Local & Repertory
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Blowing Up Cinema: The Art of Michelangelo Antonioni Swoon, ye 21st-century philistines, before the cataract of existential glamor that is Red Desert, just when you forgot how cool modernist despair could be. As a kind of capper to the white-hot Italian’s alienation “trilogy,” this famously Technicolor 1964 odyssey finds muse Monica Vitti lost in the supermarket of life, an unstable young mother wandering the fabulously gray industrial wastelands of Ravenna’s shipyards and entertaining the seductions of trenchcoated engineer Richard Harris. Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces. The face of ’60s unhappiness, Vitti still fascinates, while Harris, all dimply and young-Dennis-Hopper-ish, seems dropped in by helicopter—but both are subservient to the imagery, which desaturates, beautifully, when the world isn’t simply painted neutral, as with the enigmatic gray fruit glimpsed on a vendor’s cart and the mountains of streaming ash that could, if you’re of a mind, represent Everything. (NR) MICHAEL ATKINSON Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $8–$12 individual, $35–$54 series. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through March 24.
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Cinema Italian Style Federico Fellini’s 1986 Ginger and Fred is pretty much a love letter to his wife, Giulietta Masina, and favorite leading man, Marcello Mastroianni, who play aging vaudeville performers reuinited during the garish new era of Italian television. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through March 19.
The Cutting Edge D.B. Sweeney and Moira Kelly star in this fondly remembered ice skating rom-com from 1992. Fun fact: This was the first produced script by Tony Gilroy, who later wrote Michael Clayton and most of the Bourne movies. (PG)
Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Weds. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. matinees
Dwarves Kingdom Director Matthew Salton will introduce his doc about a Chinese theme park where dwarves are the sole and star attraction. (NR)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 8 p.m. Thurs.
Eva A late addition to the SIFF calendar, this Spanish sci-fi flick has Daniel Bruhl messing around with androids and artificial intelligence. Apparently the cute little Eva robot becomes his Frankeinstein’s monster. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. Opens Fri.
First Period Director Charlie Vaughn will introduce his high-school spoof, full of nerds, outcasts, and cross-dressers. (NR)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 8 p.m. Thurs.
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Growing Up Baumbach With his new midlife comedy While We’re Young due later in the year, here’s a helpful career overview for writer-director Noah Baumbach. Beginning the series (Weds. March 11) is 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, about which our Tim Appelo wrote, “Baumbach’s exhilarating evisceration of his literary-critic father (here named Bernard and wonderfully played by Jeff Daniels) is set in Brooklyn’s Park Slope in the mid-1980s, as their family is breaking up. Mother Joan (Laura Linney) upsets the family dynamic by taking up writing in midlife and instantly selling stories to The New Yorker. She also takes up lovers including a tennis instructor (winningly, grinningly limned by Billy Baldwin). Not that Bernard is a monk himself—he kinkily invites his slinkiest student (Anna Paquin) to move in with him and Walt (the director’s surrogate figure, played by Jesse Eisenberg). Because Squid is about hyperarticulately selfish Manhattan neurotics, the flick fetches rote comparisons with Woody Allen, but Baumbach is his own man. Daniels uses every artful flicker of his wounded, wounding eyes and each twitch of his nerdy beard to convey the fraudulence of Bernard, yet we actually sympathize with the crooked, snookering schnook.” Following are Kicking and Screaming, Frances Ha, and a sneak preview of the Ben Stiller-starring While We’re Young. (R)
SIFF Film Center, $5. 7 p.m. Wednesdays through April 1.
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L.A. Confidential James Ellroy’s guilt-soaked crime novel, set amid the thoroughly corrupt LAPD of the 1950s, receives a suitably tough and tawdry treatment in Curtis Hanson’s 1997 adaptation. Kim Basinger won an Oscar for her glamorous, doomed moll, and Russell Crowe has his American breakthrough as hard-nosed, tormented cop Bud White. (Ellroy has retained that character, like others here, in his second new L.A. Quartet, recently begun with Perfidia.) The bench runs deep here, with Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito, and the late James Cromwell adding spice and vice. (R)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Mon. & Weds.
Revenge of the Mekons Joe Angio’s recent documentary 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 married to singer Sally Timms. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 7 p.m. Thurs. & 2:30 p.m. Sat.
Saturday Secret Matinee Hosted by The Sprocket Society, this Saturday matinee series 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. Saturdays through March 28.
