Welcome to the Rileys, to its credit, doesn't conform to narrative expectations. It's a drama, but a drama on the edge of utter destruction. Kristen Stewart is Allison ... or Mallory, depending on the scene (trust me, this makes sense). She's an exotic dancer in New Orleans, she meets James Gandolfini (who is on a business trip), and we're off from there.

James Gandolfini (as Doug Riley) is a damaged man. His wife, played by Melissa Leo, is a damaged woman. And of course Kristen Stewart's Allison is not exactly emotionally stable. As such, the interplay between the relationships involved is fraught with peril. It makes for an engaging, if tense, viewing experience.

On the acting front, Stewart is a live wire throughout the near two-hour running time presented here. She comes off like a rabid dog, completely unpredictable; it's easy to see why directors see so much potential in her work. She's great here. Gandolfini is also excellent, he continues to pick tremendous scripts (his work in In the Loop was also exceptional).

The intriguing part about Welcome to the Rileys is the innovation level of the story itself. It's not about New Orleans, it's not about strippers, it's not about any one thing in particular, though the broad themes of personal responsibility, grief, and trust are certainly broached. Each scene involves heavy doses of dialogue, but heavy doses of silence and body language, too. It's a patient and deliberate effort out of director Jake Scott and it portends well for his career. Mr. Scott clearly has a deft touch, something that will serve him well should he choose to continue in the genre of indie/dramatic work.

My only knock on Welcome to the Rileys? It's probably too subtle a work to really stick with viewers. The dialogue and settings are so natural that they don't lodge in your memory for long afterward. But you could do far worse. See it for Stewart's electric performance, Galdolfini's papa bear strength, or to scout an up-and-coming director in Jake Scott. If it makes it to a theater near you, give Welcome to the Rileys a few hours of your life. We'll meet back here to discuss.

Grade: B

Source: Film.Com

One of the higher profile stories in the weeks leading up to the Sundance Film Festival was the presence of Kristen Stewart in two movies, neither of which featured vampires or werewolves.

The "Twilight" star has essentially gone back to her roots by appearing in two independent productions, much as she did for several years before getting involved with a big scale franchise.

Unfortunately, the first Stewart vehicle to unspool at the festival did a disservice to her sizable talents: "The Runaways," a biopic about punk rocker Joan Jett, received a lukewarm-to-negative reaction over the weekend (we covered the premiere here). Fortunately, Stewart's acting abilities are on full display in her other Sundance offering, "Welcome to the Rileys."

Although the plot sounds like the sort of contrived indie misfire that hits the festival each year -- a solemn businessman (James Gandolfini), grieving the death of his teenage daughter, takes a troubled girl (Stewart) that's the same age as his late teen under his wing -- a perceptive screenplay and strong performances keep the emotional engagement in check.

As a foul-mouthed underage stripper, Stewart risks making a spectacle of herself, but she remains intriguingly subdued in a manner that lends mystery and layers of depth to her character. Gandolfini, great as always, plays off Stewart's feigned ambivalence with his most compassionate role in quite some time.

Around the third act, when the businessman's wife (Melissa Leo) shows up, the three-way synergy of performances works wonderfully in spite of the many cliches. At the 2008 festival, a movie with the same basic plot received tepid reviews and wound up in distribution lingo. It was called "The Greatest," but this version works a whole lot better.

Ironically, "The Runaways" showed up at Sundance with distribution already in place (courtesy of Apparition), while "Welcome to the Rileys" remains on the market. The directorial debut of Jake Scott, it both displays his potential and reminds audiences why Stewart was so alluring in the first place.

It deserves a shot at getting out there. Perhaps, as part of Sundance's U.S. Dramatic Competition, "Rileys" could lead to an award for Stewart this weekend. Time will tell, but for Stewart, there's always "Twilight" as a safety net.

Source: The Wrap

The Twilight star is determined to shed her mainstream status. She talks to Nicole LaPorte about her two new movies, why she hated promoting New Moon, and being “twitchy.”

In the midst of an interview about her new film Welcome to the Rileys, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend, Kristen Stewart’s cellphone, buried under a pile of puffy, winter garb, begins going off.

Stewart, who is dressed in all-black (sweatshirt, leggings, boots), is sitting on an immense leather sofa between director Jake Scott (son of Ridley) and co-star Melissa Leo (Frozen River), burrowing deeper in the confined space she always seems to create around her. Her head—hair dyed black in a jagged cut—is down, like a shy child. Her leg is tapping nervously.

“There are a lot of people who are like, ‘Wow, you have just turned a new leaf… You can really express yourself very, very eloquently when you care to, and, Oh! You smile sometimes!’” Kristen Stewart says.

Suddenly, she bolts upward and leaps in the direction of the buzzing contraption.

“Oh, shut up! I’m busy—Shut the fuck up!” she cries to no one in particular.

After silencing the phone, she returns to the sofa. “Sorry, Jake,” she says softly, and returns to what seems like her most comfortable stance: self-protected coil.

