Local & Repertory
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Cinema Italian Style From 1970, Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion has Gian Maria Volonte playing a murderous cop playing cat and mouse with the detectives on his own squad. Though a crime thriller, the movie’s also a comment on Italian corruption of its day. (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 Devils From 1971, Ken Russell’s satire of 17th-century France features shocks and sex aplenty. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave star. Did you know Derek Jarman did the sets? (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 9 p.m. Fri.-Sat.
Gangs of Wasseypur This is a five and one-half hour Hindi epic, being screened in two parts. The film, directed by Anurag Kashyap, follows bandit Sardar Khan from colonial days through independence and beyond. (R)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996. $7-$12. See siff.net for showtimes. Fri.-Sun.
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The Homesman Though ailing at the movies, the myth of the West is alive and well in American politics, currently full of gun-totin’, hog-castratin’ candidates. Yet The Homesman is so good it makes you wish director and co-star Tommy Lee Jones could somehow make a Western a year, just to keep exploring the pockets of American frontier experience that still need filling in. This one offers a series of new wrinkles, beginning with its route: The story goes from west to east, the opposite of most Westerns. During the 1850s, Nebraska “spinster” Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank, a fine and precise performance) volunteers to transport three women back to Iowa. They’ve been driven mad by the prairie and their men, or at least they have become no longer socially acceptable. Claim-jumper and full-time scalawag George Briggs (Jones) will accompany Mary on her grim, weekslong job. Their episodic adventures bring them into contact with a variety of frontier types along the way (played by Tim Blake Nelson, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Corbin, and no less than Meryl Streep). The setup suggests the potential for showing the West from the female characters’ perspective, which isn’t entirely the case, although the story does depict the unfairness of frontier life for women. The real subject is the West itself—the brutality of it and the price paid for settling it. (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center, $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon.
The Last: Naruto the Movie Earth faces destruction by gigantic meteorites in this new sci-fi anime from Japan. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$9. Runs Fri.-Thurs.
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The Maltese Falcon John Huston made a memorable debut as director with his 1941 adaptation (the third) of Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel. Who next would play Sam Spade and attempt to own the role? George Raft was briefly attached, but he didn’t trust Huston, a mere screenwriter. (Pshaw!) So it was that Humphrey Bogart cemented his screen persona as the hard-boiled detective ensnarled by a dame (Mary Astor) and various eccentrics (Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) all searching for the precious little statue. He’s unsentimental, even cold, but he has his code—famously expressed in the line “When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it.” (NR) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat. & Mon.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show Everyone’s favorite cult musical from 1975 stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, and Barry Bostwick. (R)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. Midnight, 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.
Event Yadda. (NR)
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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) R.H. Sundance, Bainbridge, Pacific Place, 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, others
The Duke of Burgundy Peter Strickland’s film is mostly set in and around a beautiful old house in the countryside (Hungarian, though the film’s in English). We first meet the professor, Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen), as she cruelly bosses around Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), a younger woman who appears to be her maid. It turns out this ritual of humiliation is not only mutually accepted, but mostly dictated by Evelyn, who enjoys being punished. Cynthia is tired of these, but she looks terrified of losing her pretty young companion, and goes through the paces accordingly. However weirdly it might present itself, and whatever Cynthia and Evelyn’s S&M tastes might be, the relationship issues between the two women are pretty mundane: One is getting bored; one is needier than the other; one has money and the other has youth. Dressing these everyday anxieties in bondage gear gives the movie an undercurrent of droll humor, which becomes part of its sneaky appeal. (NR) R.H. SIFF Film Center
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. Varsity, 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 Uptown, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Lynwood (Bainbridge), Kirkland, 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
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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
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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
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, 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. Varsity, 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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Whiplash Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is an unbridled asshole for art’s sake, a petty Stalin figure inside the Juilliard-like music academy that greets the innocent Andrew (Miles Teller). Andrew has fled Long Island and his kindly, weak mensch of a father (Paul Reiser) to be the best drummer in the best studio band at the best school in the country. That means pleasing the imperious, bullying Fletcher, a man who seems endlessly displeased with the world’s lax standards. (The Oscar-worthy Simmons, who originated this role in writer/director Damien Chazelle’s prior short, doesn’t oversell the villainy or froth at the mouth.) How Andrew responds to such abuse—quite calculated, as we shall learn—is the heart of this thrillingly propulsive drama, an intense, brutal, and often comical tale of mentorship gone amok. Chazelle, a genuine new talent, has compared his Sundance prizewinner to a war movie or a gangster picture; yet it’s a battle where the two antagonists share the same musical goals. At some moments, Whiplash pushes past realism into the fugue state of practice and performance. (Black Swan comes to mind.) Apotheosis or psychosis—what’s the difference? For Andrew, there may be none. (R) B.R.M. Varsity
