Local & Repertory
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Actress It doesn’t really matter if you remember Brandy Burre from The Wire or not; nor is it worth looking up her scant credits on IMDb. This recursive documentary about her increasingly discontented life as a mother and housewife in the Hudson River Valley, meanwhile trying to resume her old trade, provides a definitive role. Burre—surely with some sort of publicity agenda in mind—agrees to let director Robert Greene trail her through what proves an eventful period in her life. With two small children and a mostly silent boyfriend, Burre faces a familiar female dilemma. Her youthful identity is being smothered by domestic life. The next two decades are set for her in sleepy, snowy Beacon—unless she can somehow revive her career. Putting on makeup with practiced self-regard in the mirror, performing a confident cabaret set onstage, crying on cue for Greene’s lens, Burre remains unknowable—to Greene, to us, and to her increasingly baffled, stoic boyfriend. Actress raises but refuses to answer some unsettling questions. How strong is your marriage? And: How well do you know your spouse? (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon.
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Children’s Film Festival Seattle This annual festival, now in its tenth year, offers a lot more than movies. Music, dance, filmmaking workshops, a pancake breakfast, and other kiddie activities are also on the schedule. Several packages of animated and live-action shorts are presented in themed screenings throughout the fest. Visiting filmmakers will attend selected screenings; see website for details. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, childrensfilmfestivalseattle.nwfilmforum.org. $6-$8. Ends Feb. 7.
Enter The Dangerous Mind An EDM musician may or may not be schizophrenic in this new indie thriller by Youssef Delara and Victor Teran. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 9 p.m. Fri.-Sat.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night This debut feature by Ana Lily Amirpour is a very studied mood piece, dryly humorous and more inclined toward the arthouse than the drive-in. There will be blood—and it will be sucked—but Amirpour has more on her mind than horror in this black-and-white, Farsi-language vampire movie. Sheila Vand plays our unnamed heroine, a young woman who walks (and yes, sometimes skateboards) down the streets of Bad City at night. Clad in her chador, drenched in the movie’s black-and-white gloom, she has a great vampire vibe. Her soulmate also moves through the nocturnal city: Arash (Arash Marandi), whose vintage T-bird has been claimed by a local gangster—yet even without wheels, he’s still cool. When he dresses as Count Dracula for a costume party and runs into the vampire there, their union is written in blood. Amirpour, an experienced hand at short films, is content to let the movie float along on its gorgeous monochrome look and punk attitude. She seems to have taken the attitude that if vampires have nothing but time, why shouldn’t scenes just keep going on and on? (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Sat.
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My Last Year With the Nuns This adaptation of Matt Smith’s 1997 stage monologue has three irresistible selling points if you’re a) Catholic, b) were raised on East Capitol Hill during the 1960s, and c) have an aversion to warm and easy nostalgia. Directed by Bret Fetzer (who also staged the original monologue), Nuns doesn’t cover a lot of ground, but it also doesn’t need to. It’s a condensed, somewhat fictionalized account of what it meant to be a teenage troublemaker during 1966–67, when Smith and his buddies were in the eighth grade at St. Joseph’s. Smith is unsparing—and often hilarious—about his clannish, insular, and bigoted parish, populated by large families whose kids were just beginning to sense the liberal breeze of the late ’60s. The anecdotes and adventures Smith relates aren’t terribly novel (stealing from the collection plate, etc.); but again, they don’t need to be. Their snotty, profane details transport us—meaning Seattle natives; Amazon newcomers won’t care—back to our city’s preliberal roots. Seattle is then seen through the parochial perspective of a lad Smith has subsequently called “a 13-year-old white Catholic boy who is cluelessly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, and is only now just barely beginning to confront the horror of his thinking.” (NR) B.R.M. Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 3 p.m. Sun., 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues.
Saturday Secret Matinee Hosted by The Sprocket Society, this Saturday matinee series (through March 28) features the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, preceded by various vintage cartoons and shorts. Total program length is about two hours. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 1 p.m. Sat.
