Local & Repertory
Cronos The 20/20 Awards presents Guillermo del Toro’s 1993 breakthrough, in which a device bestowing immortality becomes a dangerous object of contention. (R)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Tue., Oct. 15, 8 p.m.
Dead Alive Peter Jackson’s 1992 horror comedy has a poor lad caring for his zombie mother. (R)
Central Cinema, $6-$8, Thu., Oct. 10, 8 p.m.
Robert K. Elder The author will discuss The Best Film You’ve Never Seen: 35 Directors Champion the Forgotten or Critically Savaged Movies They Love, followed by a screening of the 1988 Killer Klowns From Outer Space. (PG-13)
Grand Illusion, $5-$8, Mon., Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m.
A Fierce Green Fire Mark Kitchell’s star-studded doc calls for action on global warming via a meandering look at environmental movements of yore. But this doc is so filled with eco-stereotypes that it plays like a Christopher Guest parody, something best suited to a Sierra Club fundraiser. For what it’s worth, the doc features narration from celebrities including Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, and Ashley Judd. The title comes from a quote from Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), the man credited with establishing ecology as a modern field of study. He said he saw a fierce green fire in the eyes of a wolf he’d just killed, a transformative moment that began his long journey toward conservationism. By contrast, this film will only make your eyes glaze over. (NR) DANIEL PERSON Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., Oct. 11, 7 p.m.
Irish Reels Film Festival A half-dozen titles are screened, with ancillary parties and events. Beginning the fest at 6 p.m. is the new romantic comedy Run and Jump. See irishreels.org for full schedule and details. (NR)
SIFF Film Center, Oct. 11-13.
Lost Highway In David Lynch’s 1997 puzzle picture, Bill Pullman plays the guy who ends up being two guys (later played by Balthazar Getty), both of them troubled by Patricia Arquette. ( Pullman is charged with killing his wife but beats the rap, being Getty.) The whole thing’s an unsatisfactory career midpoint between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Lynch works through many of the same ideas—doubles, obsessions creating their own dark-mirror reality, the fickleness of love—without creating a consistent tone of dream logic. The film gains an extra layer of creepiness thanks to the presence of future wife killer Robert Blake. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, $8.25. Midnight. Sat., Oct. 12.
Reel Rock Film Tour A handful of climbing and skiing documentaries are screened in this traveling collection of films. Notable among them is High Tension: Ueli Steck and the Clash on Everest, about the conflict between professional climbers and their low-paid guides. See reelrocktour.com for full lineup. (NR)
Guild 45th, $20, Wed., Oct. 9, 8 p.m.; Thu., Oct. 10, 7 p.m.
Ride the Night Continuing SAM’s fall film noir series, Humphrey Bogart looks into the disappearance of an old Army buddy, finding Lizabeth Scott instead, in the 1947 Dead Reckoning. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org, $63–$68 series, $8 individual, Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Through Dec. 5.
Samurai Cinema Toshiro Mifune stars in 1967’s Samurai Rebellion, in which an aging warrior picks up a new cause. (NR)
$6-$11, Mondays, 7 p.m. Through Oct. 21.
Seattle Latino Film Festival The GI, SIFF, and other venues are being used for this mini-festival. Topics include old school buses being repurposed in Guatemala, idle youth in Lisbon, and the infamous skyscraper-become-slum in Caracas. See slff.org for info. (NR)
Grand Illusion. Through Oct. 13.
Seattle Polish Film Festival Crime thrillers, documentaries, and more are screened. The fest opens with Roman Polanski’s 1962 marital thriller Knife in the Water, which proved his calling-card to America. Several directors and actors will visit the fest. See polishfilms.org for full schedule and details. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, Oct. 11-20.
Seattle Social Justice Film Festival Over 60 titles will be screened, mostly documentaries, plus a visit on Saturday from Sister Helen Prejean, played by Sudan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking. She’ll introduce the acclaimed new doc The Central Park Five, about the black teenagers wrongfully convicted for the 1989 assault on a white woman in Manhattan. Danny Glover will visit on Sunday with his new historical drama Tula: The Revolt, about an 18th-century slavery uprising. Venues include the Cinerama, Majestic Bay, and Market Theater. See socialjusticefilmfestival.org for full schedule and details. (NR) $6-$15 individual, $89-$100 series, Oct. 10-13.
