To be released tomorrow on DVD

Racial land mines, cultural differences and adolescent girl turmoil get the indie mash-up treatment in writer-producer-director Emily Abt’s drama Toe to Toe, a movie whose emotional messiness is sturdier than its storytelling. Set primarily at a racially mixed Washington, D.C., prep school, Abt focuses on the queasy friendship between studious black teenager Tosha (Sonequa Martin), who lives in cramped inner city quarters with four generations of her family (including Leslie Uggams as a no-nonsense grandma), and white, privileged, and self-destructively promiscuous Jesse (a heartbreaking Louisa Krause).

They’re both star players on the lacrosse team — for Tosha, it’s also her hoped-for Princeton scholarship ticket — but they clash over the attentions of a sweet-faced Lebanese classmate (Silvestre Rasuk) with hip-hop-DJ dreams. Martin’s charismatic dignity in conveying Tosha’s academic and cultural pressures make for a fetching heroine, and she’s a stark counterpoint to Krause’s Jesse, a fast-fading flower whose aggressive sexual indiscriminateness (since her globe-trotting mother, played by Ally Walker, ignores her) is at times difficult to watch.

Unfortunately, Abt undercuts the roiling power of her pained strivers with over-earnest dialogue and tidying-up plotting. But for good stretches, Toe to Toe has an engaging frankness about youthful liberty as both a weighty armor and a dangerously alluring escape hatch. Grade: B-plus


Other recent movies to be released tomorrow on DVD:

From Paris With Love (2010) Directed by Pierre Morel. A low-ranking intelligence operative (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) working in the office of the U.S. ambassador in France partners with a wisecracking, fast-shooting, high-ranking U.S. agent (John Travolta) who’s been sent to Paris to stop a terrorist attack. Among the more talented in Luc Besson’s vast stable of technicians, director Morel (Taken) keeps the usual junky Besson plot (mismatched buddies, vague topical references, hot women who kick ass) moving forward swiftly, and brings the busy goings-on to a close after 90 minutes. And though Travolta has been put on far too loose a chain — an early rant where he tries to force a bag of energy drinks through customs is particularly strained — he helps set a tone of cheery stupidity that makes the film go down easy. (Poor Meyers, the straight man, has to play the wet blanket in this scenario.) As junky and disposable as most Besson productions, From Paris With Love is a feast for insomniacs. Grade: C

The Shinjuku Incident (2010) Directed by Tung-Shing Yee. Nick (Jackie Chan), an honest and hardworking tractor repairman from northern China, goes to Tokyo after losing contact with his girlfriend, Xiu Xiu, who months earlier had left China for Japan with hopes of a better life. Trying to exist in the underbelly of Tokyo long enough to find Xiu Xiu, Nick searches for a decent living and unwittingly finds himself pitted against the Japanese yakuza. This is an earnest gang-warfare melodrama that may make some Chan fans long for Rush Hour 4. It does build momentum and may contain enough mayhem to keep less discriminating viewers engaged. Unfortunately, the picture’s emotional beats, particularly those involving ex-girlfriend Xiu Xiu (Xu Jinglei) and new lover Lily (Fan Bingbing), feel more perfunctory than authentic. Grade: B-minus

Shutter Island (2010) Directed by Martin Scorsese. Two U.S. marshals (Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo) are summoned to a remote and barren island off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from the island’s fortress-like hospital for the criminally insane. If the material, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from Dennis Lehane’s slippery novel, disappoints, you can still count on Scorsese for punch. So many of his famous sequences are charged with a dream logic that when he finally allows himself to make proper nightmares, they blow you away. The DiCaprio character’s dead wife haunts him in vivid color and scenes of falling ash. (She perished in a fire.) There are swirling papers and flashbacks to Dachau, of all places. Still, coming from Scorsese, Shutter Island is slumming: minor but enjoyably nuts. Grade: C-plus