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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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
Chappie Though hugely anticipated, the new sci-fi movie from Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 and Elysium) turns out to be hugely unwieldy, if not quite a flop. Again filming in a gritty, near-futuristic Johannesburg, Blomkamp and his co-writer (and wife) Terri Tatchell have concocted an R-rated fairy tale of sorts. There’s too much crime, bad language, and shooting for kids who otherwise might appreciate how the artificially intelligent robot Chappie (created by Dev Patel’s programmer) swiftly undergoes an innocence-to-experience process of maturation not unlike their own. The movie works best and most sweetly in its crypto-parenting scenes, with the overprotective Patel pitted against the larcenous Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser (from the hip-hop duo Die Antwoord). Chappie’s hard-wired to do no harm, per Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics, but he’s also tempted—teenage rebellion soon arrives—by the thug life. The rest of the plot is a mess, a stripped-bolt fusion of Frankenstein, RoboCop, and A.I. Blomkamp and Tatchell crib from many sources, but they can’t have it both ways. The corporate intrigue about commercialized crime fighting—cue Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman—demands a grown-up treatment, satire advanced beyond the Brothers Grimm. Chappie himself eventually becomes a genius savant incapable of original thought, a fitting mascot for the movie. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance, Cinerama, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Lincoln Square, Pacific Science Center, 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
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Peter Jackson’s crowded final film of the J.R.R. Tolkien universe begins in mid-breath. Fiery breath: The flying dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) was loosed at the end of Part Two, and his flaming rampage is in full swing as Five Armies commences. With no memory-refreshing from the previous chapters, we launch into a dozen or so plotlines: all those names and all those creatures, plus cameo appearances from LOTR cast members. The hubbub renders nominal hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) a team player rather than a true protagonist. The second half of the picture is overwhelmed by a giant battle (there may be five armies involved, but I’m a little vague on that), which ping-pongs between thousands of computer-generated soldiers and clever hand-to-hand combat involving the principals. Jackson is as resourceful as ever at exploiting cool locations—crumbling bridges and iced-over lakes—for cartoony stunts. Such ingenuity is at the service of a project that lost its emotional core when Jackson decided to take Tolkien’s relatively streamlined novel and pump it up into three plus-sized movies. It’s still pleasant to see Bilbo in the company of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), but the rest of the cast hasn’t taken up the slack. (PG-13) R.H. 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. Lincoln Square, 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. Crest
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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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) R.H. Crest
Queen and Country John Boorman’s 1987 Hope and Glory advanced the revisionist argument that—to uncomprehending children, at least—World War II was like a huge thrilling holiday. His sequel, set in 1952, again follows the Rohan family, whose only son Bill (bland, smiling Callum Turner) is again Boorman’s stand-in in this autobiographically inspired account. It’s a pleasant, nostalgic movie that didn’t need to be made (a memoir written, maybe), chiefly because he has nothing new to say about the postwar era. If WWII was, in childish Bill’s eyes, fun, the Cold War is here a fairly bland affair. There’s talk of fighting in Korea, dropping the A-Bomb, and even catching venereal diseases in the brothels of Seoul, but the movie barely leaves the barracks where conscripted Bill and his pal Percy (Caleb Landry Jones) are teaching soldiers to type and confronting their inflexible superiors. No one knows, apart from Boorman, how swiftly the sun is setting on the British Empire. Bill, certainly, is oblivious: He’s only intent on an unobtainable dream girl (Tamsin Egerton). Leave it to old pro Richard E. Grant, as the eye-rolling base commander, to signal how little any of this will matter in the following decade. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance
The Salvation This Western shot by a Danish crew in South Africa never quite overcomes that sense of being assembled from different directions, but—with the help of two charismatic stars—it does conjure up its share of evocative genre moments. The hook is set early, as a terrible act of frontier violence and instant retribution blows apart the world of Danish immigrant Jon (Mads Mikkelsen). Now Jon and his brother are targeted for revenge by a very bad hombre whose henchmen have the usual traits of bad hygiene and lousy marksmanship. There’s also a woman, played by the thankfully ubiquitous Eva Green, who does not speak. A wordless role is no problem for this French actress, who looks as though she might set fire to the entire worthless town with a glance. I can’t say why The Salvation exists, exactly, except that Europeans are very fond of this most American movie genre, and periodically get the urge to “do” a Western. The very cool Mikkelsen, star of TV’s Hannibal, is perfectly comfortable in 1870s-era surroundings. His chiseled looks and laconic style were just waiting for a Western to come along, and for that reason alone The Salvation earns a look. (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel The plot devices in this sequel are so stale that the movie itself loses interest in them halfway through its dawdling 122 minutes—and this is a good thing. By that time the contrivances of Ol Parker’s script have done their duty, and we can get to the element that turned the film’s 2011 predecessor into a surprise hit: hanging around with a group of witty old pros in a pleasant location. There are many worse reasons for enjoying movies. Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) mostly allows Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Celia Imrie, and Penelope Wilton to float around on many years’ worth of accrued goodwill. (New to the expat ensemble is Richard Gere.) Especially fine is the spindly Bill Nighy, whose shy Douglas is a hesitant suitor to Dench’s Evelyn, a still-active buyer of fabrics. Even when the story has him fulfilling sitcom ideas, Nighy maintains his tottering dignity and sense of fun. Second Best will be a hit with its original audience, and maybe then some. The languid mood is laced with an appreciation for getting to the End of Things, especially as Smith’s formerly snappish Muriel mellows into a melancholy leave-taking. (PG) R.H. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others
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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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 Egyptian
