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. (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 This movie is so good it makes you wish 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) 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 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.
Ongoing
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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. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan. 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. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot. 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. (R) R.H. Sundance, 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. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others
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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
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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
