Local & Repertory

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Airplane! This 1980 Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker sendup of all airplane/disaster flicks was a huge and hugely quotable hit in its day. The jokes aren’t so fresh now, but you can admire the deadpan of Leslie Nielsen, Robert Hays, Peter Graves, and company. And surely we’re not joking about that. (PG)

Egyptian, $8.25, Fri., April 12, 11:59 p.m.; Sat., April 13, 11:59 p.m.

BoneBat Comedy of Horrors Film Fest Several shorts are introduced by the hosts of the popular podcast. See bonehand.com for more info. (R)

Central Cinema, $30, Sat., April 13, 2 p.m.

Cine Independiente: Discoveries From Argentina Five recent titles are shown by upcoming Argentine filmmakers. See nwfilmforum.org for full schedule and details. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, $6-$10, April 12-14.

Crisis of Civilization Discussion follows Dean Puckett advocacy doc, which offers a critique of neoliberal ideology. (NR)

Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., April 12, 7 p.m.

Floating Energy: The Films of Nathaniel Dorsky The avant-garde San Francisco filmmaker will attend and introduce two packages of his short movies. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, $6-$10, Wed., April 10, 8 p.m.; Thu., April 11, 8 p.m.

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Grey Gardens Mimosa Brunch The Maysles brothers’ 1976 documentary Grey Gardens, inspiration for the current stage musical running at ACT, is paired with their 2006 sequel, The Beales of Grey Gardens, essentially comprising footage not used in the original (both Big Edie and Little Edie were dead by then). Brunch is served between the two. (NR)

SIFF Cinema Uptown, $10-$15, Sun., April 14, 11 a.m.

The Island President With his island nation of the Maldives islands threatened by rising sea levels, President Mohamed Nasheed lobbies the international community for assistance in this acclaimed 2011 documentary by Jon Shenk. Adding to the drama is a coup that sends him to jail. (NR)

Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org, Free, Sat., April 13, 2 p.m.

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Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut: French New Wave Masters Though Jeanne Moreau is top-billed in Francois Truffaut’s 1968 The Bride Wore Black, it takes a good 15 minutes to figure who the hell the film is about. Two douchey bachelors, one about to wed, discuss their various female conquests the way hunters compare trophy animals. Then there’s the wedding, which Moreau’s enigmatic Julie crashes, and where the new husband experiences an abrupt change in marital fortune. Adapting the crime novel by Cornell Woolrich, Truffaut proceeds through two murders before, in flashback, Julie’s exact mission is explained. Her five targets grant Moreau a chance to play five different roles, since each is an imposter seeking to get close to the intended. She is by turns a schoolteacher, a tramp, an artist’s model, and so forth. You can’t say that Bride is a particularly personal film for Truffaut (or Moreau), but each chapter offers the chance to savor how each successive d-bag is lured and skewered, as it were, by an instrument of vengeance. With four decades’ distance, Bride satisfies by siding so firmly with Julie against these self-satisfied playboys (politician, artist, mobster, etc.). It’s very much a ‘60s film, but French male sexism is obviously more entrenched, and unchanging, than the so-called sexual revolution. Julie is, in a way, an avatar of true love, a wronged woman determined to do right—but by killing for the sake of honor in a corrupt new world. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org, $63-$68 (series), $8 individual, Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Through May 30.

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Langston Hughes African American Film Festival Fifty features and shorts will be screened over nine days, beginning with a repertory presentation of John Sayles’ 1984 The Brother from Another Planet (7 p.m Fri., $25), with star Joe Morton and Mayor Mike McGinn in attendance. Concluding the fest on April 21 will be the latest from director Robert Townsend, In the Hive, written by local playwright Cheryl L. West (Pullman Porter Blues). Both will also attend the fest. Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, 104 17th Ave. S., 684-4758, langstoninstitute.org, $5-$10 individual, $50-$150 pass, Runs April 13-21.

