Counter Clockwise (now on video)

[COUNTER CLOCKWISE is no available on home video and VOD.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Filmmaker George Moise' agreeably low-budget time-travel yarn had me for while…then lost me…then had me…then lost me etc. I suppose on balance it’s pretty good, aspiring essentially to being a cause-effect teaser in the tradition of 12 MONKEYS and DONNIE DARKO (other stated inspirations were the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy and an indie I never saw, TIMECRIMES). I might even throw in there local writer James Renner’s novel The Man From Primrose Lane (even though that’s a bit of a spoiler).

These are not bad associates, at least when things stay fairly cerebral. Which is about more than half the time in COUNTER CLOCKWISE. Nebbishy inventor Ethan (Michael Kopelow) working in a private lab on platforms that, a la THE FLY, teleport living things (there’s a one-eyed dog he uses as a test animal), crosses the wrong wire and ends up with a time machine instead.

Experimenting on himself, he zaps himself into his lab a months into the future - to find the complex closed down, his beloved wife murdered, his mother institutionalized, and himself a notorious fugitive, object of a manhunt as a brutal mass-murderer.

Predestination (March 12th and 15th at the Cleveland Cinematheque and available On Demand)

[PREDESTINATION screens Thursday March 12th at 8:55 pm and Sunday March 15th at 8:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Also available On Demand.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

In most time travel stories, paradoxes are an unwanted byproduct that need to be either sheepishly explained or hastily swept under the rug; PREDESTINATION embraces them. Where the various internal contradictions that arise throughout something like the TERMINATOR franchise are treated as unwelcome nuisances best not thought about too deeply, here they are everything.

The film begins with an agent of the Temporal Bureau, some sort of time travel police charged with stopping particularly horrific crimes from taking place, failing in his efforts to capture a criminal known at the Fizzle Bomber in 1970s New York City. The agent does manage to prevent the bomber's crime, but is severely burned in the process. Recovering in the Bureau's headquarters in the future, the agent awakens with the face of Ethan Hawke. There he is given one final mission, one last chance to stop the Fizzle Bomber, before his forced retirement.

About Time

Review by Pamela Zoslov

My favorite scene in Mike Leigh's TOPSY-TURVY, about the collaboration of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, has theater impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte complaining about the sameness of G&S's operettas, each of which has turned on some supernatural device — a magic coil here, a magic lozenge there. The next show, Gilbert, insists, will be completely different. “In this instance,” says he, “it is a magic potion.”

I am reminded of this by ABOUT TIME, the new movie by Richard Curtis. The British writer and director is best known for export-ready romantic comedies like FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL, LOVE, ACTUALLY and NOTTING HILL, full of hugs and celebrations and happy endings. Like its predecessors, ABOUT TIME is about the bumpy search for romantic love. But in this instance, it is the magic potion of time travel. Curtis has poured his old wine into a new, science-fiction bottle. (New to Curtis, anyway; there have been hundreds of time-travel movies, three of which, including MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, THE TIME-TRAVELLER'S WIFE, and this one, feature Rachel McAdams.)