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Secretary Based on a 1989 short story by Mary Gaitskill, Secretary’s oddly affirmative tale is one of private pathology turned to self-discovery. Instead of therapy (she’s fresh from the nut house), Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) finds a healthier, if still unconventional, outlet for her masochistic tendencies while being bound, spanked, and dominated by her anal-retentive attorney boss (James Spader). Proofreading has never been so sexually charged. In a movie about erotic and emotional displacement, each of Lee’s typos invites stern correction. The 2002 Secretary treats the S&M stuff for laughs, not titillation, yet the two excellent lead performers never wink at the audience or belittle their characters. The Sundance prize winner’s cockeyed sweetness owes everything to Gyllenhaal’s open-faced charm. Secretary is her My Fair Lady, and Spader her naughtier, uncensored Henry Higgins. The movie may send some feminists up a wall, but Lee looks to be awfully fulfilled in the end. (Also note that a very different sort of romance, Sleepless in Seattle, is also playing the theater this week; see website for schedule.) (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Tues.
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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American Sniper Clint Eastwood’s deliberately neutral take on this real-life war tale is a measured approach likely to disappoint those looking for either a patriotic tribute to the troops or a critique of war and its effects. Chris Kyle (ably played by a hulked-up Bradley Cooper) was a sharpshooter whose action in four Iraq War tours reportedly made him the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history. His life had a lurid ending—a terrible irony that reframes his story in a larger context of troubled veterans and PTSD. The film, scripted by Jason Hall from Kyle’s memoir, has some standard-issue military bonding and uneven dialogue. What really works is the way it’s structured around parallel sequences, nowhere more intensely than the repeated images of the sniper at his gun, scanning the world for insurgents. One such sequence is the film’s most unnerving: As Kyle idly looks through his gunsight at passersby on the street below, he talks to his wife (Sienna Miller, now a real actress) on the phone, half a world away. Their conversation could be taking place in an Applebee’s, or a suburban backyard, but the finger stays on the trigger and the eye searches for threats. In other places in the film, Eastwood’s uninflected approach has a flattening effect. Here it creates one of the most chilling scenes in recent American film. (R) R.H. Cinerama, Sundance, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Pacific Place, Ark Lodge, others
Big Eyes The pancake-eyed-waif portraits of Walter and Margaret Keane became inexplicably popular during the ’60s. For director Tim Burton, at least, they still hold a kitschy fascination. As we see in this lighthearted, factually inspired account, the Keanes’ success was born from the beatnik Bay Area of the late ’50s, reversed at the 1964 World’s Fair, and collapsed during the Nixon end of the ’70s. The nation turned more cynical during that span, or developed more sophistication, but Burton isn’t interested in diagnosing the American mood or deciding why the Keanes’ art had its appeal. Big Eyes is a simple comedy of female vindication, and it’s enjoyable as such. Any film with Amy Adams (as the naive painter Margaret), Christoph Waltz (as her credit-stealing husband Walter), and Terence Stamp (as the New York Times critic who calls them out) is a film I want to see. Because of Waltz’s lupine charm, Walter’s decision to slap his name on Margaret’s art doesn’t seem so implausible. (“People don’t buy lady art,” he says, and it’s true during this sexist Mad Men era.) Burton’s been down this road before with Ed Wood, also written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Yet if Margaret is a less colorful figure than Wood, and if we can laugh about her art today, we can never mock her. (PG-13) B.R.M. Crest
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Birdman A movie star in a career skid since he stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is preparing his big comeback in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver stories, funded and directed by himself. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s co-star (Andrea Riseborough) announces she’s pregnant with his child; his grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan; a critic plans to destroy the play. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton, doing a wonderful self-parody) who’s involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts). This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity—he hears Birdman’s voice in his head, for one thing. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot (disguised with artful digital seams). Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. It has a few stumbles, but the result is truly fun to watch. And Keaton—the former Batman, of course—is a splendidly weathered, human presence. Ironically or not, he keeps the film grounded. (R) R.H. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, others
