Local & Repertory
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The Big Lebowski The Coen brothers’ 1998 stoner-noir is Raymond Chandler filtered through dirty bong water, where almost every line of dialogue is a hazy, hilarious non sequitur. My favorite is when accidental P.I. Jeff Bridges (forever the Dude) is ambushed in his tub by nihilists bearing a ferret. “Hey, nice marmot,” he greets them, with his usual unflustered amiability. Nothing rattles Bridges’ Dude, not a lost rug, not a leering Tara Reid, not a lisping John Turturro, not a raving John Goodman, not a simpering Steve Buscemi, and not even shrieking performance artist Julianne Moore, who joins Bridges in a Busby Berkeley-style bowling fantasy that sums up the movie’s sweet, silly spirit. (R) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Sat. & Sun.
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Children’s Film Festival Seattle This annual festival, now in its tenth year, offers a lot more than movies. Music, dance, filmmaking workshops, a pancake breakfast, and other kiddie activities are also on the schedule. Opening the fest on Thursday is the Buster Keaton classic Steamboat Bill, Jr., accompanied by live music. Caspar Babypants performs two shows as part of Friday’s pajama party. Several packages of animated and live-action shorts are presented in themed screenings throughout the fest. Visiting filmmakers will attend selected screenings; see website for full schedule and details. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, childrensfilmfestivalseattle.nwfilmforum.org. $6-$8. Thurs., Jan. 22-Sat., Feb. 7.
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Cinema Italian Style From 1963, Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous adaptation of the classic Italian novel The Leopard stars Burt Lancaster as the aristocrat uneasily watching his fortunes (and Italy’s class system) fade during the 1860s. With Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon. (PG)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through March 19.
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It’s Alive!: Frankenstein On Film In addition to the talk and seminar by our own Robert Horton (see page 17), this weekend fright-athon includes screenings of Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein, Flesh for Frankenstein, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Frankenweenie. (NR)
SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. Fri.-Sun.
It’s Gonna Blow Director Bill Perrine will introduce his music doc about San Diego’s music underground, covering the years 1986-96 and including bands like Drive Like Jehu, Rocket from the Crypt, and Crash Worship. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $9-$13. 8:30 p.m. Sat. & 3 p.m. Sun.
Rosewater Making his debut behind the camera, Jon Stewart’s life-inspired movie is about the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari (Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal). In 2009 Bahari was arrested by Iranian authorities while covering the disputed elections in Tehran; included in the “evidence” against him was a Daily Show segment. We see Bahari’s home life in Toronto and his journalistic work for Newsweek in Tehran, where his mother (Shohreh Aghdashloo) still lives. Once in prison, his main tormentor (Kim Bodnia) obsesses over whether Bahari’s arthouse DVDs are actually pornography and the question of just how many Jews are running the world. Stewart relishes these absurdities, as you would expect. Rosewater too frequently has a dutiful quality, careful always to balance the negatives of the Iranian authorities with the positives of Iranian culture. The movie doesn’t announce the arrival of a born filmmaker, but it’s much better than a dilettante project—Stewart keeps a difficult storytelling subject moving right along. And there are sequences, like Garcia Bernal’s exhilarating solo dance at a crucial point in his imprisonment, that convey a real appreciation for the human element that survives amid political horror. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Film Center, $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon.
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.
Spirited Away Hayao Miyazaki’s 2001 anime is essentially a kids’ fairy tale, rich in enchantment and shape-changing, with a dreamy Never-Never Land setting. While moving to their new home in the country, ten-year-old Chihiro and her parents stumble upon a spirit-haunted abandoned amusement park; soon her folks are turned into pigs, leaving Chihiro to fend for herself and search for ways to break the spell. Gradually she ingratiates herself at a kind of vacation bathhouse for the Shinto spirit world’s genius loci figures. Miyazaki’s visual artistry is undeniable; any one individual cel from Spirited Away would look great on a gallery wall. As a movie, however, it’s lacking. (PG) B.R.M. Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun.
