PBirdman

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Guild 45th, 
Pacific Place, and Lincoln Square. 
Rated R. 119 minutes.

Even if it doesn’t live up to its festival reviews or its crazy possibilities, Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. The movie begins quietly enough—an actor meditates in his dressing room before a stage rehearsal—but there’s a curveball. The actor is floating in mid-air.

No mention is made of this, nor of the other apparently telekinetic powers that belong to Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton). A movie star in a career skid since he stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Thomson is preparing his big comeback. Unless it kills him first. He’s in the St. James Theater on Broadway for the final rehearsals on his own adaptation of the work of Raymond Carver. As his producer (Zach Galifianakis) keeps reminding him, Riggan’s own money is on the line, and so is whatever’s left of his reputation.

Obstacles abound: Riggan’s co-star (Andrea Riseborough, from Oblivion) announces she’s pregnant with his child; his grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan; a New York Times critic (Lindsay Duncan) plans to destroy the play and the habit of Hollywood people ruining Broadway. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton)—currently involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts)—who’s full of pompous ideas about keeping it real. Speaking as someone who has always found Norton a faintly self-righteous screen personality, I can only say that the actor has found his ideal role. (Seriously, he’s great in it.)

This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity—he hears Birdman’s voice in his head, for one thing. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot (disguised with artful digital seams). At times we understand that a day or so has passed, but the camera just keeps prowling around, looking for the newest breakdown. This, along with the lively—if not terribly fresh—showbiz satire keeps the film humming. The movie’s subtitle, The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance, hints at some of Inarritu’s loftier tendencies. The director of Babel and 21 Grams has been guilty of a heavy touch in the past, and Birdman has a few such stumbles. But the result is truly fun to watch, and Keaton—the former Batman, of course—is a splendidly weathered, human presence. Ironically or not, he keeps the film grounded. Robert Horton

PThe Blue Room

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Meridian 
and Varsity. Not rated. 75 minutes.

They don’t make movies like this anymore, a fact that director Mathieu Amalric immediately emphasizes with The Blue Room’s boxy old Academy ratio. Though set in the present-day French countryside, this crime tale operates according to very traditional conventions. It’s based on a 1963 mystery by the prolific Georges Simenon, who got his start in crime fiction during the 1920s. Best known here for his Inspector Maigret mysteries, Simenon was a strict technician of plot and genre—those may be outdated notions today, but Amalric respects them scrupulously in this disquieting fat-free procedural.

We meet Julien (Amalric) during one of his regular hotel-room trysts with Esther (co-writer Stephanie Cleau), also married, a biter in bed. There’s something fierce and unbridled about her lovemaking—part of her appeal to Julien at first. Later he’ll have cause to question that ferocity. Scenes of their affair and its aftermath alternate unsparingly with Julien’s testimony to police, prosecutors, and lawyers. The Blue Room is all about withholding: Not until midway through do we learn who—apart from Julien—is alive, dead, or on trial for what crime. At home Julien’s got a lovely wife (Lea Drucker) and daughter whom he dragged back to his old village, where Esther and the other locals have cause to know him as something more than a successful tractor salesman. But again, that information is concealed, and Amalric carefully controls the slow drip of damning detail.

Amalric, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Quantum of Solace, is blessed with one of those shifty, quick-eyed faces that makes it nearly impossible to trust Julien. He’s always calculating in what he says and reveals to Esther, his wife, and the authorities. Even if he’s completely innocent, Amalric plays him as if guilty. (Would you buy a tractor from this guy? Not very likely.) I’d hesitate to call The Blue Room a wrong-man thriller in the classic Hollywood sense, and Amalric leaves the ending open for you to judge Julien’s final culpability. Outside the courtroom, the swarming media have branded him a monster, which gives The Blue Room a certain kinship with Gone Girl. Unlike Ben Affleck’s befuddled adulterer Nick, Julien seems like too smart a guy to have ended up in such a mess. But he chose the wrong woman, Esther, and that stupidity may be the real crime here. Brian Miller

PDear White People

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Sundance Cinemas and other theaters. Rated R. 108 minutes.