My Amityville Horror Previously the subject of an unlikely hit suspense flick from 1979, “based on a true story,” this new documentary interviews surviving family members who resided there. (NR)

Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Fri., April 12, 11 p.m.; Sat., April 13, 11 p.m.; Mon., April 15, 9 p.m.

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Singin’ in the Rain SEE THE WIRE, PAGE 15.

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The Sound of Silents With a Side of Schtick In this hybrid evening of cabaret/burlesque performances by Moisture Festival talent, nine short films will be screened, with Harold Lloyd and director Georges Melies represented from the silent-film era. New scores will be performed live for those, along with some newer shorts. The live performers include Kevin Joyce, Avner the Eccentric, Dr. Calamari & Acrophelia, Paul Nathan, and Sandy Neale. (NR)

SIFF Cinema Uptown, $15-$20, Thu., April 11, 7:30 p.m.

They Live! In the satirical horror of John Carpenter’s They Live! (1988), aliens have taken over the planet and conspired with yuppies to keep the working man—championed by wrestler Roddy Piper—in his place. Mind control is achieved through coded TV and advertising that Piper can discern, along with the aliens, thanks to magical eyeglasses. But it’s also the economic structure that has him living in a crowded Hooverville. And the film’s bleak end, like that of Carpenter’s The Thing, implies the system will prevail. (R)

BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, $6-$8, April 12-14, 9:30 p.m.

Ongoing

Admission Based on a 2009 campus novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission contains a clutch of topical issues that Tina Fey might’ve expanded much further and funnier. (Unfortunately, she’s only acting here, not writing.) Fey plays Portia, an admissions officer at Princeton locked into a childless long-term relationship with a feckless academic (smug weakling Michael Sheen, too short on screen time). Seemingly bound for a thin envelope is shy, brainy senior Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), a scholarship student at an artsy-fartsy prep school. His teacher John (Paul Rudd) is pushing him toward Princeton, but with an ulterior motive. In swift succession, Portia becomes a very biased booster for Jeremiah, a flustered crush object for John, and a maternal figure to the latter’s son, a precocious 11-year-old orphan adopted by his single father. Fey could probably pen an entire sitcom season from these elements, but Portia feels like more of a paycheck role for her. Likewise, Rudd coasts lazily on his charm. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Kirkland Parkplace, Cinebarre, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Oak Tree, others

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Chasing Ice Jeff Orlowski’s beautiful yet sobering documentary visits the world’s rapidly melting ice caps. His guide is James Balog, a renowned nature photographer who has become obsessed with documenting the staggering speed with which the icebergs of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska are crumbling into the sea. Orlowski films as Balog and a small team of young scientists go on a mad mission to embed dozens of time-lapse cameras into the rock walls above various ice fields. Those cameras take one image every hour, and when Balog and his team, known as the “Extreme Ice Survey,” assemble the footage, they discover that glacier fields the size of Lower Manhattan are receding at an astonishing rate. (NR) CHUCK WILSON Ark Lodge Cinemas

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Django Unchained In Quentin Tarantino’s blood-spattered historical tent show, set in antebellum Dixieland, Jamie Foxx stars as the captured runaway slave Django. He’s given his freedom by an unlikely savior: a German-American bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) who trains Django to become his partner. Together, they make their way toward a sprawling Mississippi plantation known as Candyland, where Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) is owned by a brutal, foppish master (Leonardo DiCaprio), abetted by his old house slave (the astonishing Samuel L. Jackson). Wagnerian hellfire ensues, though Tarantino’s true reference point is a century of Hollywood cinema’s failure to engage with the ugly realities of the “peculiar institution,” from Gone With the Wind to Spielberg’s Lincoln. Like all of the best pop art, Django Unchained is both seriously entertaining and seriously thoughtful, rattling the cage of race in America onscreen and off. Tarantino earned his second Oscar for the script. (R) SCOTT FOUNDAS Meridian, Admiral