Troll 2 This is the 1990 sequel to 1986’s gentle fright flick Troll. Here, however, the main foe are a town full of goblins who threaten a family vacation. (PG-13)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 10 p.m. Fri.-Wed.
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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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. Cinerama, Sundance, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, Bainbridge, Pacific Place, Ark Lodge, others
Big Eyes The pancake-eyed-waif portraits of Walter and Margaret Keane became inexplicably popular during the ’60s. For director Tim Burton, at least, they still hold a kitschy fascination. As we see in this lighthearted, factually inspired account, the Keanes’ success was born from the beatnik Bay Area of the late ’50s, reversed at the 1964 World’s Fair, and collapsed during the Nixon end of the ’70s. The nation turned more cynical during that span, or developed more sophistication, but Burton isn’t interested in diagnosing the American mood or deciding why the Keanes’ art had its appeal. Big Eyes is a simple comedy of female vindication, and it’s enjoyable as such. Any film with Amy Adams (as the naive painter Margaret), Christoph Waltz (as her credit-stealing husband Walter), and Terence Stamp (as the New York Times critic who calls them out) is a film I want to see. Because of Waltz’s lupine charm, Walter’s decision to slap his name on Margaret’s art doesn’t seem so implausible. (“People don’t buy lady art,” he says, and it’s true during this sexist Mad Men era.) Burton’s been down this road before with Ed Wood, also written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Yet if Margaret is a less colorful figure than Wood, and if we can laugh about her art today, we can never mock her. (PG-13) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, Oak Tree, 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, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Pacific Place, others
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Citizenfour Fugitive leaker Edward Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room. In this absorbing character study, they debate how and when to spill the information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. Clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny. One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. By the end of the film, we get a scene that suggests that Snowden is not alone in his whistleblowing status—a tantalizing hint (scribbled by Greenwald on pieces of paper) of another story to come. (NR) R.H. Crest
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. Meridian, Lincoln Square, others
The Gambler This movie has its roots in Dostoyevsky and a thoughtful, near-classic ’70s film by James Toback (James Caan was the the star). The lead role is a failed novelist and university professor, whose gambling problem and apparent death wish is at the crux of the story. Not a Mark Wahlberg role, in short. But he plays it, and he’s terrific. Wahlberg’s Jim has a great deal to feel burned out about. He’s disgusted with his career as a writer, he insults his students, and he asks his mother (Jessica Lange) for enormous amounts of money. Badly in debt, Jim has one talented student (Brie Larson, the gifted actress from Short Term 12) who knows about his gambling. Written by William Monahan and directed by Rupert Wyatt, The Gambler isn’t too interested in psychological digging, although there’s something intriguing about Jim’s assertions that he isn’t actually a gambler. (Maybe he just really wants to lose, in every sense.) But sometimes plot can carry the day, and the strands of The Gambler—Jim parlaying his various debts against each other, and betting on a basketball game—are skillfully played. (R) R.H. Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, Cinebarre, others
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night This debut feature by Ana Lily Amirpour is a very studied mood piece, dryly humorous and more inclined toward the arthouse than the drive-in. There will be blood—and it will be sucked—but Amirpour has more on her mind than horror in this black-and-white, Farsi-language vampire movie. Sheila Vand plays our unnamed heroine, a young woman who walks (and yes, sometimes skateboards) down the streets of Bad City at night. Clad in her chador, drenched in the movie’s black-and-white gloom, she has a great vampire vibe. Her soulmate also moves through the nocturnal city: Arash (Arash Marandi), whose vintage T-bird has been claimed by a local gangster—yet even without wheels, he’s still cool. When he dresses as Count Dracula for a costume party and runs into the vampire there, their union is written in blood. Amirpour, an experienced hand at short films, is content to let the movie float along on its gorgeous monochrome look and punk attitude. She seems to have taken the attitude that if vampires have nothing but time, why shouldn’t scenes just keep going on and on? (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown
