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Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Sunshine Cleaning, The Cake Eaters</em>

In the cutesy, "offbeat" indie Sunshine Cleaning, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt play sisters who go into business together cleaning up crime scenes. Alan Arkin is thrown in to play the girls' grandpa, and Steve Zahn turns up, too. But none of that appeals to A.O. Scott, who hates this movie: "A better title...would be Sundance Recycling, since the picture is less a free-standing independent film than a scrap-metal robot built after a shopping spree at the Park City Indie Parts and Salvage Warehouse."I donât just mean that aspects of the setting, characters and plot seem awfully familiar (and, in a few cases, familiarly awful). The deeper problem is an overall confusion of tone, mood and genre, a breathless incoherence that comes from the effort to jam too many disparate elements together...All in all, itâs a mess, and much as Ms. Blunt pouts, Ms. Adams twinkles, and Mr. Arkin growls, thereâs nothing they can do to clean it up." — Gothamist

Published Mar 13, 2009

Modified Mar 13, 2009

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Click on the film stills above for more details and reviews on this weekend's new releases and repertory screenings, which include The Cake Eaters, Tokyo Sonata, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carmen & Geoffrey, Waiting for Dublin, Miss March, Z, The Last House on the Left, The Disco Dolls in Hot Skin, and The Dead Zone.