Local & Repertory •  An American Werewolf in London The ’80s were

Local & Repertory

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An American Werewolf in London The ’80s were very good to John Landis, who scored a deserved hit with this 1981 horror-com. Landis was a student of the Lon Chaney Jr. werewolf originals and a wiseacre about horror conventions. His goal was to mix yucks and gore (he even wrote his first draft at age 19.) Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning effects give the film part of its visceral, pre-CGI charm. The werewolf transformations and gore are more palpable, not just applied with a mouse click. Young leads David Naughton and Griffin Dunne don’t have the stiffness that can come from acting in front of a green screen. (R) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Tues.

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Blowing Up Cinema: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni Monica Vitti and Alain Delon star in L’Eclisse (1962), which chronicles a doomed romance in a doomed Italy. (NR)

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $8–$12 individual, $35–$54 series. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through March 24.

Cinema Italian Style From 1971, Death in Venice is Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of the Thomas Mann novela, with Dirk Bogarde as the unhappy artist smitten with an unobtainable boy. (NR)

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through March 19.

Jeremy Moss: Space immaterial/Immaterial place The visiting filmmaker will introduce his avant-garde shorts. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6-$11. 7 p.m. Sat.

Open Screening Local filmmakers screen and discuss their work at this free event. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, 6:30 p.m. Mon.

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Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure Underrated by other critics because they haven’t had as many bicycles stolen as I have, Tim Burton’s 1985 road-trip movie brought Paul Reubens’ cable-TV man-boy character to the big screen in all his adenoidal glory. Resolutely presexual, Pee-Wee lusts only after his tasseled one-speed cruiser, pursuing his bike across the Southwest. The whole thing is a kind of goof on De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, but it’s more surrealist than neorealist—Burton makes America just as weird and plastic as his hero’s underdeveloped yet overgrown imagination. Pee-Wee’s cartoonish quest takes place in an oddly pliable world where his single-minded hunt begins to look like high principle. (PG) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun matinees.

Records Collecting Dust Director Jason Blackmore explores the enduring cult of vinyl. (NR)

Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 7 p.m. Thurs. & 3 p.m. Sun.

Revenge of the Mekons Joe Angio’s recent dodumentary salutes the influential but undersung English band, with admirers including Jonathan Franzen, Luc Sante, Greil Marcus, and Fred Armisen of Portlandia, the latter having once been maried to singer Sally Timms. (NR)

Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 7 p.m. Thurs. & 3 p.m. Sat.

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.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry When is feminism going to have its Selma moment? Second-wave feminism, the subject of this listless new doc, failed to achieve its big goal: the Equal Rights Amendment. That narrative isn’t triumphant enough for the multiplex, yet director Mary Dore tries—partly by ending her story short of the ERA’s proposal and ratification failure—to spin as many happy outcomes as possible. And, sorry to say, I’m not buying all of them. Through archival footage and some fresh interviews, Dore mostly follows the movement’s minor players to whom she had access. (There’s a poignant 7 Up effect as miniskirted marchers become gray-haired grandmothers.) She’s Beautiful simply celebrates the heroic past, blinders firmly in place. The film becomes a tedious procession of laudable figures recalling a noble cause; then it gets mired in the dull factionalism of race, sexual orientation, and class within the movement. (NR) B.R.M. Northwest Film Forum, $6-$11. 3 p.m. Sun.

A Year in Champagne This recent documentary about Champagne is followed by a discussion with sommelier Jeff Lindsay-Thorsen … and maybe samples? (NR)

SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon.