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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
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. Cinerama, Meridian, Pacific Science Center IMAX, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Lincoln Square, Thornton Palce, 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. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, others
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Inherent Vice Why Thonas Pynchon would go back to 1970 with his late (2009) hippie detective spoof is obvious: nostalgia, command of period color, and unfinished business as one optimistic decade curdles into another—trying to locate Where It All Went Wrong. But what mysteries are there for Paul Thomas Anderson to plumb? Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mutton-chopped gumshoe operating near the L.A. beach, salt air and cannabis fumes constantly in his lungs, vaguely pursuing a missing-person case in which the real-estate developer in question. His “old lady” Shasta (Katherine Waterston) turned him onto the case, which sends him stumbling through a gallery of SoCal eccentrics. (These include Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Benicio Del Toro.) The squares of Nixon’s silent majority are represented by Martin Donovan (as a string-pulling tycoon), Reese Witherspoon (a D.A. and Doc’s new squeeze), and Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen: police detective, part-time actor, and Doc’s possible doppelganger. Both Bigfood and Doc are confronting the MacGuffin that is the Golden Fang: possibly a conspiracy, possibly a paranoid stoner misunderstanding. Don’t expect any mysteries to be solved here; Doc is a P.I. who collects very little hard evidence, yet he persists, unperturbed by the absence of such facts. In Anderson’s loosest, most purely enjoyable film to date, the indigestible apricot pit of The Master is blissfully washed away. Plot matters less than the telling and serendipitous details of the tale. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Meridian, Thornton Place, 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. Pacific Science Center IMAX, Meridian, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Cinebarre, 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. Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Pacific Place, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Thornton Place, Bainbridge, Kirkland, others
Nightcrawler Titled and released as if it were a Halloween horror flick, Dan Gilroy’s dark media fable has more in common with Network than Nosferatu. Lou (the politely creepy Jake Gyllenhaal) is identified as an earnest, calculating criminal in the opening minutes; he’s never less than transparent about his motives, most of which appear to have been gleaned from self-help books and inspirational Internet sites. He’s an amoral American hustler, a type descended from Dale Carnegie and Sammy Glick. A career in stolen scrap metal soon gives way to freelance videography at L.A. car wrecks and crime scenes, and Lou’s basest impulses are naturally encouraged by a ratings-starved TV station. (Rene Russo is amusingly aroused as the station’s “vampire shift” manager—a venal Mrs. Robinson who mentors eager Lou.) Nightcrawler is more a parable of unfettered capitalism—there’s your horror—than realistic media satire. Lou’s swift progress in TMZ-land brings him a rival (Bill Paxton) and a naive protegee (English actor Riz Ahmed), but no one here has—or needs—much depth. Lou has no history, no family, only his hollow aphorisms of success. Nightcrawler never quite settles on a satisfactory tone between squeamish laughter and a smarter, Chayefskian disgust, but Lou you remember—a creature for these craven times, prospering from our need to see the worst. (R) B.R.M. Crest
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. Bainbridge, Admiral, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, Thornton Place, others
St. Vincent Bill Murray is pretty much the sole draw for the movie, and given his unique screen presence, it’s something. St. Vincent is all about the Murray persona: a deeply sarcastic man struggling to find his way to sincerity. That struggle is why Murray looks so melancholy in so much of his work. But it’s not a good movie. Murray’s slovenly Brooklyn misanthrope is Vincent, who reluctantly agrees to babysit the 12-year-old son (Jaeden Lieberher) of his new next-door neighbor (Melissa McCarthy). This will take time away from drinking, gambling at the racetrack, or visiting his Russian prostitute (Naomi Watts). We are also cued to the reasons Vincent is curmudgeonly, none of which will come as much of a surprise. Writer/director Theodore Melfi tries hard to convince us that Vincent is capable of great nastiness, but even these efforts seem rigged to ultimately show the soft, gooey center of both character and movie. As much pleasure as I took from watching Murray stretch out, I didn’t believe a minute of it. But do stick around for the end credits, when Murray sings along to Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm.” It’s the movie’s one great sequence. (PG-13) R.H. Crest
