Opening
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PBoyhood

Opens Fri., July 25 at Harvard Exit And
Lincoln Square. Rated R. 164 minutes.

The title Boyhood suggests something definitive, perhaps even a statement on the essential nature of growing up. Which is not at all what this movie is. Made up of stray moments, occasional bits of melodrama, and a gentle sense of time drifting by, the film is much better represented by its working title: 12 Years. Nothing grand about that, just a description of the awkward age of life. (Writer/director Richard Linklater decided to go with Boyhood after 12 Years a Slave came into the world.)

12 Years would’ve also been shorthand for the film’s making. It was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period—Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world; as 21st-century history and its actors’ personalities evolve, the movie is changed by those things. This isn’t just an interesting experiment, but a philosophical position: Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts.

So what’s it about? (Other than about 164 minutes—the length is crucial, and almost unnoticed.) We meet Mason daydreaming in a backyard, his parents having recently separated; the broken marriage will linger as a fact of life. His journey through the school years is sometimes bumpy, sometimes mundane. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. Nothing alerts us to the fact that another year has passed, unless we notice changes in haircuts. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned—the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem.

Still, it’s quietly radical. Linklater’s films are almost always nudging us to watch movies in a different way, from the unusually structured Slacker and the Before Sunrise trilogy to the anti-nostalgia of Dazed and Confused. By all means, enjoy this movie for its evocation of childhood, but let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. Robert Horton

PCannibal

Runs Fri., July 25–Thurs., July 30 at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 116 minutes.

Most of the conventional horror is contained in the first 10 minutes. A surgically precise evocation of a lonely gas station at night gives way to reveal someone stalking a driver and passenger. A deliberate crash ensues. A dead woman is taken to a mountain cabin, where the stalker selects a knife from his collection and goes to work. Back home in Granada (this is a Spanish film), the killer fills his refrigerator with the outcome of the murder—the prime cuts stacked in rows. The movie is called Cannibal, after all.

After this terrifying opening, Manuel Martin Cuenca’s film remains a minimalist affair, cued to the deadpan central performance by Antonio de la Torre (the bisexual pilot from Almodovar’s I’m So Excited!). He plays Carlos, a meticulous old-school tailor whose skill at cutting suits is matched by his precision at—well, you know. His nosy neighbor (Olimpia Melinte) asks one too many personal questions and abruptly disappears, after possibly finding out too much about Carlos’ fridge. We assume Carlos has done his thing. Then her sister Nina (also played by Melinte) arrives to investigate, a process Carlos goes out of his way to aid. Nina is unique enough to sway Carlos away from his fear of women, at least for a while. This cannibal-meets-girl setup is just a little too tidy to take flight as a really original idea, but Cuenca’s control as a filmmaker turns Cannibal into a thoroughly engrossing experience anyway. The film is so beautifully lit and framed that it’s almost as though Carlos is calling the shots, creating a movie world in which everything fits neatly into place.

Eventually Carlos and Nina will drive up to the mountain cabin, and he will begin eyeing his knives. But Cuenca has an intriguing final act prepared, and he doesn’t push us to settle on a single metaphorical meaning for Carlos’ cannibalism—we can make of it what we will. It’s definitely not presented as part of the sophistication of an antihero we might come to root for, as the various screen depictions of our old flesh-eating friend Hannibal Lecter have sometimes been guilty of doing. No, this cannibal we do not root for—although eventually we might feel pity. Robert Horton

Code Black

Opens Fri., July 25 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 81 minutes.

Bad doctors, in social settings, brag about their jobs. The good ones are less self-aggrandizing, so it’s not initially obvious how to approach Dr. Ryan McGarry’s five-year documentary study of the Los Angeles County Hospital ER where he and his fellow residents arduously trained. That these people are idealistic, hardworking, well-spoken, and rather photogenic shows some healthy self-regard, but McGarry’s lens is wider than that. He wants to say something about the current state of post-ACA healthcare in America, rather like last year’s doc The Waiting Room, set in an Oakland ER. However, what that something is, much less its timeframe—starting before and finishing after Obamacare?—is never clearly established. We get personalities and anecdotes, but not much data, especially when it comes to costs.

Still, when you’re helicoptered into “C Booth” (as this ER is dubbed, for reasons never explained) with gunshot wounds or broken limbs from a car wreck, it’s medical quality you care about, not costs. Mentored by their sage old Yoda figures (equivalent to Harborview’s Dr. Michael Copass), McGarry and company swiftly intubate patients, stuff their hands into gaping wounds, and do what they can to stop bleeding. We watch some patients live and others die, the social safety net in action, our tax dollars at work. It’s controlled chaos, where physicians are permitted to improvise on the fly. If you loved the old reality TV show Trauma: Life in the ER or any medical procedural drama, Code Black will likewise appeal.