From Up on Poppy Hill Produced and co-scripted by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro Miyazaki, this is a gentle, somewhat slight story of student life and young love in early-’60s Japan. As the country looks to bury its wartime history and show the world a modern new face at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, these students are determined to hold on to the past by saving their old, neglected clubhouse (known as The Latin Quarter) from demolition. Nothing like a cause to spark a sweet, utterly chaste high-school romance between sunny young Umi, a teenage girl who’s running her family boarding house and looking after her siblings, and student leader Shun, until unexpected complications halt their blossoming relationship. The English-dubbed cast, which includes Anton Yelchin, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Aubrey Plaza, and Bruce Dern, is appropriately understated. But behind the idealized, picaresque coastal village of Yokohama is a postwar culture of absent parents, self-sufficient kids, and adults uncomfortable acknowledging (let alone discussing) the past. (NR) SEAN AXMAKER Majestic Bay, Sundance Cinemas, Bainbridge, Meridian

No

Mad Men for a different era, No is basically the true story of two rival 1988 ad campaigns—one for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the other for “happiness,” according to Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), the advertising hotshot with a very difficult client. Outside Chile, international pressure has prompted Pinochet to offer a national referendum on his rule. After a 27-day TV blitz, voters can vote either Si (thus keeping Pinochet) or No (bringing in a new coalition government). Rene and his boss Lucho consider it a rigged contest, yet Rene is lured into running the No campaign—perhaps less out of ideology than his simple desire “to win,” as he puts it. (Lucho will later lead the Si campaign.) All this is true in outline, but director Pablo Larrain and his writers embellish history and devise a funny, effective series of fake ads and jingles for both campaigns. Rene can be seen as the Roger Ailes of his day, a guy who packages ideology irresistibly. His ads show picnicking families, spontaneous dancing in the streets, golden beaches, and smiling faces. Those who remember our Reaganite ’80s will recognize the same sunny spirit; No cleverly inverts that era’s hemispheric politics. You’re left with the enjoyable dissonance between messenger and message. Never mind politics. Once the referendum is over, Rene will have soap operas and appliances to sell. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th

The Place Beyond the Pines Luke (Ryan Gosling), a tattooed, muscled motorcycle stunt rider in a traveling circus, is a bad boy—just the way you like them. But then Luke discovers that a former one-night stand (Eva Mendes) has a toddler-aged son. Suddenly he turns paternal. He quits the circus, tells Romina he wants to settle down, to take care of her and the kid. Luke is now both the bad boy and the tender father—the perfect guy, except that he has no job skills but motorcycle riding and, taught by a new mentor, bank robbing. Derek Cianfrance’s drama turns out to be a much larger and longer ensemble piece, one that eventually skips 15 years forward from its initial story. One of Luke’s stickups is interrupted by anambitious young cop with a law degree, Avery (Bradley Cooper), who has an eye on politics. Luke turns out to be a useful stepping stone to that career. Fifteen years later, however, Avery will have to reconsider the debt he owes Luke’s family. But only the early crime scenes have any spark to them. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, Sundance

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Room 237 Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. So goes the quote so often attributed to Freud, but it’s hard to make that case for coincidence and happenstance in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Rodney Ascher’s documentary explores five uniquely different and obsessively catalogued perspectives on Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining. It’s about the genocide of the American Indian, argues Bill Blakemore, pointing to the prominence of Native American art (and Calumet baking powder) in certain frames. Geoffrey Cocks sees it as a metaphor for the Holocaust. Ascher doesn’t make fun of his Shinologists, who lay out their theses in voiceover (no talking heads here), or the five detailed, obsessively catalogued exegeses under consideration. Each obsessive interpreter is granted their own area of expertise in the Kubrickian details. Ascher mostly plays it straight, illustrating the commentary with films clips and using slow motion, step frames, split screens, and visual effects to render the evidence under consideration. Ascher adds his own commentary using clips from other Kubrick films for counterpoint or comic effect. (NR) SEAN AXMAKER SIFF Film Center

The Sapphires

Dreamgirls meets Rabbit-Proof Fence. During the late ‘60s in the outback, on a sunny, cheerful farm, three Aboriginal sisters sing in exquisite harmony. In addition to folksongs voiced in their own language, they have a fondness for American country music—because we’re all reading from the same grand, globalist sheet music of humanity, aren’t we? As our story begins, Cynthia, Gail, and Julie are suffering indignities of local talent shows, where their talents are scorned by racist judges. Shambling onto the scene with a hangover and untucked shirttails is roving musician/talent scout Dave (Chris O’Dowd). He whips them into an R&B group, adds cousin Kay, and takes them to entertain the troops in Vietnam. Based on a true story (and previously a stage musical), The Sapphires is not a movie to dwell on racism, injustice, or wartime violence. Every season needs a mom matinee, something that brings an easy smile and doesn’t require a wad of tissues. The Sapphires is that kind of movie. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables

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Side Effects Steven Soderbergh is a total filmmaker who handles his own camera, but is only as good as his script. And this big pharma/crime tale by Scott Z. Burns is not a great script. Yet it starts out smartly enough, as Emily (Rooney Mara) waits for her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) to be released from jail after a four-year term for insider trading. Understandably, Emily is depressed, and she’s on a lot of pills. Her new shrink, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), provides suicidal Emily with modest meds and a sympathetic ear. Then he enrolls her in a clinical trial that will, conveniently, provide him some much-needed extra income. Disaster follows. As Side Effects becomes a medical-legal procedural, with lawyers, courtroom testimony, and flashbacks, you could imagine a different set of actors—perhaps Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck—in an older, black-and-white version of the same script, with the same enjoyable plot twists. Side Effects ultimately feels like a remake. And if that’s the way Soderbergh chooses to end his career, fine. Side Effects embodies the pleasures of the familiar, if not the discoveries of his past. (R) BRIAN MILLER Meridian

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Silver Linings Playbook If you took the fighting out of The Fighter, David O. Russell’s previous movie, you’d be left with a close, fractious family like the Solitanos of his hugely appealing new Silver Linings Playbook. Instead of Boston Irish and boxing, we have Philadelphia Italian and the Eagles. The family patriarch (a fine, restrained Robert De Niro) is an OCD bookie bound by strange rituals to the team; his wide-eyed wife (Jacki Weaver) is the nervous family conciliator/enabler; and their volatile son Pat (Bradley Cooper, wired) is fresh out of the nuthouse with a restraining order from his ex. But Pat is looking for those silver linings through self-improvement: reading, running, losing weight, scheming to win back his wife. Russell’s pell-mell approach perfectly suits the story of Pat’s mania and wrong-footed romance with young widow Tiffany (the Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence), who’s even more titanic in her instability than Pat. (R) BRIAN MILLER Oak Tree, Cinebarre, others

Theaters:

Admiral, 2343 California Ave. SW, 938-3456; Ark Lodge Cinemas, 4816 Rainier Ave. S, 721-3156; Big Picture, 2505 First Ave., 256-0566; Big

Picture

Redmond, 7411 166th Ave. NE, 425-556-0566; Central

Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684; Cinebarre, 6009 SW 244th St., 425-672-7501; Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Ave., 448-6680; Crest, 16505 Fifth Ave. NE, 781-5755; Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 781-5755; Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St., 523-3935; Guild 45, 2115 N. 45th St., 781-5755; Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., 781-5755; iPic Theaters, 16451 N.E. 74th St. (Redmond), 425-636-5601; Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, 425-827-9000; Lincoln Square, 700 Bellevue Way N, 425-454-7400; Majestic Bay, 2044 NW Market St., 781-2229; Meridian, 1501 Seventh Ave., 223-9600; Metro, 4500 Ninth Ave. NE, 781-5755; Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380; Oak Tree, 10006 Aurora Ave. N, 527-1748; Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., 888-262-4386; Seven Gables, 911 NE 50th St., 781-5755; SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996; SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), 324-9996; Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave NE, 633-0059; Thornton Place, 301 NE 103rd St., 517-9953; Varsity, 4329 University Way NE, 781-5755.