Selma A lot of Selma is good, and a lot of it is dutiful lesson-telling. But even when it feels like civics class, Selma benefits from its timing: Coming at the tail-end of 2014, a truly rotten year for race in America, the film’s depictions of protest marches and boiled-over tensions can’t help but create ripples of excitement in a movie theater. Director Ava DuVernay keeps her focus on the events surrounding the march to Selma, when the horrifying violence of Alabama law enforcement against black protesters—televised in a newly immediate way—helped turn public opinion toward the idea of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This very American story has a curiously Brit-dominated cast, including David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta. The casting is not a huge issue, although anybody with direct memories of the larger-than-life presences of LBJ and Alabama governor George Wallace can be forgiven for finding Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth (respectively) insufficiently vulgar in the roles. Cameos by the likes of Oprah Winfrey (as a victim of the ludicrously unfair methods of keeping African-Americans away from the voting booth) and Cuba Gooding, Jr., carry an unfortunate TV-movie guest-star air about them, although one understands the value of getting marquee players in a relatively low-budget project. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, 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. Harvard Exit, Lincoln Square, Kirkland, Oak Tree, others
Top Five If Chris Rock’s movies were as good as his interviews, he’d be racking up year-end critics’ awards right about now. The story unfolds over the course of a long day in New York, as a once-popular comedian named Andre Allen (Rock) desperately promotes his new movie. He’s talking to a New York Times writer (Rosario Dawson) throughout the day, a device that’s less about illuminating his character and more about highlighting their growing rapport. (Although one long slapstick recollection about a lost weekend in Houston keeps the movie 2014-level raunchy.) Rock has gathered a batch of colleagues to contribute smallish roles, including Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, and Cedric the Entertainer. As for Rock’s performance, even playing opposite the lively Dawson doesn’t make him a more fluid actor. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of mixing comedy and Woody Allenesque introspection—I guess the comparison here is with Allen’s Stardust Memories, but that movie wasn’t especially strong, either. The “problems” that come with wealth and celebrity are a wobbly basis for comedy, despite the laughs scattered through Top Five. (R) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Ark Lodge, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, others
Unbroken The greedy guy on a life raft who eats all the chocolate bars is surely going to die. That’s just one of the moral lessons in Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of the remarkable life story Unbroken, a recent bestseller by Laura Hillenbrand. Since indefatigable hero Louis Zamperini endured so much during World War II—surviving a bomber crash in the Pacific, 47 days on that life raft, then two years of brutal mistreatment in Japanese POW camps—Jolie needs to extract plenty of lessons, or at least uplift, during her very sincere, stolid movie. Flashbacks extend to Zamperini’s solid family upbringing during the Great Depression and Olympic running exploits, but most of the film consists of Louis (Jack O’Connell) stoically suffering. During the long imprisonment, sadistic warden Watanabe (Japanese pop star Miyavi) becomes slightly and slyly more interesting while Louis remains the same solemn martyr. Oddly, Jolie shies away from the viscera of war. Death is kept at a distance, like the silently exploding bombs Louis drops from his B-24. When his comrades perish, they do so quietly and without evident suffering. Considered as another patriotic tribute to The Greatest Generation (now mostly gone), Unbroken isn’t a terrible movie. Yet as it grinds its way to victory, which is to say survival, there’s the unpleasant sense that we’re prisoners, too, and Jolie our cruel captor. (PG-13) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Kirkland, Cinebarre, Bainbridge, others
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. Seven Gables, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Big Picture, Kirkland, Meridian, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, others
