast
⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars
Rating: PG-13.

"23 Blast" tells a fact-based story about a star high school football player in Kentucky who gets a killer infection and ends up blind. It's about a kid without a care in the world, whose entire sense of himself is bound up with the idea of playing football, who becomes suddenly helpless — and, for a time, hopeless. In his directing debut, Dylan Baker takes material that might have made for a sentimental after-school special and invests it with lots of honest observation about the kinds of people who live in towns where the football team is something everybody knows and cares about. Fred Thompson appears in only one scene, as a football coach, but he makes a strong impression. The acting in the younger roles is good, too, even if the actors look well beyond their teen years. Mark Hapka, who plays Travis, the stricken teenager, and Bram Hoover, who plays his rowdy best friend, are both in their 30s, and Alexa PenaVega, who plays the object of their mutual interest, is 26. Good thing she's 26. Given her co-stars, an actual teenager in that role might have turned this into "The Jerry Lee Lewis Story."
MICK LASALLE, San Francisco Chronicle

Ouija
⋆ out of four stars
Rating: PG-13 for disturbing violent content, frightening horror images and thematic material.

Universal's effort to reclaim its place as the Home for Horror takes a step backward with this duller-than-dull 89 minutes of your life you'll never get back. Frankly, the board game is scarier. Laine (Olivia Cooke) is beside herself. Her friend hanged herself after toying with a Ouija board. Seeking closure, Laine rounds up her boyfriend (Daren Kagasoff), her Goth-brat sister (Ana Coto), the dead girl's beau (Douglas Smith) and the exotic Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos) for a seance. "Ouija" is a cynical attempt to spend almost no money and cash in on board game sales. But seriously, who'd buy that game after this? After "Ouija" and "Dracula Untold," who will buy Universal as a serious home for horror? Tod Browning and Bela Lugosi are rolling in their graves.
ROGER MOORE, Tribune News Service