Black Sea This is the kind of satisfyingly well-executed little B-movie that never pretends to be original, precisely because it doesn’t need to be. Only one star is required, Jude Law, and the rest of the Russian-British cast comprises a bunch of interesting/familiar faces whom we know will perish one by one, this being a submarine movie. And not only is it a submarine movie, one of my favorite genres, it’s a guys-on-a-mission movie salted with Nazi intrigue. Basically, Law and his motley proletariat crew are hired by some smooth magnate to boost the bullion from a sunken World War II U-boat. As Law’s sub locates the loot, Black Sea proceeds like a series of grisly, body-mangling industrial accidents: engines break, fires start, valves fail, bolts pop, and—God how I love this cliche—the glass face of the depth gauge inevitably shatters, needle in the red, when the disabled sub careens to the sea floor. And director Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) keeps the focus on process and story, with a minimum of fuss. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, others
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Citizenfour Fugitive leaker Edward Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room. In this absorbing character study, they debate how and when to spill the information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. Clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny. One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. By the end of the film, we get a scene that suggests that Snowden is not alone in his whistleblowing status—a tantalizing hint (scribbled by Greenwald on pieces of paper) of another story to come. (NR) R.H. Crest
Foxcatcher The wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), who won gold in the 1984 Olympic Games, isn’t very bright. He’s got a puppy-dog earnestness; his ears have turned to cauliflowers after so much time on the mat; he’s accustomed to taking orders from his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who also won gold in ’84. Yet Mark is suddenly on his own when he accepts the patronage of the eccentric multimillionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell). In Bennett Miller’s clinically chilly true-crime tale, the murderous outcome is never in doubt. One brother will perish and du Pont go to jail (where he died in 2010). There was the same kind of underlying criminal inevitability to Miller’s 2005 Capote, where the surprise lay in how a talented, frivolous writer created his unlikely masterpiece. Here, I’m sorry to say, there’s no such consolation. Foxcatcher is uniformly well crafted and acted, though Carell playing the villain isn’t really the selling point. With his birdlike prosthetic nose, craned neck, and opaque, upper-toothed smile, Carrell’s du Pont remains a mystery, but not an interesting mystery. Yet even if Miller can’t find a satisfying denouement for Foxcatcher, Mark—whom Tatum ably invests with inchoate currents beneath that bulging brow—becomes a clay-footed figure of inarticulate tragedy. (R) B.R.M. Meridian, Lincoln Square, others
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Gone Girl What’s exceptional about Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her 2012 novel, directed with acid fidelity by David Fincher, is that Gone Girl doesn’t like most of its characters. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) soon falls under suspicion of murdering his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). The small-town Missouri police investigation (led by Kim Dickens) goes entirely against Nick for the first hour. He behaves like an oaf and does most everything to make himself the prime suspect, despite wise counsel from his sister (Carrie Coon) and lawyer (a surprisingly effective, enjoyable Tyler Perry). Second hour, still no body, but flashbacks turn us against the absent Amy. As we slowly investigate the Dunnes’ very flawed marriage, funny little kernels of bile begin to explode underfoot. How the hell did these two end up together? Flynn’s foundational joke answers that question with a satire of marriage. The movie poster and tabloid-TV plot suggest a standard I-didn’t-kill-my-wife tale, but matrimony is what’s being murdered here. Amid the media circus, Nick becomes the scorned sap because of his untruths; but what really damns him in the movie’s intricate plot is his credulity—he believed in Amy too much. Gone Girl is all about manipulation—Fincher’s stock in trade, really, which helps make the film such cynical, mean-spirited fun. (R) B.R.M. Crest
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The Imitation Game A ripping true story can survive even the Oscar-bait effect. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the brilliant English code-breaker Alan Turing as a borderline-autistic personality, a rude brainiac who during World War II fiddles with his big computing machine while his colleagues stand around scratching their heads. Turing’s homosexuality only gradually enters the picture, and even when he proposes marriage to fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), it isn’t treated as a really big deal. Even if the movie sketches simplistic conflicts among its principal characters, the wartime world is so meticulously re-created and the stakes so compelling that it emits plenty of movie-movie sparks. (Morten Tyldum, of the ridiculously entertaining Headhunters, directs.) But the real reason to like this movie is that it’s so diligently pro-weirdo. Especially in Cumberbatch’s truly eccentric hands, Turing stays defiantly what he is: an oddball who uses rationality to solve problems. The film suggests that Turing does not have to become a nicer person—he beat the Germans’ Enigma code and won WWII, so let him be. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, others
