Local & Repertory
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Cry-Baby What was Johnny Depp like back in 1990 before he became an Oscar-nominated pirate genius? Possibly still a genius? John Waters uses the young thespian, then transitioning out of 21 Jump Street, to fine effect in this send-up of ’50s juvenile delinquency pictures. Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop, Troy Donahue, Polly Bergen, and ex-porno starlet Traci Lords lend to the fun and music. Depp pokes fun at his Tiger Beat teen-idol image, but nobody’s dumping on the films—then and now—that made such melodramatic eye-candy of the troubled-hormone set. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Sat. (also 3 p.m. Sat. matinee) & 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues.
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Growing Up Baumbach Opening April 10, Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young features Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as 40-something filmmakers who become besotted with an energetic married couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). The ending doesn’t quite achieve its desired effect, but it’s a brisk, smart comedy of marital dissatisfaction you’ll definitely want to see. (R)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $5. 7 p.m. Weds. April 1
Noir de France Is there anyone in Touchez Pas au Grisbi Jean Gabin does not slap? In one of my favorite scenes during this influential but frankly rather dull 1954 French gangster flick, he open-hands his girlfriend, her double-dealing fellow chorine (who happens to be Jeanne Moreau, so we really feel the sting), and a hotel concierge cowering behind some folded linen. I’m pretty sure that when the take was over, Gabin walked behind the camera to slap the director and several grips as well. It’s that kind of movie. You’re so intent on finding the pleasure and worth to its creaky Gallic gangster archetypes that you imagine better things occurring offscreen and in scenes unseen. The plot is just as simple as a slap. Max (Gabin) and his partner, Riton, are sitting on 200 pounds of stolen gold; his partner’s coke-sniffing moll (Moreau) tips that info to a gang of thugs, who then kidnap Riton. Fortunately, Grisbi is set in Paris, and we do glimpse the real Moulin Rouge and other black-and-white sights among arrondissments laced with narrow cobblestone streets. (NR) B.R.M. Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through May 21.
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Saturday Classics Beginning this morning matinee series is the great Lawrence of Arabia, which ought to look tremendous on Paul Allen’s trophy screen. Other titles in the series include Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, and Oklahoma!. (NR)
Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Ave., 448-6880, cinerama.com. $13. 10:30 a.m. Saturdays through April 24.
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SLeeper Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy is still pretty damn hilarious, however ragged the assembly of jokes. Somehow the giant banana-peel gag never gets old. (PG-13)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
Zombeavers College kids are attacked by zombie beavers. What more do you need to know? (NR)
SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Fri. & Sat.
Ongoing
Get Hard This raunchy ebony-and-ivory buddy comedy is essentially a long riff on the terror of becoming another man’s prison bitch. Or, even more horrifying, a white man becoming a black man’s. Except for when it’s also a riff on black stereotypes. Financier James (Will Ferrell) is framed for fraud and embezzlement, and has 30 days before slammer-time. He’s so terrified of becoming someone’s bitch that he hires the only black guy he knows, his building’s car-wash guy, Darnell (Kevin Hart), to teach him to survive behind bars. Setting aside any consideration of taste—or the concept of taste—Get Hard is marginally funny with a handful of solid laughs, and it goes limp in the final act. Along with such hilarity as Darnell telling James that if he can’t fight, he’s going to have to practice sucking dick, there are a few clever satirical moments that’ll be lost on, say, northern Idaho audiences. (R) MARK RAHNER Sundance, Bainbridge, Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, others
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It Follows David Robert Mitchell’s suburban thriller creates constant anxiety. The premise itself is simple, if faintly absurd. A teenager, Jay (Maika Monroe, excellent in The Guest), sleeps with her handsome new crush; he then informs her that she is now the target of a relentless, shape-shifting ghoul, which will pursue her to death. Her only escape is to have sex with someone else, who will then become the target. Mitchell canny about using the camera to evoke mystery. Every time someone drifts into the background of a shot, we have to wonder: Is that just a random passerby, or is that, you know, “It”? There’s also a wild musical score by Disasterpeace that provides an aggressive—at times maybe too aggressive—accompaniment to the film’s eerie mood. If the use of teen sex as a horror convention seems tired, rest assured that Mitchell seems less interested in a morality play than in sketching the in-between world of suburban adolescence. (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Ark Lodge