Seattle South Asian Film Festival With screenings taking place at SIFF Cinema Uptown and the UW Bothell campus, this annual fest will screen over a dozen features and documentaries, plus many short films. Topics include political tension in Kashmir, sex trafficking, and film preservation in India. Mira Nair’s very topical new The Reluctant Fundamentalist is also on the bill. Various live musical events, forums, visitors, and parties are also planned. See tasveer.org for full schedule and details. (NR)
$10-$12 individual, $60-$250 series, Through Oct. 13.
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The Shining Stanley Kubrick’s slow, eerie 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining has a primal, fairy-tale quality laced with Oedipal conflict. It matters less if Jack Nicholson’s blocked writer is demonically possessed (or Indian-cursed or evil reincarnated or whatever) than that he’s simply a bad father—rough and impatient with son Danny, cruelly dismissive of his wife (Shelley Duvall), selfish in his writerly ambitions. A failure at the typewriter, his imagination turns inward, rotting inside its own topiary maze. (Also screening this week is the King-derived Pet Sematary.) (R)
Central Cinema, $6-$8, Oct. 11-12, 7 p.m.; Mon., Oct. 14, 7 p.m.; Wed., Oct. 16, 7 p.m.
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Singin’ in the Rain The classic 1952 movie musical is a film about movies, and about our love of movies—including all their fabulous artifice. Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds sing, dance, and put on a show in fabulous Technicolor, set to the memorable Adolph Comden-Betty Green score. This is also the GI’s annual fundraiser gala, with refreshments served. (G)
Grand Illusion, $25, Sun., Oct. 13, 5 & 8 p.m.
Totally ‘80s Tuesdays
Valley Girl and Desperately Seeking Susan are screened. (PG-13)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11, Tuesdays, 7 & 9:15 p.m. Through Oct. 22.
Ongoing
Blue Jasmine There’s nothing comic about the downfall of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, the inspiration for Woody Allen’s miscalculated seriocom. Blue Jasmine is an awkward mismatch of pathos and ridicule, less fusion than simple borrowing. Grafted onto the story of delusional trophy wife Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is a Madoff-like fable of the recent financial crisis. In flashback, we see her husband (Alec Baldwin) buying her consent with luxury while he swindles the Montauk set. In the present timeframe, Jasmine is broke and living with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) in a shabby San Francisco apartment. Jasmine is a snob who needs to be brought low, a task relished by Ginger, her boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and her ex (a surprisingly sympathetic Andrew Dice Clay). Perhaps because her heroine isn’t entirely Allen’s creation, he doesn’t finally know what to do with her. Jasmine is more foolish than evil, but there’s nothing funny about her final punishment. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Kirkland Parkplace
Don Jon Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote, directed, and stars in Don Jon, the story of a porn addict who’d be right in place amongst the braying loudmouths of Jersey Shore. However, the likable Jon is also a ladies’ man, prowling the disco with his buddies and searching for a “dime” (a “10,” on the immortal scale) to take home on a Saturday night. An encounter with the lushly named Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson, in a deft caricature) suggests that our boy may have found authentic love, but Gordon-Levitt throws in some reasonably fresh variations on the tale of an addict redeemed. One of them comes in the form of a night-school classmate (Julianne Moore) who’s got more honest life experience than most of the people in Jon’s circle. All this is in service of a very simple message, of the kind an earnest young filmmaker might feel is important to say for his generation. Which is maybe more endearing than insightful. (R) ROBERT HORTON Bainbridge Cinemas, Cinebarre, Varsity, Meridian, Thornton Place, others
Enough Said Nothing much happens in a Nicole Holofcener film, and that’s OK. Enough Said is yet another well-wrought example of her focus on the problems intelligent women create for themselves through their constant worry. Ten years divorced, her daughter soon to leave for college, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) wearily lugs her massage table from client to client, hearing their petty complaints without comment, seemingly resigned to a single woman’s slide toward menopause. The large, hairy obstacle in that path is Albert (James Gandolfini), also divorced with a college-bound daughter. Eva has a secret pipeline to confirm her doubts about him: Albert’s ex-wife Marianne (Catherine Keener) is one of her clients. If there is a Hippocratic oath for masseuses, Eva knows she’s broken it tenfold. Yet she continues to knead and befriend the cynical poet while allowing Marianne’s complaints to poison her relationship with Albert. In his last screen role, Gandolfini conveys a lumpy shyness and decency; his Albert is genuinely hurt by the fat-shaming of Eva’s yoga-toned cohort. Eva’s BFF (Toni Colette) tells her to learn to compromise in a relationship, even while constantly dissing her husband (the excellently indignant Ben Falcone). For the women of Enough Said, too much candor has its risks, but remaining silent can bring disaster. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place, Ark Lodge, Lynwood Theater (Bainbridge)
