Local & Repertory

Bastards SIFF concludes its Monday night “Recent Raves!” series with Claire Denis’ recent French crime tale. Her cryptic approach only adds to the film’s creeping sense of unease, as a man commits suicide on a rainy night, and his brother-in-law Marco (Vincent Lindon) quits his job as a ship’s captain in order to come home and sort things out for his deeply damaged sister (Julie Bataille) and niece (Lola Creton). Marco moves into a huge, empty apartment across the hall from a prominent businessman (Michel Subor), who lives with trophy mistress Raphaelle (Chiara Mastroianni) and their young son. The hints that emerge about this world grow darker as the movie goes on—and are, in fact, about as dark as a family nightmare can get. For a movie obsessed with how difficult it is to see the truth (and how reluctant people are to acknowledge it), it is fitting that surveillance cameras and other recording devices are an almost-unnoticed fact of life—culminating in the last, terrible sequence. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net, $6-$11, 8 p.m. Mon., Feb. 24.

Building Character Local film gadfly Warren Etheredge will lead discussions after each title in this five-night series. First up is the Henry James update What Maise Knew, with Julianne Moore, Steve Coogan, and Alexander Skarsgard. Following are Valentine Road, Smashed, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Mud. West of Lenin, 203 N. 36th St., 352-1777, thewarrenreport.com, $7-$10 ($25-$35 series), Feb. 25-March 1, 7 p.m.

Dirty Dancing Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey star in this favorite rom-com from 1987. (PG-13)

Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com, $6-$8, Fri., Feb. 21, 7 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 22, 3 & 7 p.m.; Mon., Feb. 24, 7 p.m.

Dreamland This recent doc examines Iceland’s power industry and debt, which caused a national crisis. (NR)

Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., Feb. 21, 7 p.m.

Getting Back to Abnormal Paul Stekler, one of four co-directors behind this new doc, talks about following an eccentric New Orleans politician around the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 829-7863, nwfilmforum.org, $6-$11, Sun., Feb. 23, 7 p.m.

The Golden Age of Italian Cinema From 1963, The Organizer stars Marcello Mastroianni as an idealistic professor sent to organize oppressed textile-factory workers in Turin. (NR)

Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org, $63-$68 (series), Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Through March 13.

Harold and Maude Hal Ashby’s 1972 countercultural touchstone may now seem somewhat adrift, since that dominant, Nixon-era culture has disappeared. Suicidal Bud Cort falls for lively Ruth Gordon, each of them learning life lessons along the course of their, ahem, romance. One indication of how times have changed is the score by Cat Stevens, as he was then known. Another is how Cort could almost pass for a Williamsburg hipster today. (PG) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $6-$8, Feb. 21-26, 9:30 p.m.

The Last Bath Made in Seattle in 1973 by a collective associated with the old Apple Theater, this is evidently a home-brewed porno unavailable on video. (NR)

Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org, $5-$8, Thu., Feb. 20, 8 p.m.

Neshoba: The Price of Freedom This doc relates the story of how Civil Rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were slain in 1964 Mississippi. (NR)

New Freeway Hall, 5018 Rainier Ave. S., 722-2453, $2, Fri., Feb. 21, 7 p.m.

The Sprocket Society’s Saturday Secret Matinees The 1949 serial Batman & Robin will be screened in weekly installments. (NR)

Grand Illusion, $5-$8 individual, $35-$56 pass, Saturdays, 2 p.m. Through March 29.

The Telephone Book In this 1971 porno, a hippie chick falls in love (or something) with an obscene phone caller. So naturally she tries to find him; various sex-capades ensue. (NR)

Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Opens Feb. 21, Fri., Sat., 10 p.m. Through March 1.