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter The setup here might promise routine road comedy: A sad and lonely Japanese woman, who somehow believes the 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo is a documentary, ventures from Japan to the frozen Midwest to find the cash Steve Buscemi buried in the featureless snow. Yet filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner have no interest in obvious gags. Half their movie is scene-setting in Tokyo, where dejected office drone Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, from Babel) is a Eleanor Rigby-like loner. More than shyness or defeat, an ever-widening distance separates her from the world beyond her imagination. Kindly strangers, including a widowed Minnesota farm wife and a sympathetic cop (David Zellner), barely register. Unseen in Seattle, the Zellners’ prior two features, Kid-Thing and Goliath, also dealt with alienated loners. The well-crafted Kumiko can likewise be seen as a character study; though, like her supposed treasure, it’s not certain if that character actually exists. A stubborn obstinacy lies at Kumiko’s core, but also delusion. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Lynwood (Bainbridge), Ark Lodge
Merchants of Doubt Based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, this doc lays out a convincing, follow-the-money trail from the tobacco industry’s postwar efforts to prevent (or forestall) government regulation to a profitable lobbying specialty today. Fake scientific experts and “teach the controversy” subterfuge have now infiltrated all public-policy debates where billions are at stake. Harvard historian Oreskes, prominent in the film, helps advance the thesis that PR consultants perfected a strategy of obfuscation and delay (“There is no consensus”) during our government’s decades-long war against Big Tobacco. After those battles, a professional class of liars found eager new clients in the oil, chemical, and food industries. Merchants of Doubt is about D.C.’s permanent lobbying establishment and those false-front organizations always espousing individual liberty and responsibility. Constrained by fact, it’s not so entertaining as Thank You for Smoking, and most of its points are well familiar. And the consultants are winning. They’ve successfully tapped into a tribal belief system that trumps empirical evidence. (PG-13) B.R.M. Meridian, Sundance
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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. 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. 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
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, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Meridian, others
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Seymour: An Introduction Right from the first scene, in which pianist Seymour Bernstein talks his way through his thought process for fingering a passage in a Scarlatti sonata, it’s gratifyingly clear that Ethan Hawke’s documentary portrait isn’t going to be afraid to dig seriously into music. Hawke’s own search for artistic purpose (why acting?) led him to examine the life of the pianist, a casual acquaintance who became a role model for a life devoted to art, not to the trappings of art. “I’m not so sure that a major career is a healthy thing to embark on,” says the 88-year-old Bernstein, who, despite acclaim, retired from public performance at age 50 thanks to stage fright and a disdain for the showbiz side of the classical-music world. The concertgoer’s loss was the aspiring pianist’s gain; from the onscreen evidence here, scenes with private pupils and master classes, he’s a fantastic teacher. He’s also a captivating raconteur (wait until he starts talking about his time in the army in Korea, playing recitals for soldiers on the front) and a fount of aphorisms. You have to admire Hawke’s patience (courage, even) just to stand back, point his camera, and let the man play. (PG) GAVIN BORCHERT Sundance
Spring Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) is a mid-20s American drifting through Italy in the wake of his parents’ death. In a small coastal town, he strikes sparks with a sultry, elusive local, Louise (Nadia Hilker), who doesn’t like to explain much about herself. And yet they do a lot of talking. Co-directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, Spring’s idea seems to come from a jokey proposition: What if you were watching one of those walking-and-talking indie romances in the style of Richard Linklater’s Before series, and it suddenly turned into a horror flick? Though slowed by artiness and a certain overly earnest attitude, Spring manages to catch some of the appeal of such a genre-blending experiment. (NR) R.H. Grand Illusion
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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, the silly deadpan tone is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large, 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. Vladislav admits they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Ark Lodge