Justin Simien’s smart new college satire reminds you how lazy most American comedies are. In a very different Hollywood ecosystem, Netflix is paying Adam Sandler untold millions to produce four new doofus-coms. For the same price, Simien could create a dozen movies—and probably several TV series to boot. Moreover, they’d all be topical, engaged with the Twitter-lovin’ culture of today.

Dear White People forthrightly addresses race, though its antecedents and references range further back than the unhappy headlines from Missouri and Florida. Specifically, it feels like a follow-up—though not a rebuttal—to Spike Lee’s School Daze, made a generation ago. And like Lee, though with a lighter comic touch, Simien is interested in the stereotypes that black and mixed-race kids apply to themselves. If anything, after YouTube and the Internet and smartphones and all the other mixed blessings inflicted on our youth since 1988, conformity and peer pressure have been amplified tenfold.

The movie’s title comes from the provocative campus radio show hosted by Sam (Tessa Thompson), who calls out all races for their shallow assumptions. Troy (Brandon P. Bell) is the seemingly perfect high achiever, son of a dean (Dennis Haysbert) and dating a white sorority girl. Coco (Teyonah Parris) is a savvy, sexy social-media queen, willing to play any role for the sake of fame. And new on campus is nappy-haired nerd Lionel (Tyler James Williams, from the TV show Everybody Hates Chris), trying to navigate his way among cliques and not-so-coded expectations of What It Means to Be Black. (He’s also a covert note-taker, reporting a big expose for the campus paper.)

While Sam and Troy are vying in some student-body election, and as a privileged white frat prepares for a bad-taste bacchanal, the real fun lies in the witty background chatter, grace notes, and text messages that undercut everyone’s public identity. To her white b.f. on the D.L., Sam confesses her Cosby Show nightmare—“The hair so perfect, the sweaters so big.” And though she praises Spike Lee, her secret favorite director is Ingmar Bergman. The shame! Meanwhile the Obama-smooth Troy reveals himself to be a closet toker, needing to relieve the stress of his Chosen One status. After a hook-up, Coco shows the hollowed-out sadness behind her ambition. Nobody is who they seem to be—including Lionel, whose gay editor is suddenly coming on to him, perhaps with good reason.

In his debut feature, Simien stuffs the plot with rather more stock elements than needed (a venal dean, racist frats, even a reality TV show come to mint/exploit new stars). But as with his characters, everything typical here gets comically upended. When he shows the Winchester University motto, “Nosce Te Ipsum,” Simien leaves the Latin untranslated: Know thyself. If only it were so easy. Brian Miller

John Wick

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Thornton Place and other theaters. Rated R. 96 minutes.

In the title role of John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays the sort of cool, silent assassin who has only a few dozen lines. He’s a slick, lethal hit man; why should he talk much? And yet you wish he’d shut up already. This movie needs only a simple setup to function, but there’s John Wick, handcuffed to a chair and telling the bad guys why he’s doing what he’s doing. We get it, man. Now why can’t you be as terse as Ryan Gosling in Drive?

The simple setup goes like this: Wick’s been out of the assassin game for five years, living a normal life for a while. His wife dies of illness, leaving behind a surprise puppy to console her husband. After the hothead son (Alfie Allen of Game of Thrones) of a Russian gangster (Michael Nyqvist) steals Wick’s car and kills the dog, merciless revenge is guaranteed. Wick’s rep is so badass that when the villains hear he’s been wronged, they all but commit hara-kiri on the spot; he’s the Michael Jordan of hit men, and it’s really just a matter of time (and 50 or so bodies) before he removes the Russian mob from the picture. As the movie presents it, Wick is actually pretty lucky his opponents are such bad shots—but at a certain point, you don’t apply real-world standards to a movie like this. This is a cartoon in which the brotherhood of assassins doesn’t just have its unspoken code (although everybody keeps speaking it—see above), it also has its own Manhattan hotel, a discreet place where Wick is welcomed as an old pal.

