Openings
For No Good Reason Johnny Depp pays a fond visit to English illustrator Ralph Steadman—he the frequent collaborator with Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson—in this new documentary, reviewed online. (R)
Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., 633-0059, sundancecinemas.com.
Local & Repertory
As You Like It Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie star in 1963’s Billy Liar, about a clerk whose imagination gets the better of him, sensitively directed by John Schlesinger. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org, $63-$68 series, $8 individual, Thurs., 7:30 p.m.
Dirty Harry Directed by Don Siegel, this 1971 bad-cop flick made Pauline Kael and liberals everywhere hate the now-revered Clint Eastwood. Who, let’s remember, didn’t write that iconic role, and whose mature films as director have since shown all the ambiguities of violence and revenge (see Mystic River especially). It’s a brutal, quotable benchmark of the Nixon era. (R) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
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Godard Does Himself With his Cannes-selected Goodbye to Language possibly marking Jean-Luc Godard’s farewell to cinema (he being 83), here’s a chance to sample three of his classics: Alphaville (1965), Le Petit Soldat (1963), and Contempt. In the latter, of course, the fateful decision of an ambitious screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) to let his young wife (Brigitte Bardot) ride in a red Alfa with a lecherous movie producer (Jack Palance) bodes poorly for their marriage. Godard’s 1963 film is about many things: moviemaking satire, Homer’s Odyssey, lost idealism, and the interrelationship between art and life (with cinema always the valance between). But through the Mediterranean colors and CinemaScope lenses, it’s the gradual, ineluctable dissolution of marital trust that haunts you. “You’ve changed since this morning,” Piccoli protests, but as Bardot points out, the same could be said of him. She got in the car, but he took the producer’s money. See nwfilmforum.org for exact schedule. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380. $6-$11. Fri.-Thurs.
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The New Black Yoruba Richen’s recent documentary follows Delaware’s 2012 ballot referendum Question 6, which asked voters to uphold or affirm the Democratic legislature’s new marriage-equality law. As with our Referendum 74 and California’s Proposition 8, out-of-state money and the religious right invested in a local fight; but what makes Richen’s film so valuable is its focus on the black faith community. She treats both sides non-judgmentally: Pastors fret about the rise from slavery to respectability being tainted by scandalous sex talk; activists patiently doorbell households that are inclusive inside, but Scripture-spouting on the stoop. Propriety is important. The topic is still fraught for African-Americans—“dual oppression” versus “black first,” says one advocate. Even a preacher who’s come around to the pro-equality camp can joke of the traditional black church’s view of homosexuality as “a white man’s disease.” Panel discussion follows. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org. Free. Noon. Sunday.
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Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece recently bumped Citizen Kane off the top of the decadal Sight & Sound poll. No, I didn’t vote, but I rank the film as the the most emotionally resonant tragedy of Hitchcock’s long career. Jimmy Stewart is the San Francisco cop, afraid of heights, who falls for Kim Novak, loses her, and then gradually loses his mind while trying to recreate her image with another woman (also Novak, unbeknownst to him). The psycho-thriller is less overtly Freudian than, say, Psycho, but plunges deepest into the psyche of a guy so in love with a dead woman (who claims to be a reincarnation) that his urges push a live woman—who can’t live up to his ideal—to her death. It’s eros and thanatos dancing to a classic score by Bernard Herrmann (to say nothing of the famous Saul Bass poster), pulling Stewart inexorably into the fatal whorl of his own passion, like the spiral curl of Novak’s blond hair, like the twisted tissues of his own cortex. Also note Saturday and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
Ongoing
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Belle The English Belle, based on a true story, inspired by an 18th-century painting of two cousins—one black, one white—never lets you doubt its heroine’s felicitous fate. Dido (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is born with two strikes against her: She’s the mulatto daughter of a kindly English naval captain who swiftly returns to sea, never to be seen again; and she’s female, raised by aristocratic cousins in the famous Kenwood House (today a museum), meaning she can’t work for a living and must marry into society—but what white gentleman would have her? Writer Misan Sagay and director Amma Assante have thus fused two genres—the Austen-style marriage drama and the outsider’s quest for equality—and neatly placed them under one roof. The guardians for Dido and cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) are Lady and Lord Mansfield (Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson); the latter is England’s highest jurist who in 1783 would decide the Zong case, in which seafaring slavers dumped their human cargo to claim the insurance money. Yes, there are suitors for both girls; and yes, there are rash proposals, teary confidences, concerned aunts, unexpected inheritances, and significant walks in the park. Yet Dido’s slavery-equality dilemma deepens the usual courtship complications. Belle never surprises you, but it satisfyingly combines corsets and social conscience, love match and legal progress. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, Lincoln Square, Pacific Place
Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism—apart from the constant Twitter plugs—is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene—but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip—Miami to L.A.—and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Majestic Bay, others
Cold in July The genre of Cold in July is the modern-dress Western, drawn from a novel by Joe R. Lansdale. Richard (Michael C. Hall), a mild picture-framer in a Texas town, shoots a home intruder in the opening scene. It’s the 1980s, which we know because Dexter star Hall sports a hideous mullet. The dead man was a real bad guy, and Richard was protecting his wife (Vinessa Shaw) and child; in fact the shooting is so justified that the sheriff (screenwriter Nick Damici) is downright eager to bury the body and close the case. Alas, the dead man’s hard-case father (Sam Shepard) shows up in menacing form—his introduction, suddenly looming within the off-kilter frame of a car window, is one of director Jim Mickle’s visual coups. His previous films, Stake Land and We Are What We Are, delved into horror, but with wry detachment and flickering humor. Cold in July is an uneven but densely packed drama that also contains some alarming shifts in tone—suddenly we’re careening from suspenseful noir to buddy-movie hijinkery to solemn vengeance against the purveyors of snuff movies. One of the bigger shifts comes with the arrival of a private detective (Don Johnson, whose good-ol’-boy routine temporarily dissipates the film’s tension). Based on his previous work, these radical turns seem intentional on Mickle’s part—momentarily confusing as they might be, they keep us alert and wondering what kind of movie we’re watching. Mickle might be just a couple of steps from making a masterpiece, and while Cold in July is certainly not that, “stylish and unpredictable” is not a bad foundation on which to build. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance
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Fed Up Narrated by Katie Couric, Stephanie Soechtig’s advocacy doc is slickly made, studded with food gurus (Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, etc.), and sympathetic to the sad young teens we see struggling with obesity. Yet heredity is only part of our four-decade obesity epidemic, which the filmmakers convincingly trace back to a collision between industry and regulators. On the one hand, the FDA is supposed to keep our food healthy. On the other, the USDA’s goal is basically to sell as much food as possible—including corn; and from that, high fructose corn syrup. Which side do you suppose is winning? “It’s fair to say the U.S. government is subsidizing the obesity epidemic,” says Pollan, who then pauses a beat. “Indirectly.” Fed Up convincingly argues how the processed food industry has so successfully engineered its products since the ’70s to be addictive yet never sating. Willpower counts for little (ask any alcoholic or junkie). “We are not going to exercise our way out of this obesity problem,” says one nutritionist. Viewers will not be surprised when parallels to Big Tobacco are explicitly drawn. (PG) B.R.M. Varsity
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The Grand Budapest Hotel By the time of its 1968 framing story, said hotel has been robbed of its gingerbread design—the first of many comments on the importance of style in Wes Anderson’s latest film. A writer (Jude Law) gets the hotel’s story from its mysterious owner, Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham, a lovely presence). Zero takes us back between world wars, when he (played now by Tony Revolori) began as a bellhop at the elegant establishment located in the mythical European country of Zubrowka. Dominating this place is the worldly Monsieur Gustave, the fussy hotel manager (Ralph Fiennes, in absolutely glorious form). The death of one of M. Gustave’s elderly ladyfriends (Tilda Swinton) leads to a wildly convoluted tale of a missing painting, resentful heirs, a prison break, and murder. Also on hand are Anderson veterans Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson—all are in service to a project so steeped in Anderson’s velvet-trimmed bric-a-brac we might not notice how rare a movie like this is: a comedy that doesn’t depend on a star turn or a high concept, but is a throwback to the sophisticated (but slapstick-friendly) work of Ernst Lubitsch and other such classical directors. (R) ROBERT HORTON Cinebarre, Guild 45th
