PBerberian Sound Studio

runs Fri., July 5–Thurs., July 11 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated.
92 minutes.

We don’t learn exactly how a fussy English bachelor gets a job as a soundman on an Italian horror movie in ’70s Rome. That’s his profession, and the evidence suggests he knows his craft. But this gig is wrong on so many levels. The longer Berberian Sound Studio goes on, the less it matters how this ill-advised assignment came about. Because this experience unfolds more as a dream than a credible story. And the dream is a nightmare.

That’s the way it goes for Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a mild chap whose warm, loving letters from home are written not by a wife, but—as we discover when he reaches the bottom of the page—by his mother. Of course. Utterly at sea among the floridly warm-blooded Italians in this post-production studio, he’s just as uncomfortable with the content of the film he’s dubbing. It’s a giallo, as the Italians call their style of horror, and the sadistic material onscreen is discomfiting. Though, being British, Gilderoy remains as detached as possible while actresses record their terrifying screams for his microphones.

We don’t see that movie, by the way. It’s one of the fiendishly smart touches in this fiendishly smart film that we experience this trashy flick primarily through our ears. What better way to empathize with our protagonist, whose sense of hearing is precise. This description merely provides the setting for Berberian. Actually watching the movie is quite a different thing. It doesn’t take long to notice that how we get from one scene to the next can sometimes require a great leap of imagination, and that “reality” is going to get very changeable the longer Gilderoy stays on his job.

The pompous director of the giallo insists that his sadistic production is art, not horror. In this, writer/director Peter Strickland gives us a hint (or a warning?) about his own goals; the bucket-of-blood crowd will find Berberian disappointing, but that’s not what it’s about. Strickland emulates some of the slips in logic that fuel gialli, which tend to be the opposite of the tidy, well-plotted horror tales of the English tradition. By the time we get to the final act, things are trippy indeed. Like Gilderoy, the viewer is out of place, an uncomfortable visitor to a location that doesn’t operate in expected ways; the movie’s got some of the choked, obsessive quality of Repulsion-era Roman Polanski.

Strickland’s finishing touch is casting gnomelike Jones, who might be even better suited for this meek fellow than he was for Truman Capote in Infamous. All tweed and worried brow, Gilderoy can’t hold his sanity long in this world. And he won’t. Robert Horton

Byzantium

Opens Fri., July 5 at Varsity.
Rated R. 118 minutes.

Sixteen is a lousy age for a vampire: perpetually virginal, stuck with feelings that aren’t going anywhere, and bossed by a family member who—being undead herself—never ages either. This is the dilemma for Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), a 200-year-old teenager who’s currently mooning about a rotting coastal town in Britain. The protective instincts of Clara (Gemma Arterton) have resulted in frustration for Eleanor and debasement for Clara, whose methods of providing run along the lines of stripping and hooking. Admittedly, after 200 years, she’s probably gotten good at her work.

Eleanor writes down all the things she can’t say out loud about her life, and sometimes other people read these musings—usually before they are going to die, drained with great delicacy by our thoughtful heroine. The Twilight aspects come into sharper focus when vampire elders (including Sam Riley) chase down our heroines for perceived transgressions against the race, or something. Byzantium is based on a play by Moira Buffini, who also scripted, and the aim is higher than those hormonal vamps from the Stephenie Meyer universe. The fragrant seaside setting helps, and the material gets its ideal director, Neil Jordan, who put werewolves into fairy-tale motion in The Company of Wolves and set Anne Rice’s vampires into heat in Interview With the Vampire.

Alas, Jordan gives Byzantium his nocturnal mood, all blurry lights and fishy air, but he hasn’t cracked the code for bringing the situation to life. Both underdone and overcooked, the film is best in its most intimate moments—dear, sweet Eleanor patiently waiting for a victim to volunteer to be taken out of this world, so our girl can feed—and clumsy in its supernatural crescendos of blood running down hillsides in torrents.

