On June 6, 1968, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. Also on that date, the hotel’s beautician discovered her husband’s affair with a phone operator, a teenage guest married a friend to keep him out of Vietnam, and two young campaign staffers dropped acid for the first time. Director and writer Emilio Estevez focuses on these fictional narratives to illuminate the diversity of experience in 1960s America. News clips of Kennedy’s visits to Appalachian cabins, Southern shantytowns, and midwestern farm communities suggest that he could have been the individual to unite the nation’s discordant demographics. Though Kennedy is the center of the film’s constellation of stories, each supporting role is inhabited by a recognizable star, which gives the secondary narratives more weight. From Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, and Nick Cannon to Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, and Laurence Fishburne, every generation of Hollywood royalty takes part in portraying the tragic end of another member of America’s most cursed family. US-rated R; German release date, March 8.
Alpha Dog
After an initial 15 minutes of drug deals, tattoo-covered muscles, and profanity galore, fans of director Nick Cassavetes’s last film—The Notebook—might wonder if they’ve wandered into the wrong theater. Yet though he became famous through his work on that tearjearker, Cassavetes’s acting career, and his direction of the Denzel Washington blockbuster John Q, have been of a different sensibility. This new film merges the grit and velocity of his previous work with the skillful pulling of heart strings effected in The Notebook. A somewhat-fictionalized account of a true story, the film follows a group of California teens through a weekend of pool parties, marijuana hazes, and aggravated kidnapping. Small-time drug dealer Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) snatches a rival’s younger brother, and spends the next few days trying to figure out what comes next. Singer Justin Timberlake stands out for his nuanced portrayal of a stoner friend who gets stuck babysitting the charge. As the boy tags along to hotel room rages and late-night skinny-dipping, however, it seems like his kidnapping might be the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. Drawing equally from music videos and Bret Easton Ellis, the film has style and bite. US-rated R;
German release date: March 22