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Ongoing

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) ROBERT HORTON Admiral, Lincoln Square, others

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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, Ark Lodge, others

Focus Will Smith is all arrogant confidence as Nicky, the veteran con artist who runs his jobs like a coach fielding a champion team. Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street) is working-class grifter Jess, the minor-league talent who proves to be a natural as the distraction, if not star player, of Nicky’s squad. Filmmaking team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who wrote Bad Santa and directed Crazy Stupid Love, seed the script with clues and suggestions and comic relief to keep us looking in the wrong direction, manufacturing one kind of drama while surreptitiously playing out another. It’s kind of fun as those things go, at least until the con is dropped. Without their carefully cultivated pose in place, Smith and Robbie have nothing to fall back on, and are left to bicker like idiots. It would be clever if that were the point, but it’s merely a failure of imagination. (R) SEAN AXMAKER Sundance, Ark Lodge, Admiral, Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, others

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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. Lincoln Square, others

Interstellar Reaching about 90 years forward from its start in a near-future dystopia, Christopher Nolan’s solemn space epic commits itself both to a father/daughter reunion and the salvation of mankind. Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper is sent on a mission to plunge into a wormhole near Saturn because Michael Caine tells him to. And no one in a Chris Nolan movie can say no to Michael Caine, here playing a professor named Brand who also sends along his scientist daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) with Cooper and two others. Before leaving, Cooper tells his daughter—played by three actresses at different ages—that maybe they’ll be the same age when he returns home, because of Einstein and other stuff we slept through in AP physics. The two ceremoniously synchronize their watches, sure to figure later—two hours for us, rather more for them—in the story. Cooper and company must investigate possible planets for colonization (scouted in advance by other astronauts). One is water, the other ice, and both prove quite lethal. There’s some action (though none so elegant as in the much superior Gravity), but what Nolan really wants Cooper’s team to do is discuss relativity, gravity, the fifth dimension, and quantum data (the latter requiring a visit to a black hole). There’s talk of ghosts and a cosmic “they” who chose Cooper for his long mission. But with the frequent recitations of Dylan Thomas poetry and the grown Murph (Jessica Chastain) stabbing chalky equations on a blackboard, the movie feels like an undergraduate seminar in space—one that’s three hours long. (PG-13) B.R.M. Crest

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. Crest

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Leviathan At the core of this Oscar-nominated drama is a simple land-grab, but the implications are far-reaching. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a rough handyman who’s managed to carve out a livelihood on the seafront near Murmansk. His house sits on a rocky piece of oceanfront property that is being claimed by the town’s crooked mayor. Kolya’s old Army friend Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a lawyer, has just arrived from Moscow to help in the case; his big-city sophistication is in stark contrast to Kolya’s country ways, a fact that Kolya’s wife (Elena Liadova) notices. As we sink into the situation, every strand of life is revealed to be rigged. The shady mayor is blatant in his greed, and the legal system is a comically wordy charade. The success of this study-in-corruption by director Andrey Zvyagintsev has brought Vladimir Putin’s minions, Russian nationalists, and religious authorities out in force to condemn it as “evil,” “a cynical and dirty parody,” and “a cinematic anti-Putin manifesto.” In other words, it needs to be seen. (R) R.H. Guild 45th

Maps to the Stars Oscar-hungry, over-the-hill actress Havana (Julianne Moore) hires a particularly unsuitable young woman as her personal assistant (or “chore whore” ). Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives without prospects in L.A., her only contact a Twitter friendship with Carrie Fisher (later to cameo, of course). Something’s clearly not right with Agatha, a timid soul on many psych meds and covered with burn scars. We’re also introduced to self-help guru Stafford (John Cusack), his wife (Olivia Williams), and bratty teen actor son (Evan Bird); all these figures will play a role in the fortunes of Havana, Agatha, and the dim, decent limo driver (Robert Pattinson) who ferries them all around. Though directed by David Cronenberg, Maps really bears the imprint of screenwriter Bruce Wagner, whose insider novels about Hollywood (I’m Losing You, Memorial, etc.) are drenched in knowing wit and sordid detail. All Wagner novels feature dense, gothic backstories of corruption and conspiracy. Pathologies are revealed, rehab is reversed, and sexual deviance becomes the new white-bread normal. The problem to Wagner’s oeuvre, and here, is that it all becomes so grindingly obvious. We watch to see the worst in Maps, it’s revealed, and absolutely nothing about it is surprising. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Uptown