The riveting Ronan, uncannily compelling in Atonement and the otherwise misfired The Lovely Bones, is out-of-sorts here. So low-key is her and Jordan’s conception of the role that she’s overshadowed by Arterton, who at least gets to exhibit the fury that most female vampires are only occasionally allowed to uncork. Arterton had already displayed her skills as a fantasy badass as Gretel in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, so maybe the casting is too on-the-nose. Imagine the actresses switching roles here, and suddenly you’ve got a crazier and more intriguing movie. Robert Horton

Despicable Me 2

Opens Wed., July 3 at Ark Lodge 
and other theaters. Rated PG. 98 minutes.

Forget the 3-D. The most important question any parent will ask about this animated sequel is, Does the theater have air conditioning? That’s the moviegoing technology that matters most this week, but it’s only the first reason for seeing this funny, good-natured family romp. Again given a Slavic villain’s voice by Steve Carell, the bald, twig-legged Gru is now a single suburban dad raising the three orphan girls he appropriated in 2010’s Despicable Me. The bespectacled eldest daughter is a texting tween just discovering boys; the other two bounce and squeal without being too annoying; none of their names matter. New to the series—though voiced by Kristen Wiig, who played a different character in the first installment (surely there will be three)—is Lucy, a karate-chopping bundle of goofy adrenaline with a sharp, perky nose. She looks like a whittled-down mannequin, a cross between Wilma Flintstone (the orange hair) and Lucille Ball (the boldly miscalculating eyes). Lucy’s a sunny, comic creation, yet she’s almost elegant next to bird-nosed, beleaguered Gru, a human coat rack of a hero, draped with too many cares and indignities.

Gru’s basic problem is that he’s bored now that he’s out of the thievin’ game. He and his goggle-eyed yellow minions—essentially upright Twinkies, with their babbling language supplied by directors Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin—have vainly attempted to go legit with a basement jelly-making enterprise. Forcibly recruited by the Anti-Villain League (Lucy’s employer) to recover a stolen potion, Gru sets up shop in a local mall, where the evil perpetrator is supposedly hiding. The thief will catch a thief, and Gru is newly energized by the investigation, setting his sights on Eduardo (Benjamin Bratt), the burly proprietor of the mall’s Mexican eatery.

In its amusing first scene, as a flying sky magnet attacks a snowy Bond-villain compound, bits and pieces of this and that go flying through the Arctic air. To otherwise justify the 3-D, Gru and company smash through windows, battle a fierce guard-chicken (!), leap out of planes, and are pursued by a swarm of monstrous little purple demons (on this plot point, parents will detect a parallel with World War Z). All that expensive CG rendering is fun as far as it goes, but kids at the press screening laughed just as hard at the fart guns. Despicable Me 2 doesn’t aim as high as Pixar’s best efforts do, but its core idea is sound: Through this adventure, a new family will inevitably be formed. And if those family members have the skin texture of Nerf balls, they also have the same enjoyable bounce. Brian Miller

Downloaded

runs Fri., July 5–Thurs., July 11 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 106 minutes.

It’s weird enough that Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich found themselves across a table in a 2001 congressional hearing. The amazing thing is that the conservative politico proved hipper than the headbanging rock star. That surreal moment came during the brief initial heyday of Napster, the online music-sharing service that mightily scared record companies and music artists alike. If you weren’t paying attention to details during the Napster affair, Downloaded is here to set some of the record straight.

And it’s true: Hatch really did seem to grasp the positive aspects of Napster, or at least he didn’t have a knee-jerk reaction against it. Nobody else chronicled in Downloaded appears neutral on the subject, which makes it a prime candidate for an argumentative documentary. Napster’s saga also carries an air of What Might Have Been, which lends appeal to something otherwise rooted in writing code and computer language. Director Alex Winter sees the romance in this grand failure, and seems more taken with the Napster-as-subversive-force-for-freedom narrative than with the complaints of the artists who didn’t dig their music being passed around for free. (Dr. Dre and Metallica were among Napster’s most prominent opponents.)