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Inherent Vice Why Thonas Pynchon would go back to 1970 with his late (2009) hippie detective spoof is obvious: nostalgia, command of period color, and unfinished business as one optimistic decade curdles into another—trying to locate Where It All Went Wrong. But what mysteries are there for Paul Thomas Anderson to plumb? Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mutton-chopped gumshoe operating near the L.A. beach, salt air and cannabis fumes constantly in his lungs, vaguely pursuing a missing-person case in which the real-estate developer in question. His “old lady” Shasta (Katherine Waterston) turned him onto the case, which sends him stumbling through a gallery of SoCal eccentrics. (These include Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Benicio Del Toro.) The squares of Nixon’s silent majority are represented by Martin Donovan (as a string-pulling tycoon), Reese Witherspoon (a D.A. and Doc’s new squeeze), and Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen: police detective, part-time actor, and Doc’s possible doppelganger. Both Bigfood and Doc are confronting the MacGuffin that is the Golden Fang: possibly a conspiracy, possibly a paranoid stoner misunderstanding. Don’t expect any mysteries to be solved here; Doc is a P.I. who collects very little hard evidence, yet he persists, unperturbed by the absence of such facts. In Anderson’s loosest, most purely enjoyable film to date, the indigestible apricot pit of The Master is blissfully washed away. Plot matters less than the telling and serendipitous details of the tale. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Meridian, Thornton Place, others
Into the Woods Cue the irony that this sly modern classic musical (songs by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine) has been taken up by Disney, history’s busiest purveyors of the happy ending. Its fairy-tale happy ending comes halfway through the action, then Cinderella and company must decide what to do next. Into the Woods presents a crowded roster, with Meryl Streep earning top billing as the Witch, the blue-haired crank who sets things in motion with a curse. (James Corden and Emily Blunt play the baker and wife who want a child; also on hand are Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, and Johnny Depp as various familiar fairy-tale characters.) The blend of rustic locations and studio-built woods is eye-filling, especially when the characters cross the border from the realistic realm to the enchanted forest. In general, though, director Rob Marshall (who guided Chicago to its dubious best-picture Oscar) brings his usual clunky touch, hammering home the big moments and underlining subtlety with a broad brush. The singing tends toward the Broadway-brassy, although Blunt and Corden—working in a more casual style—are completely charming. A bit of the 1987 show’s subversive message still peeks through, making this an unusual blockbuster to unleash at Christmastime. (PG) R.H. Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Pacific Place, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Thornton Place, Bainbridge, Kirkland, others
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Mr. Turner Must the great man also be a nice guy? Mike Leigh’s comprehensive biopic tempers our admiration for the English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), unquestionably a genius, and recognized as such in his day. Turner (Timothy Spall), when we meet him, is famous, prosperous, and possessed of a nice London home. His cagey old father (Paul Jesson) aids in the family business, as does the devoted maid Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), who’s plainly, painfully in love with her indifferent master. (He is by turns tender and terrible to the women who surround him.) During the last 25 years of his life, Turner and his art—in late career tending toward abstraction—are mutable. He travels under an assumed name to the coastal village of Margate, where he eventually takes a new lover, Sophia (Marion Bailey), to replace poor Hannah. Yet the film’s no melodrama. Leigh and his Oscar-nominated cinematographer Dick Pope periodically pause for us to see 19th-century views as Turner did: lambent light on a Flemish canal, the sun filtered through sea mist near the shore, or locomotive steam bursting into a halo above the green countryside. As for the final nature of this selfish, sensitive, uncompromising artist, Leigh simply frames him in a portrait, leaving us to grope for psychological shapes and colors. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Lincoln Square
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A Most Violent Year Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) sports a handsome camel-hair topcoat. He’d like to achieve success the honest way, and that immaculate coat is like his shining armor. Problem is, this is 1981-era New York, the business is heating oil, and nothing stays clean for very long here. Writer/director J.C. Chandor is skillful with these details—this is a very intricate story—and quiet in his approach. Abel’s jacket is the flashiest thing about the movie, where the essential plot is him trying to put together a deal to buy a choice piece of East River waterfront, where he can land oil barges. Assisting him is his fierce wife Anna (Jessica Chastain), the daughter of a local mobster, whose take on life is a little worldlier than his. The actors are a splendid pair: Isaac, of Inside Llewyn Davis, captures the immigrant’s go-go drive for success; and the only problem with Chastain in this film is that she isn’t in it enough. Chandor’s first two films, Margin Call and All Is Lost, were more startling and original. But he does manage the game with dexterity, and the re-creation of a grungy, now-distant era is completely convincing. (R) ROBERT HORTON Lincoln Square, Meridian