Then, at some point during McGarry’s long project, a new hospital is built and new procedures are implemented. He and his colleagues complain about the paperwork, the constant computer data entry, the new distance from their patients. “The day of the cowboy is gone,” laments one senior MD. But again, we’re never told when or by whom these regulations have been imposed. Are they to save money or limit liability? This is a public hospital that by law must serve all comers, meaning that “This is a place where you get to work twice as hard for half-price,” as one of McGarry’s superiors puts it. The younger physicians seem to favor a single-payer system, but that debate is past. Code Black is admirably focused as a tribute to a noble profession, but some political context and outside perspective would help McGarry’s diagnosis. “Healthcare seems so broken,” he says by way of a conclusion. Even if McGarry disagrees with their prescription (repeal!), you’ll hear Republicans saying the same thing for the next two years. Brian Miller

I Origins

Opens Fri., July 25 at Meridian and Sundance. Rated R. 113 minutes.

It begins as a science thriller: Researchers narrow in on absolute proof that the eye evolved in nature. Such confirmation would give the lie to creationists who sometimes use the complexity of the eye as evidence for an “intelligent designer,” which is another way of saying God. Alas, I Origins has more than science on its mind—it wants to pick fruit from The Tree of Life and other such exercises in magical hugger-mugger.

Molecular biologist Ian Gray (Michael Pitt, from Last Days) and his gifted intern Karen (Brit Marling) do the lab work; meanwhile, the supremely rational Ian indulges in a whirlwind affair with exotic Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). She has uniquely patterned eyes, European manners, and beaucoup de hotness, so he is forgiven for tossing aside his usual scholarly method. A drastic plot twist jumps us forward seven years, and once again the rationalists are forced to examine their atheistic beliefs—as they so often are in movies.

Although I found all this to be fundamentally silly, I should say that writer/director Mike Cahill is clearly a talented filmmaker; his 2011 debut Another Earth was shaky on the sci-fi but genuinely haunting nonetheless. Here the hothouse world of super-focused scientists is convincing, and the staging of the sequence where Ian relocates Sofi (through a series of mystical coincidences) is technically accomplished. Pitt has matured into a leading-man presence, and Marling—the star and co-writer of Another Earth—is fittingly brainy, and also lighter and looser than she was in that previous film. If Cahill applied his skills to a movie that didn’t strain quite so hard to be significant, he could make a crackling genre picture.

The longer I Origins goes on, the more it encourages eye-rolling. Along with its obligatory journey to India and its theological ponderings, the film also presents a sequence with a grown man picking up a child on a foreign street and taking her alone to his hotel room—we know his purposes are innocent, but somebody hasn’t thought through the optics here. And speaking of optics, the title I Origins is, I fear, meant to be a pun on “eye,” which reduces the film’s metaphysical ideas to a glib play on words. So the movie has the title it deserves. Robert Horton

A Most Wanted Man

Opens Fri., July 25 at Seven Gables, 
Oak Tree, and Pacific Place. 
Rated R. 121 minutes.

When Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February, he had several films half-completed or in the can. Their quality, as it is for any actor, even the Oscar-winning elite, is always going to be variable. A star performer can only dictate so much of the show, though this adaptation of a lesser 2008 John le Carre novel will, I think, be remembered as the best among Hoffman’s posthumous releases. Directed by the very deliberate Dutch photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control, The American), A Most Wanted Man is a fatigued and belated picture—and I mean that as praise. It’s post-spy movie, post-Cold War, post-9/11. Hoffman plays a rumpled Hamburg cop, Bachmann, with failures in his past, who’s charged with the dirty work of counter-terrorism. There are no press conferences or posh U.N. cocktail parties for this schlub, who’s like a German variant on Lieutenant Frank Columbo: disrespected by his bosses, underestimated by his quarry, beloved by his team, but a wry, sad, solitary figure who expects the worst outcome from any investigation. Bachmann is a pessimist and alcoholic who listens to Beethoven late at night on his stereo, alone.

Crawling out of the Elbe, like a rat, is a Russian-Chechen Muslim we’ll come to know as Karpov (Grigory Dobrygin), though he has other names. Bachmann and his squad (including Continental all-stars Daniel Bruhl and Nina Hoss) follow Karpov intently without arresting him, hoping he’ll lead to bigger fish. His bosses are dubious; a separate, rival German intelligence agency interferes; and he’s even got to negotiate with the CIA—represented in butch slacks and blonde buzz-cut by Robin Wright—to allow Karpov room to roam. (Here Rachel McAdams shows up as a naive, sympathetic human-rights lawyer—riding a bike, of course.) Will Karpov plant a bomb in the rush-hour subway or lead Bachmann to an important al-Qaida funding link? Related within a few days’ time and surveillance, that’s the essential plot.

Gadgets don’t agree with the genius of le Carre. If intelligence can simply be gathered by satellite, computer, and wi-fi, what’s the point of the face-to-face deceptions and codes of spycraft? The recent Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a much better movie as it evoked the old, analog Cold War; unreliable technology meant that human relationships, and betrayals, were paramount. Hoffman would’ve been a better fit in that bygone world of smoky negotiation and curdled compromise. In The New York Times last week, le Carre said as much, calling him “the only American actor I knew who could play my character George Smiley.”