If you can put up with the constant gunfire and the aggressive score, John Wick offers ridiculous but satisfying action. Nyqvist, the star of the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, brings a little twinkle to the otherwise stock Russian villain, and Willem Dafoe, Adrianne Palicki, and Ian McShane are fun condiments on the underworld smorgasbord. Reeves does his usual thing, striding through the mayhem in good-looking suits and patchy beard. Once the dog is dead, his motivation is locked in. And if you wonder whether a dog killing is sufficient justification for John Wick’s huge body count, you obviously haven’t been with a movie audience lately. The dog is adorable. Let the bullets fly. Robert Horton


Listen Up Philip

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 108 minutes.

Anyone who had trouble putting up with Ben Stiller’s abrasive title character in Greenberg might pause before entering the world of one Philip Lewis Friedman. A bearded New York novelist whose second book is about to be published, Philip is self-centered, vindictive, and—worst of all—articulate. He’s played by Jason Schwartzman, an actor unafraid of letting his least appealing qualities hang out. Schwartzman understands how to throw himself into this kind of egotist; we can enjoy the actor’s skill even as we’re being repelled by the character. In Listen Up Philip, this guy is meant to be a throwback to a certain kind of ’70s antihero (the movie’s got the grainy look of the era), as well as the kind of literary character that might have sprung from the pages of Philip Roth. Having said that, he’s still a jerk.

Writer/director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel ) hedges his bets, letting Philip slide offscreen for most of the middle section of the film. There we concentrate on Philip’s live-in girlfriend Ashley, who’s probably been paying the rent with the money from her photography business. She is played by Elizabeth Moss, the increasingly essential actress from Mad Men and The One I Love, and her character is so much warmer than Philip that it’s a relief to watch her, even in the mundane business of picking out a new cat. Philip’s been taken under the wing of a famous writer (Jonathan Pryce), who brings his protege to his upstate cabin and gets him a teaching job in the vicinity. Philip encounters other women—the well-cast group includes Krysten Ritter, Josephine de La Baume, and Dree Hemingway—but his erotic inclinations are frequently blocked by his sour disposition and his need to prove women wrong.

The way Perry spreads his attention across these characters is shrewd, because we probably couldn’t stay in Philip’s unpleasant cauldron for 108 minutes. Still, it’s not always easy to tell how much Perry is in control of Listen Up Philip—the way he keeps his actors in close-up suggests he’s searching for the key to each scene. A narrator, Eric Bogosian, gives the whole thing a fittingly literary feel. It might not add up to a complete package, but at least the movie delivers some smarts, as well as one very brave performance. Robert Horton

Stonehearst Asylum

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Southcenter. 
Rated PG-13. 112 minutes.

There may be no ideal time to wander into the halls of a remote Victorian-era home for the mentally impaired, but the waning days of December 1899 appear especially unfortunate. Nevertheless, a young doctor named Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess, from Cloud Atlas) arrives at Stonehearst Asylum just in time for Christmas dinner—because of austerity measures, the menu this evening includes roast squirrel. Almost the entirety of Stonehearst Asylum unfolds inside the place, so we have plenty of time to consider the dismal setting and the wretched circumstances of the inhabitants. Still, Newgate is taken under the wing of the hospital’s director, Dr. Lamb (Ben Kingsley), an intense sort who seems open to new ways of treating his patients. Another bright spot is a patient, Mrs. Eliza Graves (Kate Beckinsale), imprisoned here for reasons that would hardly be considered insane in another era: She’s been abused by her husband and rendered sensitive to touch.

If this movie doesn’t have too many actual surprises in store, it at least benefits from a certain novelty factor—who makes period horror features based on Edgar Allan Poe stories anymore? That alone buys Stonehearst some goodwill, even if its initial intrigue gives way to pedestrian storytelling of the “Why didn’t he just do this?” variety. Director Brad Anderson, whose curious career has often veered into the twilight zone (The Machinist, Transsiberian), goes all in with the shadowy corners and steampunk devices. It follows that there is a dungeon below the asylum; and yes, it does hold secrets.