Nightcrawler Titled and released as if it were a Halloween horror flick, Dan Gilroy’s dark media fable has more in common with Network than Nosferatu. Lou (the politely creepy Jake Gyllenhaal) is identified as an earnest, calculating criminal in the opening minutes; he’s never less than transparent about his motives, most of which appear to have been gleaned from self-help books and inspirational Internet sites. He’s an amoral American hustler, a type descended from Dale Carnegie and Sammy Glick. A career in stolen scrap metal soon gives way to freelance videography at L.A. car wrecks and crime scenes, and Lou’s basest impulses are naturally encouraged by a ratings-starved TV station. (Rene Russo is amusingly aroused as the station’s “vampire shift” manager—a venal Mrs. Robinson who mentors eager Lou.) Nightcrawler is more a parable of unfettered capitalism—there’s your horror—than realistic media satire. Lou’s swift progress in TMZ-land brings him a rival (Bill Paxton) and a naive protegee (English actor Riz Ahmed), but no one here has—or needs—much depth. Lou has no history, no family, only his hollow aphorisms of success. Nightcrawler never quite settles on a satisfactory tone between squeamish laughter and a smarter, Chayefskian disgust, but Lou you remember—a creature for these craven times, prospering from our need to see the worst. (R) B.R.M. Crest
Selma A lot of Selma is good, and a lot of it is dutiful lesson-telling. But even when it feels like civics class, Selma benefits from its timing: Coming at the tail-end of 2014, a truly rotten year for race in America, the film’s depictions of protest marches and boiled-over tensions can’t help but create ripples of excitement in a movie theater. Director Ava DuVernay keeps her focus on the events surrounding the march to Selma, when the horrifying violence of Alabama law enforcement against black protesters—televised in a newly immediate way??helped turn public opinion toward the idea of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This very American story has a curiously Brit-dominated cast, including David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta. The casting is not a huge issue, although anybody with direct memories of the larger-than-life presences of LBJ and Alabama governor George Wallace can be forgiven for finding Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth (respectively) insufficiently vulgar in the roles. Cameos by the likes of Oprah Winfrey (as a victim of the ludicrously unfair methods of keeping African-Americans away from the voting booth) and Cuba Gooding, Jr., carry an unfortunate TV-movie guest-star air about them, although one understands the value of getting marquee players in a relatively low-budget project. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, others
Still Alice Adapted from the 2007 bestseller by Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist turned novelist, Still Alice is like experiencing only the second half of Flowers for Algernon: high-functioning start as Columbia professor, wife, and mother of three grown children; then after Alzheimer’s diagnosis at age 50, the brutal, inexorable mental degradation and loss of self. An academic, Alice (Julianne Moore) plays word games and self-tests her memory. She types constant reminders into her iPhone, which soon becomes her adjunct memory and, eventually, her intellectual superior—even the auto-correct feature seems poignant. And finally she records a video on her laptop addressed to her future self, conveying detailed instructions, that will later allow Moore to play both sides of a scene with herself: crisp professionalism versus foggy incomprehension. Directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland (Quinceanera) mostly avoid the sap, despite the score’s twinkly piano pathos. The filmmakers do add gauzy, sunny beach flashbacks to soften the sting, but mainly we’re left with the relentlessly linear narrative of decline, which isn’t very interesting to watch. (In Hollywood, Alzheimer’s isn’t so fruitful a disease as, say, bipolarity or alcoholism.) There’s a bit of tension as her family—led by husband Alec Baldwin, playing a fellow Ph.D.—tries to cope with Alice’s predicament, yet the Howlands’ rifts aren’t terribly dramatic either. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Lincoln Square, Meridian, Guild 45th
The Theory of Everything The Stephen Hawking biopic opens with our hero (Les Miz star Eddie Redmayne) as a young nerd at university, where his geeky manner doesn’t entirely derail his ability to woo future wife Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones). Hawking is diagnosed with motor neuron disease at age 21 and given a two-year prognosis for survival—one of the film’s sharpest ideas is to allow time to pass, and pass, without pointing out that Hawking is demolishing the expectations for someone with his condition. James Marsh’s movie is officially adapted from (now ex-wife) Jane Hawking’s memoir, so the love story has its share of ups and downs. This is where Theory manages to distinguish itself from the usual Oscar bait. Whether dealing with Jane’s closeness to a widowed choirmaster) who becomes part of the Hawking family, or Stephen’s chemistry with his speech therapist, the film catches a frank, worldly view of the way things happen sometimes. No special villains here—you might say it’s just the way the universe unfolds. Redmayne’s performance is a fine piece of physical acting, and does suggest some of the playfulness in Hawking’s personality. From now until Oscar night, you will not be able to get away from it. (PG-13) R.H. Harvard Exit, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, Oak Tree, others