Carve those words in granite. I’ll most remember Hoffman from this movie in a brief scene, set on a ferry, where Bachmann tries to keep a nervous young Muslim informant in the fold. The kid is scared, understandably, and Bachmann agrees with his every complaint. But then Hoffman, the actor, leans in like a lead shield. He absorbs all the tsuris of the younger performer (Mehdi Dehbi) like a sin-eater, hugs him, and keeps the invaluable source intact. It’s all in a day’s work for Bachmann, but for Hoffman, too, there must’ve been costs. Brian Miller

The Pleasures of 
Being Out of Step

Runs Fri., July 25–Thurs., July 31 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 86 minutes.

Now 89, Nat Hentoff is the very definition of a living anachronism. An East Coast Jew who came of age during the postwar era, he earned his early journalistic reputation for his astute jazz criticism in Downbeat magazine. Later he began writing political commentary for the then-nascent Village Voice, from which he was unceremoniously booted in 2008 when the paper shifted its focus to the less-contemplative mode of digital journalism. As is made clear in David L. Lewis’ probing documentary, filled with archival interviews, jazz performances, and talking heads, Hentoff was always an iconoclast—a man willing to challenge the dominant narratives (whether political or musical), often redefining them in the process.

In an early interview, the young, forever-bearded Hentoff disabuses his interlocutor of the jazz mythology perpetuated by the Beat writers of the time. He argues that the great artists of the age—Charlie Byrd, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, et al.—were not wild men pulling genius from the ether, but studied practitioners birthing a new art form. That appreciation, and his eloquence in expressing it, earned Hentoff respect from the many African-American musicians who viewed him as one of the few white men they could converse with. As a result, Hentoff was employed to write liner notes for some of the era’s great albums, almost single-handedly turning that form into its own literary category. Read by narrator Andre Braugher (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), those notes reveal Hentoff’s genius and give the doc its poetic heart.

But his genius is more complicated than that, and Lewis isn’t shy about delving into the more controversial aspects of Hentoff’s character. At the staunchly liberal Voice, his unwavering First Amendment views famously set him in conflict with readers and editors, particularly when defending Chicago Nazis’ right to parade in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. As we see here, some of his acolytes were persuaded. Others were simply offended. This polarization continued as Hentoff became more of a libertarian and pro-life absolutist. “You just print bullshit,” former Voice editor Karen Durbin recalls telling him, “and it’s anti-woman.”

It would be impossible to profile this confounding writer without this unvarnished approach, and thankfully Lewis pulls no punches. What we are left with is not the hagiography of a hallowed writer, but a complex story of a thinking man who eschewed the prevailing ideology for his own sense of truth, no matter how unpopular. Like I said, an anachronism. Mark Baumgarten

PSiddharth

Opens Fri., July 25 at Varsity. 
Not rated. 97 minutes.

A child goes missing, and his father sets out to find him. There’s a plot older than The Searchers, as ancient as mythology and folkore. Filming on the streets of modern-day Delhi and Bombay, Canadian director Richie Mehta combines elements both old and new as Mahendra (Rajesh Tailang) is forced on a desperate rescue mission. In the very first scene, we see 12-year-old Siddharth packed onto a bus, headed north to the Punjab, where his mother’s brother-in-law has found him a job in a factory. When Mahendra goes home, we understand why this child labor is necessary: The Saini family is poor, living in a single concrete walled room, with a small daughter to support. Mahendra is a “chain wallah,” a guy who walks the streets like a tinker, repairing zippers for a few rupees a day. He’s evidently illiterate, and this is the only skill he’s got. His wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) meanwhile does laundry, and the whole family gathers in delight when Siddharth calls their cell phone—their most precious household item, paid by the minute—to report he’s arrived safely. Months later, however, he fails to return for a scheduled visit.

Where’s the factory? Who runs it? How can Mahendra find the owner? With no money and no connections, he becomes an intrepid but overmatched detective. Here’s where technology—and India’s bureaucracy—begins to fail, and the cruel codes of caste and feudal obligation assert themselves. The more prosperous brother-in-law, it emerges, had ulterior motives in apprenticing Siddharth to a distant cousin. Suman, eyeing the pink basin that betokens indoor plumbing, which her family lacks, angrily rips the address page out of his planner: This scrap of paper will lead her husband first to the Punjab, then finally south to Bombay. It’s a journey he can’t afford, and gathering a financial stake takes anguished weeks. Mahendra reluctantly accepts cash from his colleagues in the zipper trade and carefully rebuffs the overture of a moneylender. Gangsters may have taken his son for slave labor, sex trafficking, or maiming-and-begging on the streets; and they could inflict still more harm on his family.

Mehta based his script on an actual incident, when a poor stranger asked him about a possibly nonexistant place called “Dongri,” where stolen children were supposedly taken. So too does Mahendra ask as he plies his trade in the bustling, indifferent city. We might think, like Mehta, that Dongri is merely urban folklore, the dark analogue of Neverland in Peter Pan. Then, in one of the quietly powerful and not-quite-despairing moments that characterize this fine film, Mahendra receives confirmation from a customer. Fixing her zippered handbag, he politely asks if she’s ever heard of Dongri; she types it into her iPhone. It’s in Bombay, she tells him, giving him the coordinates. For at least a little while longer, Siddharth gives Mahendra, and us, the small consolation of hope. Brian Miller

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