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PBelle

Opens Fri., May 23 at Guild 45th, Meridian, and Lincoln Square. Rated PG. 105 minutes.

The rule or the exception—which story should filmmakers follow when addressing history’s great blights? Spielberg gave us the lucky few, and the little girl in the red coat, in Schindler’s List. More recently, 12 Years a Slave didn’t flinch from depicting the institution of slavery, but it was essentially a survivor’s tale with a happy ending. 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. In this proper Georgian household, refined Dido speaks Latin and French, plays piano, and enjoys all the same privileges as cousin Elizabeth—until guests arrive. Then, says Dido, she’s “too high in rank to eat with the servants and too low to eat with the family.”

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. She and Elizabeth are on display like commodities; and the latter realizes, because she has no fortune, “We are but their property,” referring both to potential husbands and the surrogate father who’ll approve those marriages. Predictably, it’s the square-peg Dido who begins to rebel against the patriarchy, speaking her mind at breakfast, reading abolitionist pamphlets, and even smuggling Lord Mansfield’s privy papers to a handsome, liberal law student. Belle never surprises you, but it satisfyingly combines corsets and social conscience, love match and legal progress. Brian Miller

Chef

Opens Fri., May 23 at Majestic Bay, 
sundance, and Lincoln Square. 
Rated R. 115 minutes.

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. Generous and blandly indulgent, Chef may be Favreau’s attempt to make a James L. Brooks movie, only without the character flaws and self-induced setbacks. Nobody registers here as a person besides Carl. If Favreau has a creative gift he’s waiting to unfurl, it’s depicting male insecurity, which dates back to Swingers. “It hurts!” Carl screams at the critic for a bad review, and I’m sure Favreau felt the same way after Cowboys & Aliens.

Whether as artistic statement or self-justification of craft, Chef confirms the core talent of its maker. Comfort food, meet comfort movie. Brian Miller

Cold in July

Opens Fri., May 23 at Sundance. 
Not rated. 109 minutes.

Midway through this movie, a junky old Pinto backs into a shiny red Cadillac. A fight results and a piece of plot is revealed, but the memorable thing about the moment is the collision. How did we get to the point where a pale blue, half-wrecked Pinto should occupy the same space as this gaudy, mint-condition Cadillac? That disconnect is actually at the heart of Cold in July, an uneven but densely packed new drama from a prolific young director, Jim Mickle. His previous films, Stake Land and We Are What We Are, delved into horror, but with wry detachment and flickering humor.

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 Mickle’s visual coups. The old man looks like he’ll be trouble, and he will, but there’s much more to the story than we’d been led to believe. The film not only adds plot twists to its roll-out, but also 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, Jim Bob Luke; he’s the guy with the red Caddy, and he favors a 10-gallon hat and boots suitable for cow-pie kicking. Don Johnson has fun in the role, even if his good-ol’-boy routine temporarily dissipates the film’s tension. (Johnson was slimmed-down and sassy in The Other Woman, too—could we really be witnessing a Sonny Crockett renaissance?) But 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. Robert Horton

The Double

Opens Fri., May 23 at Varsity. 
Rated R. 93 minutes.

In some stories about doubles, the arrival of the doppelganger sends the protagonist into a crisis. Not so in this movie, where our hero is already decidedly cracked. Meet Simon James, played by Jesse Eisenberg, a worker drone in a dull dystopian society. Given how poorly he’s treated at work and how much he’s ignored by his dream girl Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), you might think things could not get much drearier for Simon. Well, meet James Simon, played by Jesse Eisenberg, a rakish, charming new employee—Simon’s exact physical likeness, yet an instant hit with his co-workers, boss (Wallace Shawn), and of course Hannah. Despite an initial flirtation between the two men—the look-alikes share a night on the town, and Simon uncharacteristically has a gas—the new guy cuts an increasingly sinister figure in our hero’s desperate existence.

The Double is directed by Richard Ayoade, the British actor/writer who co-starred in The Watch last year. Ayoade’s 2010 coming-of-age film Submarine showed him to be a filmmaker with clever instincts still in search of a style of his own. (Wes Anderson was undoubtedly checking his pockets after that one.) For The Double, Ayoade and co-writer Avi Korine adapt a Dostoyevsky novella, imagining the story in a curiously mid-20th century setting: rotary gizmos, analog screens, Soviet-style housing. They are of course free to create any kind of futuristic (or parallel-reality) hellscape they like, but this one so closely recalls previous efforts by George Orwell and Terry Gilliam that it lacks the slap of the truly revelatory.

That’s too bad, because for at least two-thirds of its running time, The Double is funny and engaging. 
Eisenberg is nimble as always—particularly when his alpha-self is running rings around Simon the doormat—and Wasikowska is a much harder film-noir type than Jane Eyre or Stoker would have suggested. The film’s grimy atmosphere begins to feel put-on after a while, and Ayoade can’t generate something new out of a Twilight Zone ending. So far, Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy will remain the year’s top study of the terror of confronting one’s mirror image—which, true to literary tradition, is always really about confronting one’s self. That movie really did come up with an original ending, a whopper of a non sequitur. By comparison, The Double stays in the minor leagues. Robert Horton

The German Doctor

Opens Fri., May 23 at Sundance and Lincoln Square. Rated PG-13. 93 minutes.

There’s a whole genre of movies about fearless Nazi hunters, putting Nazis on trial for war crimes, and so forth. (Marathon Man and The Boys From Brazil are just two examples.) But what about Nazis proposing to finance a line of handmade dolls in 1960 Argentina? Helmut Gregor, as he calls himself, is a polite, mustachioed physician who speaks passable Spanish and looks a bit like Robert Shaw. He’s nice to children and especially considerate of pregnant women. Might you be expecting twins, mein Frau? Perhaps ve should run some tests. I might prescribe some special vitamins—for the health of die Kinder, of course.

The fugitive Nazi here is Dr. Josef Mengele, who befriends the family running an inn in Patagonia’s southern lake district (which reminds him of home, naturlich). Adapting her own novel, Lucia Puenzo frames this loosely fact-inspired account from the perspective of 12-year-old Lilith (Florencia Bado), who’s blue-eyed, blonde, and unnaturally small for her age. Naturally Dr. Gregor (Alex Brendemuhl) wants to help this little doll, which also brings him into contact with her parents Eva and Enzo—the latter also a dollmaker. (Here let’s note that undersized Lilith bears comparison to the little hermaphrodite of Puenzo’s XXY, seen at SIFF ’08; pubescence makes them both objects of scientific scrutiny.)

What Puenzo really gets right is the hermetic isolation of Bariloche, where clannish German-speaking immigrants created their own community and schools long before Hitler. Newcomer Lilith attends such a school, where she encounters photographer/archivist Nora (Elena Roger), whose camera keeps wandering in the direction of Dr. Gregor. Meanwhile teenagers dance to jukebox pop and Gregor drives an enormous new Pontiac; Lilith’s coming-of-age will belong to the Beatles era, and World War II seems but a distant memory here. The evils of the Old World are fading into the be-bop-a-lula of the new, and the difference between them is being forgotten, too.

The German Doctor is less successful as a thriller than for its creepy historical milieu. Mengele/Gregor doesn’t do much besides take notes and administer injections; Nora snaps her clandestine photos; and Lilith eventually gets kissed (and has her first period). That this runty girl and this mad scientist should meet is fit for conjecture, but Puenzo’s movie feels incomplete. The greater historical curiosity is how Mengele remained free for another 20 years, unpunished and outliving Elvis. (He died of natural causes in 1979.) Lilith will survive to narrate her tale; Mengele remains forever the enigma. Brian Miller

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