That debate is a legitimately interesting one, and it isn’t only Millennials who saw the exciting possibilities of online file-sharing. At that 2001 hearing, Byrds founder Roger McGuinn laconically notes that his record-company contracts brought him no royalties despite the band’s great success, but that file-sharing was beginning to bring in some actual recompense. Or, as Jon Stewart put it on The Daily Show, after the courts put a stop to Napster and restored the status quo: “It’s the record companies who hold the patent on cheating musicians out of their money.”

The story also has its share of characters, including Napster founders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (perhaps you recall the latter in the form of Justin Timberlake in The Social Network). Winter likes these guys, and while the movie doesn’t try to give them the exalted status pop culture bestows upon His Holiness Steve Jobs, it doesn’t push them much, either. By the way, Winter is the dude who time-traveled with Keanu Reeves in the Bill & Ted movies; he’s mostly been directing since then. The obvious question is whether he’d approve of his movie being shared for free across the Internet. If not, rest assured Metallica has his back. Robert Horton

PA Hijacking

Opens Fri., July 5 at Harvard Exit.
Rated R. 99 minutes.

Movies are good at showing horror or panic or a sudden flight into action, but what about simply stewing in helpless, bored, sweaty fear? And what if that situation drags on for months aboard a hijacked freighter, with no dramatic rescue in sight? The achievement of this Danish procedural by Tobias Lindholm—who also wrote the forthcoming The Hunt, also seen at SIFF—lies in its matter-of-fact economy of tale. Shipping company CEO Peter (Søren Malling) takes charge of the ransom negotiations, but his sole weapon is the satellite phone. Ship’s cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) is the frightened everyman on the MV Rozen, and there’s never any question of his going Bruce Willis on his AK-47-wielding Somali captors. Instead, this is a waiting game, a slow series of bids (beginning at $15 million), rejections, and counteroffers while the human poker chips grow sick and possibly insane.

Cutting claustrophobically between his two locations, Lindholm contrasts Peter’s cool Copenhagen office and the sweltering ship, where food runs out and goats are brought aboard for slaughter. Peter has rich-white-people problems: a nagging board, curious media, incompetent underlings, and a lack of fresh French-cuffed shirts from the laundry. Mikkel’s ordeal is emphatically Third World: heat, hunger, and filth that make him resent the stingy suits back home. There’s even a suggestion of Stockholm syndrome when the crew catch a few fish for a communal meal. They and their captors share the only festive song they all know: “Happy Birthday.”

Lindholm makes the questionable decision not to use subtitles for the Somali pirates (their leader Omar, played by Abdihakin Asgar, speaks English), but it contributes to the crew’s fearful lack of information. Mikkel and a muscled engineer (Roland Møller) are separated from the others; gunshots are heard; what are they—and we—to think? In this sparse drama of withholding and bluffing, we never even learn what cargo the ship is carrying to India, what it’s worth, or how well it’s insured. In a trade-dependent port city such as ours, do we ever know what’s inside all those stacked shipping containers? And of any one vessel’s crew, Lindholm asks, who would miss them if they were gone? Brian Miller

The Lone Ranger

Opens Wed., July 3 at Majestic Bay and other theaters. Rated PG-13. 149 minutes.

Is there anything as surefire as the William Tell Overture? I mean, who messes that up? Whatever the Disney people do with the new big-budget version of The Lone Ranger, at least they’ll get the famous music right, right? Well, funny story. The music—and so many other things—are all wrong about The Lone Ranger, a mechanical contraption that never decides what it wants to be. The Lone Ranger’s squeaky-clean image and code of behavior are hopelessly square for the 21st century, but the movie hasn’t come up with anything viable to replace what worked in those thrilling days of yesteryear.