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Locke Tom Hardy is cast as a methodical Welsh structural engineer who specializes in concrete. This is a film where you will learn a lot about how that material is poured and processed. There is only one location to the movie: Locke’s BMW as he heads south through the night from Birmingham toward London—away from a critical job he is abandoning—to attend the birth of a child from a drunken one-night stand. Steven Knight’s Locke is essentially a radio play made into a movie. The camera moves up high to track Locke’s journey; there are some visual flourishes; but basically we’re listening to Hardy’s soft rumbling voice for 85 minutes. It’s a one-man dialogue, with calls to and from his wife and two sons, the hospital, his irate bosses, and a panicked Irish underling back at the job site. Locke keeps telling others, “Everything will be all right,” but he’s really trying to reassure himself against the existential void, the potential loss of job, family, and self-control. Hardy gives Locke a calm, steady self-assessment, a kind of lucid despair. He’s a guy forced to realize in one night that his life has no foundation. (R) B.R.M. Harvard Exit
The Lunchbox In teeming Mumbai, a network of Dabbawallahs delivers hot lunches to desk-bound bureaucrats like Saajan (Irrfan Khan), a lonely widower nearing retirement. His food is commercially cooked, while luckier office workers have wives back home who employ the same Dabbawallah delivery service. Somehow the lunches get switched, regularly, between Saajan and neglected housewife Ila (Nimrat Kaur). What’s worse, her distracted and possibly adulterous husband can’t even taste the difference! She’s hurt and offended, while Saajan is delighted with his misdirected meals. The Lunchbox is the simple story of their accidental epistolary friendship. Saajan and Illa communicate by notes, and nowhere does writer/director Ritesh Batra seriously suggest his two leads will ever hook up. Nor does a chaste, Brief Encounter-style meeting of the souls seem likely. The Lunchbox merely describes an increasingly hectic, impersonal city, where two kindred spirits crave human connection. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Kirkland Parkplace
Million Dollar Arm A true story neatly reshaped by the Disney mill, Million Dollar Arm gathers a collection of reliable sports-movie chestnuts with a bit of Moneyball-style backroom negotiating for grit. The exotic touch here is a scenic trip to India, where desperate agent JB Bernstein (Jon Hamm) treks to find a couple of baseball prospects in a country that doesn’t play the sport. (It’s a gimmick: JB’s staging the search for a reality-TV competition.) Along with the baseball stuff, and the culture clash, there must also be romance: Workaholic JB pauses long enough in his conquest of cheerleader types to notice the plain-but-spunky doctor who lives in his guest house. This being Hollywood, “plain” is embodied by bodacious Lake Bell. Devotees of Mad Men may find some fascination in watching Hamm stretch out in a leading-man role that actually has a pleasant, conventional arc. The actor has sustained his masterpiece of a performance as Don Draper on Mad Men so long that it comes as a shock to see self-centered, grim-faced JB loosen up and break into a smile. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace
Neighbors This fun but formulaic comedy pits Seth Rogen, as a married homeowner and new father, against Zac Efron, playing the rival patriarch of a rowdy frat house next door. We’ve got to get Delta Psi put on probation, so our baby can sleep at night! The conflict writes itself, and you really do feel these likeable two stars could do more-if not Steinbeck, then something that moves them against type. Efron, once the Disney idol, is certainly capable of undermining his image (and embracing it, in several shirtless scenes). When Rogen and wife (Rose Byrne) trick him into a fight with a loyal frat bro (Dave Franco), pushing and shoving give way to the dreaded mutual testicle grab. Efron stares at his foe and declares, with berserk conviction, “I’ll hold onto your balls forever!” Rogen is a veteran of that milieu, again inhabiting the familiar role of the shambling, genial dude who doesn’t want to be an adult. When he and the wife get into a fight, they debate who ought to be the “Kevin James”-i.e. the irresponsible partner-in their marriage. But, really, the term they ought to be using is “Seth Rogen.” And that’s the problem with this movie’s ambition: It simply lets Rogen be Rogen. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Kirkland Parkplace, others
Under the Skin Yes, this is the movie where Scarlett Johansson gets naked and-playing an alien huntress cloaked in human skin-lures men to their deaths. Aided by some motorcycle-riding minions, Johansson’s unnamed character is more worker bee than killer, a drone programmed to do one particular thing. This consists of driving around Scotland in a white van, calling out to single men with a posh English accent, then leading them back to her glass-floored abattoir. In the eerie, affectless Under the Skin, director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) dispenses with suspense or context. Instead we have process, sometimes dull. Johansson’s alien cares only for the body, not the mind, and she’s learned only enough of our language and social protocols to flirt and deceive. Eventually Johansson’s visitor goes rogue, apparently having been inspired to empathy-or maybe just bloodless curiosity-after picking up a disfigured hitchhiker. Under the Skin then becomes a dilatory chase movie, without much action, as her brood tries to return her to the nest. The movie risks tedium to ask an unsettling question about this apex predator: If this she can question her role, consider her apartness from the hive, might she then have a soul? (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance