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Two Days, One Night Sandra (Marion Cotillard) has been on medical leave from her workplace, owing to depression. She has a low-level job in a manufacturing plant in Belgium. She’s ready to go back to work, but management has decided to cut her position. According to labor laws, her 16 fellow employees can vote to keep her on the job—but the boss has offered them each a 1,000-euro bonus if they agree to lay off Sandra. She has a weekend to plead her case to each co-worker. Every few minutes we are reminded of the cruelty of being put in this position, and the humiliation of having to repeat her argument. Throughout, the deglammed Cotillard is more than up to the task of convincing us of Sandra’s modest place in the world. The very human stories of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have always had a political purpose, and this film’s portrait of the power of manipulation and greed is one of their clearest. Many of the employees casting votes for or against Sandra could really use 1,000 euros. They’ve got problems of their own, stories comparable to hers. That’s what is so devastating about this superb film. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown
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2015 Oscar-Nominated Short Films Within this hastily assembled final lineup to this twofold collection (animated and live-action), I was able to preview a half-dozen titles. On the animated side (10 titles, 82 minutes), I particularly liked Me and My Moulton, a girl’s recollection of life in 1965 Norway. The middle daughter (of three), our narrator forever wears a large No. 2 on her blouse, but leads the negotiation as the three girls try to convince their carless bohemian parents to buy them a bicycle. (A Moulton turns out to be a fancy imported English bike.) The colors radiate warm hues from Klee and Kandinsky, and the linework by director Torill Kove evokes both Peanuts-style innocence and a dawning beatnik awareness (an effect aided by West Coast jazz with a cool Wes Montgomery timbre). On the live-action side (five titles, 118 minutes), look for Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Blue Jasmine) as a meek, defeated woman working the suicide-prevention hotline. Directed by Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, the 21-minute The Telephone Call is one of those very old-fashioned but effective “Keep talking!” kind of dramas, as poor Heather begs, beseeches, and cajoles her caller—who’s overdosed on pills—to see the few redeeming bits of happiness left in life (and, by extension, in hers as well). Who voices the unseen caller? It took me 10 minutes to guess the 2001 Oscar winner. You may have to wait for the end credits. (NR) B.R.M. Seven Gables
Unbroken The greedy guy on a life raft who eats all the chocolate bars is surely going to die. That’s just one of the moral lessons in Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of the remarkable life story Unbroken, a recent bestseller by Laura Hillenbrand. Since indefatigable hero Louis Zamperini endured so much during World War II—surviving a bomber crash in the Pacific, 47 days on that life raft, then two years of brutal mistreatment in Japanese POW camps—Jolie needs to extract plenty of lessons, or at least uplift, during her very sincere, stolid movie. Flashbacks extend to Zamperini’s solid family upbringing during the Great Depression and Olympic running exploits, but most of the film consists of Louis (Jack O’Connell) stoically suffering. During the long imprisonment, sadistic warden Watanabe (Japanese pop star Miyavi) becomes slightly and slyly more interesting while Louis remains the same solemn martyr. Oddly, Jolie shies away from the viscera of war. Death is kept at a distance, like the silently exploding bombs Louis drops from his B-24. When his comrades perish, they do so quietly and without evident suffering. Considered as another patriotic tribute to The Greatest Generation (now mostly gone), Unbroken isn’t a terrible movie. Yet as it grinds its way to victory, which is to say survival, there’s the unpleasant sense that we’re prisoners, too, and Jolie our cruel captor. (PG-13) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Cinebarre, Bainbridge, others
Wild Though I have reservations about the fulsome emotional blasts of director Jean-Marc Vallee (like his Dallas Buyers Club), and though the adaptation by Nick Hornby (About a Boy, An Education) leans rather too hard on the death of bestselling memoirist Cheryl Strayed’s mother (played by Laura Dern), this is a movie that—like its solitary hiker heroine—cannot be stopped. Reese Witherspoon’s ironclad casting makes matters even more inevitable. Here is a woman who bottoms out—with men, drugs, and grief—then straightens out while hiking 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon, even without disavowing all her past actions. Wild is essentially a memory trip, presented non-sequentially, as Cheryl plods north. Various men figure in her past (including a brother), but none memorably. In the movie’s second half, more maudlin than its smart start, Wild is all about mommy. Yet don’t mistake Wild for an easy, conventional healing narrative (though healing does of course come at the end). Rather, it’s more a coming-to-terms account. Or as our heroine puts it, “Problems don’t stay problems. They turn into something else”—in this case a book and surefire hit movie. (R) B.R.M. Seven Gables, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Big Picture, Kirkland, Meridian, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, others