Other than the old reliable topic of whether the patients are saner than the doctors, Stonehearst Asylum is content to rely on its atmosphere, actors, and a couple of gimmicks to get by. The deadly earnestness of Sturgess and Beckinsale means we have to look around for more extravagant turns, including David Thewlis as a creepy handyman, Sophie Kennedy Clark (from Nymphomaniac) as a lovestruck nurse, and Michael Caine and Sinead Cusack as voices of reason. And Kingsley, of course, whose temperature is always on the boil—you really can imagine his character scuttling around a Poe story. Even for genre fans, though, the action here will feel hackneyed. Nothing wrong with being old-fashioned, but few movies can recover from stodginess. Robert Horton

Swim Little Fish Swim

Runs Fri., Oct. 24–Thurs., Oct. 30 at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 95 minutes.

Some movies are an argument against making movies; some marriages are an argument against having kids; and this addled New York indie neatly manages both feats at the same time. French filmmakers Lola Bessis and Ruben Amar shot their debut feature mostly in English, with Bessis playing 19-year-old Lilas, a sexy couch surfer and aspiring artist who gently disrupts the fraying marriage of Mary and Leeward (Brooke Bloom and Dustin Guy Defa). The latter couple have a cute 3-year-old daughter and a Chinatown apartment overrun with hipster pals, precious little talent evident among them. Mary is meanwhile a nurse hoping to buy a house in Jersey, growing ever more impatient with her musician husband’s anti-capitalist/slacker rhetoric. (He specializes in the genre of twee toy piano rock, but refuses to make demos, because this is the kind of movie where musicians won’t publicize their own art.)

Bessis and Amar show a great deal of affection toward New York, and for movies shot in New York during an earlier era (think: Something Wild), which is far greater than their enthusiasm about the hard, dull business of screenwriting. The marital conflict is rote, Leeward’s suburban Jewish family is dangerously close to stereotype, and Lilas’ mommy issues toward her famous artist mother (Anne Consigny) are clumsily sketched. There’s a generosity of spirit here, embodied by Leeward (also called Benjamin), who seems to befriend everyone he meets; yet none of those new characters add any impetus to the paltry plot.

Even as Lilas’ uncertain art-making gradually assumes more importance (she’s a filmmaker, natch), Little Fish unintentionally sides you with the practical-minded Mary and her worried in-laws, not the flighty bohemians. “I’m too old to have all these roommates!” wails Mary, who’s trying to scrape together the down payment for a mortgage. Of course Lilas, with her looks and wealthy mother, can’t comprehend such desperation. Give her 10 years, add some wrinkles, and take away her money—then this naive young artist might understand. New York has a way of doing that to people. Brian Miller

The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Harvard Exit. 
Rated PG. 137 minutes.

A staple of Japanese folklore for 10 centuries, Princess Kaguya is now an anime eight years in the making from Isao Takahata, the 78-year-old co-founder (with Hayao Miyazaki) of Studio Ghibli. So there’s a lot of national and industrial history built into this rather lumbering, reverent tale. Frame by frame, it’s never less than lovely to look at. However, whether considered as storybook pages or animation cels, you want this ossified undertaking to flip faster—which Takahata (My Neighbors the Yamadas), in likely his last movie, simply refuses to do. It takes its time, and then some.

Kaguya is a foundling, that favorite orphan figure of folklore and the Bible. A poor bamboo cutter and his wife raise the girl, discovered inside a glowing bamboo stalk, who rapidly and unnaturally grows from doll-size to babbling cherub to teenage beauty in a few short seasons. Takahata’s main theme—I won’t speak for the source tale—is the innocence of Kaguya’s childhood in the hills versus the palace intrigue that awaits in the city. Childhood is clearly the preferred milieu. All Studio Ghibli products are smotheringly nostalgic, pre-industrial, and pre-Western, and Princess Kaguya is no exception. From bobble-headed infant to woodland sprite, Kaguya and her village pals cavort through idyllic seasonal tableaux. The backgrounds are generally static, like delicate sumi drawings, while the actual animation is kept to a minimum. The kids move trough the groves, smudgy shadows pass overhead, and the boughs gently drop their blossoms. Time barely figures, even as Kaguya prodigiously sprouts.

The court rituals of the city—made possible by the bamboo cutter’s continued magical bounty—are treated more for comedy. Being groomed for an aristocratic match, Kaguya protests her plucked eyebrows and blackened teeth. When five silly suitors come calling, she stalls for time by assigning them the most impossible tasks imaginable. Perhaps because of her accelerated childhood, she—along with Takahata’s animators—yearns for the playful forest, so free from civilized protocols. When the emperor comes courting, however, his is an offer she can’t refuse.

If Kaguya has a hearty village swain (Sutemaru) who loves her most, and most intrepidly, this isn’t the sort of cartoon where a happy ending might be monetized into a Broadway musical. No Ariel or Merida, she owes a fateful celestial debt that Takahata fails to translate for us. Brian Miller

White Bird in a Blizzard

Opens Fri., Oct. 24 at Varsity. 
Rated R. 91 minutes.

Faster than you can say Young Adult novel, director Gregg Araki dives into a doomy ’80s wallow, the soundtrack throbbing with The Cure and This Mortal Coil. Adapting a book by Laura Kasischke, superficially a missing mommy mystery, he’s mainly concerned with the hormonal upheaval of 17-year-old Kat (Shailene Woodley of Divergent and The Descendants), who wears her Kate Bush T-shirts with mopey pride. Kat narrates her tale to us via therapy sessions (cue Angela Bassett, notebook in hand) and a few visits with the cop on the case (the bemulleted Thomas Jane), a more virile alternative to her dim-bulb boyfriend (who’s curiously averse to sex with her . . . hmmm).

Araki made his bones as a purveyor of New Queer Cinema (The Living End, The Doom Generation); he’s not a crime specialist, so it’s the repression and melodrama in Kat’s family that he savors. A drunk and sexually frustrated housewife before she disappears, Eve (Penny Dreadful’s Eva Green) despises her pea-green crockpots and Swanson-TV-dinner suburbia, but reserves special venom for her limp husband. His mustache drooping with defeat and humiliation, Brock (Christopher Meloni) is reduced to spanking off in the basement rec room. (Here special note must be made of the splendidly sad wood-panel and throw-rug decor, hand tools carefully aligned on a peg board, the set perfectly dressed for despair—or a Terry Richardson photo shoot.) Neither parent has any time or interest in Kat, though Eve does make a play for her boyfriend (who again seems curiously uninterested . . . hmmm).

Araki’s high-key lighting and saturated colors nod to Douglas Sirk (and Todd Haynes), and he even flashes back to Kat’s ’70s girlhood, giving Green a chance to rock some excellent polyester pantsuits in an eye-searing shade of fuchsia. Unlike most YA novels these days, where the fate of the world hinges on teen angst, no one here seems too terribly concerned about Eve’s fate. Eventually Kat goes off to college, where she majors in Depeche Mode. Three years later, mother almost forgotten, the mystery is solved—or told, really—as if Araki had forgotten about that plot driver, too. Mainly he understands in White Bird that for teenagers, no pleasure compares to hating your parents (not even hot, hairy detective sex).

Oh, what about the blizzard? Kat has snowy dreams, you see, regarding her lost mother (who was emotionally frozen!! Get it?!?). Gabourey Sidibe does supply a little warmth as one of Kat’s besties, and the movie may send you looking for those dusty old Siouxsie Sioux albums in the attic. (If nothing else, Araki will count himself well contented with that.) And Twin Peaks fans take heart: Sheryl Lee makes a late-film appearance, so she’s ready for season three. Brian Miller

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