McFarland, USA Kevin Costner plays Jim White, who provides our perspective into McFarland, a largely Mexican-American town in the California desert. There White soon loses his football coaching position and creates a cross-country team. His prejudices and assumptions are mirrored right back at him by a glib coach from an affluent school, a nice moment that Costner handles with a mix of shame and self-reflection. As a coach, White sees the untapped speed and endurance of his Cougars; as a person, he’s got no idea of their real lives. This is, after all, a town where the prison is across the street from the high school to remind kids that it’s pretty much their only alternative to working the fields. Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) stirs Southwestern spices through the usual scrappy-little-team-that-could ingredients. The kids are types rather than characters with agency or aspirations. Otherwise the film favors easy sentiment over sociology. All these kids needed was someone who believed in them—preferably a flinty but compassionate white guy who can overcome his preconceptions in the process. Go, Cougs! (PG) S.A. Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, 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) B.R.M. Sundance, others

Night at the Museum: Curse of the Tomb After two Night movies, the core cast is well established: Ben Stiller’s security guard Larry overseeing a magically animated menagerie of historical characters (played by Robin Williams, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, etc.) and beasts (most notably an incontinent monkey). The plots of the Night trilogy aren’t important or even interdependent; this one concerns a magical Egyptian tablet, which animates all the museum displays, that must be transported to the British Museum for repair, like some broken iPad. Tomb is actually lighter on the chases and anarchic wreckage than expected. By now, the museum’s nighttime secret has become a showbiz attraction and humble Larry a backstage impresario trying vainly to get his charges to perform on cue. (Stiller also doubles as a dumb, sweet Neanderthal named Laaa, who has a mighty appetite for Styrofoam packing kernels.) Apart from the chases, peeing monkey, and medieval ninja antics of Sir Lancelot (Downton Abbey’s quite amusing Dan Stevens), all pleasing to kids, parents will appreciate the interplay among the not-quite-condescending cast. What comes through most in this enjoyable hodgepodge adventure is Stiller’s all-too-recognizable brand of impatience and fatigue: a bit of the indie-world midlife panic from Greenberg, the realization that I’m getting too old for this shit. That’s why the Night series ends here. (PG) B.R.M. Crest

Song of the Sea Dazzling in its visual presentation, though not so thrilling in its conventional storytelling, the Irish-animated Song features a plot is drawn from Celtic folklore, specifically the tradition of the selkie, those mythological shapeshifters who can live on land or sea, as humans or seals. Our hero is Ben (voiced by David Rawle), a young lad whose mother vanishes under dramatic circumstances the night his mute younger sister Saoirse is born. They live on a wee shard of an island with their mournful father (Brendan Gleeson), a red-bearded lighthouse-keeper, but a series of marvelous events lead Ben into a secret world of magical creatures and spell-spinning songs. Director Tomm Moore lets the movie’s forward momentum run aground at various moments, but he and the Cartoon Saloon crew seem more interested in creating the gorgeous vistas that occupy virtually every frame. The character designs follow circular, looping patterns, and the visual influences seem inspired by anime and the line drawings of 1950s-era UPA cartoons (Mr. Magoo is not forgotten, people). (PG) R.H. Guild 45th

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) B.R.M. Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others

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. Majestic Bay, Kirkland, 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) R.H. 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

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What We Do in the Shadows The premise is ’90s-stale: basically MTV’s The Real World cast with vampires, presented as direct-address documentary. This droll comedy comes from the brain trust behind 2007’s Eagle Vs. Shark: Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, who play neck-biters Vladislav and Viago, respectively. Our three main vamps are a hapless lot. They can’t get invited into any of the good clubs or discos—ending up forlorn in an all-night Chinese diner instead. After all the aestheticized languor of Only Lovers Left Alive (and the earnest teen soap opera of Twilight), the silly deadpan tone is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), so they never pause long between sneaky gags. The amsuing and essential conflict here is between age-old vampire traditions and today’s hook-up customs. These neck-biters have been at it so long that they’re only imitating old vampire stereotypes. Things have gotten to the point, Vladislav admits, where they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Uptown & Egyptian

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. Guild 45th, others