The casting is promising: Johnny Depp is Tonto, which means the masked man’s Indian sidekick is not a sidekick anymore. (Somewhere, Jay Silverheels is smiling—top-billed at last.) And Armie Hammer, who played the computer-generated twins of The Social Network, has the strong jaw and straightforward manner for a credible John Reid, aka the Lone Ranger. As it happens, Hammer plays the tenderfoot card and not much else, while Depp is busy doing his actorly fiddling. We first meet Tonto in old age, recalling his past glories (this is merely the first echo of Little Big Man), but for most of the film Depp is covered in tribal makeup, fur, and a dead crow he wears atop his head; it’s hard for his impish personality to break the surface.

About that crow. It’s typical of what’s wrong with the film: We learn the bird’s meaning in a serious flashback that sets up an emotional story arc, the kind that screenwriting classes love to belabor. But the rest of the time, the crow’s a joke, a running gag with a broken beak. In a similar vein, expect to hear countless variations on “What’s with the mask?” as the film goes along.

The story’s about how businessmen and politicians get together to ruin the country with their railroads, a plot that rarely gets in the way of the one-liners and cartoonish sight gags. There are locomotive chases, horses galloping across rooftops, and characters falling from great heights and bouncing up without a scratch. Granted, Tonto is narrating the story, so maybe we chalk this up to magical realism. But it looks more like director Gore Verbinski opted to go big and broad—so, among other things, William Fichtner’s chief bad guy is as greasily repellent a varmint as you’d ever meet out West (maybe too repellent for a Disney audience that failed to note the PG-13 rating).

Verbinski and Depp made three Pirates of the Caribbean pictures together, and presumably somebody figured they’d catch the same balance of comedy and Halloween scares here. Nothing doing. A movie that ridicules its own mythology can’t expect the audience to care about the outcome. And as long as we’re laying out rules: Don’t add extra choruses to the William Tell Overture, either. Robert Horton

Unfinished Song

Opens Fri., July 5 at Seven Gables. 
Rated PG-13. 93 minutes.

Terence Stamp has been around a long time, yet he’s paradoxically made himself scarce on screen. A handsome star of the ’60s in Billy Budd and other pictures, he famously dropped out of the movies for a decade-long spiritual quest in India. His comeback role was General Zod in the 1978 Superman (a part now played by Michael Shannon in Man of Steel). Since then, he’s popped up for interesting turns—The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Limey; etc.—without making a full-time commitment to his craft. There’s a kind of actorly diffidence to Stamp, rare in a profession of people-pleasers. Take it or leave it, he seems to say, and his taciturn character, Arthur Harris, is consistent in this regard. He’s a retired hard-ass living in the suburbs, dismissive of his adult son (Christopher Eccleston), doting on his adorable granddaughter, and devoted to his cancer-stricken wife Marion (Vanessa Redgrave), who sings incongruous pop songs with the local geezer choir. (Gemma Arterton plays its relentlessly positive leader, Elizabeth.) Arthur scoffs at their jolly music. “You know how I feel about enjoying things,” he harrumphs. Indeed we do.

Emotional repression, cancer, family rifts, and song—you can see where this is going, right? Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams must surely have seen the 2007 doc Young@Heart about elderly American choir singers belting out rock tunes, and his intent in casting two eminent Brits was to create one of those quality Euro tearjerkers that typically carry the Working Title, Miramax, or Weinstein brands. But in this recent genre of boomers staring down the reaper (see Quartet, A Late Quartet, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, etc.), the writing matters more than the casting. The short-shorn Redgrave is lively and affecting as a woman whose clock is winding down, and Stamp is suitably stern and confounded in response. (Arthur is a man who’ll cry only with the door shut tight behind him.) They’d be great doing Pinter or Beckett together, on a stage sanded clean of all Williams’ sticky sentiment.

What barely held my interest—barely—was trying to guess what Arthur’s final tribute song to his wife would be. Because he and Marion are of a pub-singing, pre-Beatles generation, there’s a rich, deep catalog of English popular song for the film to mine. (Think of Dennis Potter and The Singing Detective.) Instead, however, the choir sings mainly from the American jukebox, and Arthur finally settles on Billy Joel. Yet Stamp sells it like a pro. He’s still above it all, like General Zod. Brian Miller

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