It is this nervous, very wired, “twitchy”—as she puts it—energy that has come to define Stewart. She is best known as the female lead in Twilight, the blockbuster vampire franchise, which has made her an unlikely star of both movies and tabloids. But with the Sundance debuts of two new films—Rileys and The Runaways, in which Stewart plays iconic rocker Joan Jett—Stewart is becoming known as something else: Indie “It” Girl.

Every year, the festival produces one face that stands for all that is rebellious, unorthodox, and slightly ill-fitting about scrappy movie-making. Chloë Sevigny, Parker Posey, and Zooey Deschanel have all worn the crown. Last year, An Education’s Carey Mulligan was a slightly more polished and proper Sundance debutante, but, hey, in a hoodie, anyone call pull it off.

No one more so than Stewart, who is, both in person and on screen, an awkward and self-effacing pixie. In Rileys, she plays Mallory, an underage prostitute in New Orleans' French Quarter who finds parental figures in Doug Riley (James Gandolfini) and his wife Lois (Leo), who have lost their own, real, daughter. Mallory, who is as damaged as the city she’s living in, hides behind thick, raccoon eyeliner, and shapeless, baggy pants and sweatshirts—at least when she’s not teetering around in hopelessly high heels, ripped fishnets, and little else. In The Runaways, she’s the harder-edged, but no less establishment-averse Jett.

Stewart is coming of age—morphing from girl to woman (she’s 19), and from teen idol to serious actress—in front of a global audience. It’s not always pretty. While doing press for last fall’s Twilight: New Moon, she was lambasted for not being press-friendly enough, and for wearing her signature scowl a little too relentlessly.

Such behavior didn’t fit well with a movie designed to dazzle 13-year-old girls, and Stewart paid the price. Talking to Stewart now about the experience, it’s like hearing someone who was forced to parade around in a drab school uniform and has now, at long last, been given her first pair of ripped jeans.

“It was hard to turn on the Twilight stuff... I was doing a movie,” she says of the two weeks she had to leave the Riley set to promote New Moon.

“There are a lot of people who are like, ‘Wow, you have just turned a new leaf… You can really express yourself very, very eloquently when you care to, and, Oh! You smile sometimes!’ And it’s like: I was doing a movie! I shouldn’t have been where I was! I should have been in New Orleans! That’s why I was so completely inept. I mean, like, that’s why. Because I shouldn’t have been there.”

It is this torn-between-two-worlds quality that makes Stewart different from other alternative-cinema queens: She is being grippingly embraced by two alien universes—mainstream Hollywood and the margins. And yet she seems passionately determined to shed the former role. Over the course of our conversation, the word “movie” is always said in respectful italics. It is clear the term does not refer to Twilight.

But if Stewart is ready to decamp from the slick center of the industry and set up permanent shop on the outskirts, she’s going to have a hard time. Not only did young Stewart die-hards from Salt Lake City battle a blizzard to show up for the premiere of Rileys on Saturday. They showed up to see it again, Sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. And at The Runaways premiere on Sunday evening, the red-carpet mayhem rivaled anything that Westwood has to offer: an eruption of shrieks and cellphone flashes as Stewart abashedly slunk by. The same Beatlemania broke out Saturday night during Joan Jett’s concert at Harry O’s on snow-blanketed Main Street. However much the crowd was rocking out to Jett (“Put another dime in the jukebox, baby…”), it was nothing compared to what happened when she briefly brought Stewart and her Runaways co-star Dakota Fanning out on stage. In response, Stewart shoved her hands in her hoodie and attempted to dissolve into the drum set.

And during the Q&A after the Rileys premiere, Stewart’s leg was shaking so dramatically that it looked like it was going to break off. When she lost herself in an erratic train-of-thought response to a question, Leo jumped in and answered for her in polished actress speak.

It is this palpable discomfort that kids on both side of the cultural divide relate to—the angst and ambivalence about life, fame, everything.

Of filming Rileys in New Orleans, Stewart says, “I sort of called it home. Like, Mallory, she’s not from there, but when she moved there, it became her town. And when I was there, it felt like it was my—like, it was so calm. I would walk down the street and I wasn’t recognized. Walking down the street, compared to how I would normally feel walking down the street, it was so different. Like, I tromped around.”

Stewart’s face brightens at the memory of such freedom, which is clearly a luxury.

But even at Sundance, the very womb of low-budget outsiderdom, Stewart again finds herself split, as she promotes two films, one of which is a tad more indie than the other. (Runaways already has a distributor, Apparation, and is coming out in March; it also has a splashier veneer than Rileys, which is seeking a buyer.) Having spent the afternoon talking Rileys, she’s now getting ready to dart off to the Runaways premiere.

“Talking about films that you really care about is really, like, the hardest thing for me to do, especially to people that I don’t know,” Stewart says. “So it’s scary.”

“I really, really, really like these movies,” she continues, vehemently. “I put a lot into them, more so than the other ones. So to have both at the festival—it’s weird. It’s like, Jesus! It’s a little overwhelming.”

Source: The Daily Beast