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Fruitvale Station By an accident of timing, if not craft, Ryan Coogler has made one of the most important movies of the year. His docudrama chronicles the last 24 hours in the life of Oscar Grant (played by Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old black man shot to death by overzealous transit cops on an Oakland BART platform in 2009. Less covered by the national media than the Trayvon Martin case, in part because Grant had a criminal record, his killing was actually witnessed and filmed on cellphones by New Year’s revelers returning home on the same BART train from which he was dragged by the cops. Fruitvale Station leads up to that incident with a day-in-the-life format. It’s overly sentimental and possibly too soft on Grant, who goes out of his way to do favors for everyone he encounters. He’s respectful of his mother (The Help’s Oscar-winning Octavia Spencer), kind to dogs, loving to his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and 5-year-old daughter. Yes, it is possible in America to be a petty drug dealer and an upstanding family man. After showing us the actual cellphone video before the credits, Coogler spends a relaxed hour humanizing Grant; then comes the grim rush of docudrama that loops us back to the fateful railway platform. (R) BRIAN MILLER Admiral
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Gravity George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are stranded in orbit, menaced by regular bombardments of space debris. The oxygen is running out and there’s no prospect of rescue from Earth. Their dilemma is established in an astonishing 12-minute opening sequence, seamlessly rendered via CGI by director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien). The camera occupies no fixed position. There is no up or down in the frame as it pushes and swoops among the wreckage and flailing astronauts. (Here let’s note that the 3-D version is essential; don’t even consider seeing the conventional rendering.) Dr. Stone (Bullock) at first can’t get her bearings; and the rest of the film consists of her navigating from one problem to the next. If the shuttle is disabled, let’s get to the International Space Station. If no one’s home there, let’s try the Chinese station next door. For all its technical marvels and breathtaking panoramas reflected in Stone’s visor, Gravity is a very compact and task-oriented picture. It’s both space-age and hugely traditional, though with a modern, self-aware heroine. Gravity is a marvelously forward-thrusting film that doesn’t need much dialogue or introspection. Stone scores her biggest laugh with an exasperated aside: “I hate space.” Thanks to Cuaron’s peerless directing work, we know just the feeling. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Alderwood 16, Cinerama, Factoria, Woodinville, Southcenter, Ark Lodge, Cinerama, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, Majestic Bay, Meridian, Thornton Place, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, others
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Inequality for All The basis for this advocacy doc, Robert Reich’s Aftershock, was published three years ago as we were tentatively clambering out of the Great Recession, which began with the subprime-mortgage collapse of 2008. The market is up today, but we also have a jobless recovery for the middle class. Why is that? Using the same graphs he employs as a UC Berkeley professor, Reich shows how the inequality curve began climbing in the ’80s, accelerating with the deregulation of financial markets during the Clinton era (when he worked in the White House). It’s a 40-year trend, with technology, globalization, outsourcing, and other causes. To counter that trend, Reich advocates federal stimulus and other policies to grow the middle class and get it spending again, to raise that median income (essentially flat since the pre-OPEC ’70s, measured in constant dollars). Meanwhile, Republican rhetoric about an “opportunity society” has become a cruel irony: Social mobility is heading in the wrong direction, making the country ever more polarized. And that is why, despite Reich’s ebullience, this is such an important, dismaying film. (PG) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit
Prisoners Crime movies about child abduction raise the usual alarm bells. Here’s a chance for actors to shriek and curse, to pound the floor and squeeze out those Oscar-friendly tears. Yet writer Aaron Guzikowski and director Denis Villeneuve mostly tamp down the emotional explosions in this damp, depressive thriller; there’s a mood of fatigue and resignation in the struggling Pennsylvania suburb where two girls go missing on Thanksgiving. Their fathers (Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard) join the cops in combing the woods; dirty rain turns to derelict sleet; and the mothers (Maria Bello and Viola Davis) crumple into passive grief at home. The sullen detective on the case (Jake Gyllenhaal) offers little reassurance; with his tattoos and pent-up anger, he seems not just disgusted by the kidnapping suspect (Paul Dano) but by the world in general. Prisoners runs long, and the clues and plot twists are roughly knotted into the fabric. It feels like a single-season TV series trying to develop, and the only character given room to grow is Jackman’s. Dover is a contractor whose business has been cut by the recession; he’s a disaster-prepper with a basement full of canned food and guns; and he turns into a monster when he lays hands on the prime suspect. (R) BRIAN MILLER Oak Tree, Pacific Place, others
Rush Ably directed by Ron Howard, Rush is the mostly true stories of two star drivers of the ’70s: the British rogue James Hunt and the Austrian technician Niki Lauda. Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is a posh, privileged, oversexed product of his times. The methodical, unlovable Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) has meanwhile paid his own way onto the circuit: He makes every car faster through strict engineering discipline, not panache. He and Hunt are yin and yang, a dynamic that screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United) repeats far more often than necessary. Howard certainly remembers the ’70s, and with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) he gives Rush a wonderfully Campari-soaked period look. The racing scenes are excitingly conveyed with vintage cars, CGI, and snippets of real race footage among the many montages. Hemsworth, an Aussie from those Thor movies, isn’t a bad actor; and Bruhl, a German-Spanish utility player, is a good actor soon to co-star in the WikiLeaks movie The Fifth Estate. I only wish the writing were up to their and Howard’s talents. Rush successfully captures the glamour and danger of its sport; only the script isn’t up to speed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Pacific Place, Bainbridge, Kirkland Parkplace, Seven Gables, Lincoln Square, others
The Summit In 2008, as was widely reported, 11 mountaineers perished in a cascade of bad judgment and warm-weather-caused icefall on the 8,000-meter peak K2. (Global warming? Maybe.) Nick Ryan’s documentary uses reenactments, fresh interviews, and some original footage to chronicle that calamity, with emphasis on Irish alpinist Gerard McDonnell, his countryman, who was making his second attempt on K2. This storytelling here isn’t Into Thin Air, and the conflicting testimony among several nationalities and rival expeditions is not a model of clarity. It’s like Rashomon in the Death Zone. None of those oxygen-starved brains are ever going to agree on a sequence of events. After fixed lines are severed by a massive icefall that strands McDonnell and others on the deadly descent, there is no central, reliable Krakauer figure on the mountain. As a result, sober analysis of the incident gives way to weepy testimonials—padded with the story of Italy’s first ascent of K2 in ’54—in an avalanche of sentiment. Whenever possible, Ryan opts for tears and conjecture instead of facts. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance
Theaters:
Admiral, 2343 California Ave. SW, 938-3456; Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S, 721-3156; Big Picture, 2505 First Ave., 256-0566; Big
Picture
Redmond, 7411 166th Ave. NE, 425-556-0566; Central
Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684; Cinebarre, 6009 SW 244th St. (Mountlake Terrace)., 425-672-7501; Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Ave., 448-6680; Crest, 16505 Fifth Ave. NE, 363-6339; Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St., 523-3935; Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., 547-2127; Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., 323-0587; iPic Theaters, 16451 N.E. 74th St. (Redmond), 425-636-5601; Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, 425-827-9000; Lincoln Square, 700 Bellevue Way N, 425-454-7400; Majestic Bay, 2044 NW Market St., 781-2229; Meridian, 1501 Seventh Ave., 223-9600; Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380; Oak Tree, 10006 Aurora Ave. N, 527-1748; Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., 888-262-4386; Seven Gables, 911 NE 50th St., 632-8821; SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996; SIFF Film Center, Seattle Center, 324-9996; Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave NE, 633-0059; Thornton Place, 301 NE 103rd St., 517-9953; Varsity, 4329 University Way NE, 632-6412.