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Woody Allen in the ‘80s Running Friday-Sunday, 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors came out a few years before the Mia Farrrow split and scandal. Allen’s reputation was still sterling, and the drama’s dark themes of jealousy and violence actually anticipate much of his work over the next 20 years. (Match Point being the most obvious example.) Anjelica Huston is the inconvenient mistress who needs killing, and Martin Landau the upright doctor who organizes the crime. Meanwhile, Allen is a poor schmuck working for a TV star (Alan Alda), with Farrow the romantic prize between them. Morality, or its absence, is the subject of this dark but occasionally comic picture. Bad deeds go unpunished, while nice guys finish last to arrogant buffoons. Alda explains his commercially successful formula to Allen thusly: “If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it isn’t.” What Crimes illustrates conversely is that morality can more arbitrary and flexible than the rabbis tells us. Sometimes it only bends without consequence, and that can be tragic. (Allen’s 1988 drama Another Woman, with Farrow and Gena Rowlands, runs Sunday-Wednesday; see grandillusioncinema.org for showtimes.) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion, $5–$8, Through March 5.

Ongoing

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American Hustle The latest concoction from David O. Russell is full of big roundhouse swings and juicy performances: It’s a fictionalized take on the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s, in which the FBI teamed with a second-rate con man (here called Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale) in a wacko sting operation involving a bogus Arab sheik and bribes to U.S. congressmen. Along with the FBI coercing him into its scheme, Irving is caught between his hottie moll Sydney (Amy Adams) and neglected wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Even more complicated for Irving is that one of the targets of the undercover operation, a genially corrupt yet idealistic Jersey politico (Jeremy Renner), turns out to be a soulmate. Equally unhappy is the presiding FBI agent (Bradley Cooper, his permed hair and his sexual urge equally curled in maddening knots). Russell encourages his actors to go for it, and man, do they go for it. (R) R.H. Lincoln Square, Sundance, others

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Dallas Buyers Club Making a straight white Texas homophobe the hero of a film about the ’80s AIDS crisis doesn’t seem right. It’s inappropriate, exceptional, possibly even crass. All those qualities are reflected in Matthew McConaughey’s ornery, emaciated portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a rodeo rider and rough liver who contracted HIV in 1985. Fond of strippers, regularly swigging from his pocket flask, doing lines of coke when he can afford them, betting on the bulls he rides, Ron has tons of Texas-sized character. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, the unruly Dallas Buyers Club goes easy on the sinner-to-saint conversion story. As Ron desperately bribes and steals a path to off-label meds, his allies and adversaries do read like fictional composites. Best among them is the transvestite Rayon, who becomes Ron’s right-hand woman (Jared Leto). (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Lincoln Square, others

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Gloria In this Chilean character study, Paulina Garcia—a veteran of Chilean television—plays the title role, and she builds a small masterpiece out of Gloria’s behavioral tics. Garcia understands this woman from the heels up. She’s divorced, nearing 60, with grown kids who are kind but aloof. Gloria has a couple of purely sexual encounters during the film (the movie is admirably nonchalant about suggesting that people over 50 might enjoy a fling or two, and unembarrassed about depicting such flings), but her main romantic interest is a recently divorced ex-Navy retiree, Rodolfo (Sergio Hernandez). Director Sebastian Lelio and Garcia have created a character so richly imperfect and fully inhabited that her trajectory remains engaging despite the occasional overstatement. (R) R.H. Sundance

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The Great Beauty Paolo Sorrentino’s fantastic account of an aging playboy journalist in Rome casts its eye back to La Dolce Vita. Yet this movie looks even further back, from the capsized Costa Concordia to the ruins and reproachful marble statues of antiquity. “I feel old,” says Jep (the sublime Toni Servillo) soon after the debauch of his 65th birthday party. He’s been coasting on the success of his first and only novel, content with his goal to be king of Rome’s high life. Jep is a dandy with thinning hair brushed back and a girdle beneath his silk shirt. False appearances are all that count, but it takes intelligence to deceive. Disgust—and then perhaps self-disgust—begins to color his perception of a Botox party, the food obsessions of a prominent cardinal, and the whole “debauched country.” Jep is a guy living parallel lives in hectic ballrooms and in his head. His wry glances are both mocking and wincing, appropriate for a movie that’s simultaneously bursting with life and regret. (NR) B.R.M. Crest, SIFF Cinema Uptown