Local & Repertory
The Homestretch Discussion follows this new documentary about homeless Chicago youth seeking to attend high school. (NR)
Frye Art Museum, 704 Terry Ave., 622-9250, fryemuseum.org. Free. Noon, Sat., April 11.
Kill Me Three Times A late addition to the schedule, this new comic thriller stars Simon Pegg as an assassin who finds he isn’t the ony guy employed on lucrative new job. (NR)
Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., 632-8821, landmarktheatres.com. $10.50. Opens Fri.
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Langston Hughes African American Film Festiva Nineteen features and some two-dozen shorts are featured during the fest, which begins with the documentary profile August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand (6 p.m. Sat.), about the Pulitzer-winning playwright of Fences and other works, who lived the last 15 years of his life in Seattle. Other highlights include An American Ascent (about black climbers on Denali), the nuptial rom-com Christmas Wedding Baby, Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 silent film Within Our Gates, and the new doc Cincinnati Goddam, about race and politics in that city. Various panel discussions are also planned; see website for full fetival schedule. (NR)
Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, 104 17th Ave. S., langstoninstitute.org. $7-$12 individual, $50-$150 series. Sun., April 11-Sun., April 19.
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Memento In Christopher Nolan smart, surprising 2001 breakthrough, a man bent on avenging his wife’s murder is hindered by short-term memory loss incurred during the assault. Although not an amnesiac, he must use an elaborate system of self-prompting to recall the clues in the case. His pockets full of Polaroids and Post-it notes, his skin covered with mnemonic tattoos, Leonard (Guy Pearce) becomes the unwitting agent of predetermined retribution. Ingeniously, Mememto employs a backwards narrative structure: Each scene begins with a missing context supplied by the one that follows (for us), which is the one that precedes it for Leonard. Storytelling is as much the subject here as vengeance. Moreover, Leonard’s unreliable narration, though often funny and affecting, leads the spectator astray. Among those involved in Leonard’s unpredictable investigation are Carrie-Anne Moss’ Natalie, whom he believes, and Joe Pantoliano’s Teddy, whom he doubts. (R) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 7:30 p.m. Fri.-Wed.
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Noir de France Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 paean to American gangster pictures, Bob le Flambeur, didn’t even reach the U.S. until 1982—unfairly making it seem an imitator, not an innovator. “Flambeur” translates not as mere “gambler” but “high roller,” which describes our down-on-his-luck hero (played by Roger Duchesne), who clings to his chivalric code despite a bad losing streak. His tools? Hat. Trench coat. Cigarette. The usual. Melville provides hard-boiled yet elegiac voice-over narration, calling Bob “an old young man, legend of a recent past.” Even as Bob plans to knock over the casino in Deauville, the cop on his trail is more concerned friend than avid pursuer. Meanwhile, Bob takes time to set up his protege with a teen sex kitten, showing almost paternal tenderness to the pair. Everybody loves Bob, but as his barmaid pal warns, “You’re no kid anymore.” He’s a man out of time, and Bob le Flambeur is in this way Melville’s ode to the lost prewar demimonde of Paris’ Montmartre and Pigalle districts. (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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A Streetcar Named Desire Stella! Elia Kazan’s 1951 Brando-starring classic has oft been parodied, but its star—reprising his Broadway role—is amazing. And in this adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter are no less fine. The latter three won Oscars, while Brando lost to Bogie in The African Queen. (PG-13)
Central Cinema, $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. (Also 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun. matinees.)
Vessel Dutch nurse Rebecca Gomperts creates a floating abortion clinic in this recent doc by Diana Whitten. Discussion follows (NR)
Keystone Church, 5019 Keystone Pl. N., 632-6021, meaningfulmovies.org. Free. 7 p.m. Fri.
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Event Yadda. (NR)
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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. (R) R.H. Crest
Cinderella When the mood strikes me, I also can be swept up in watching two beautiful people fall in love. And beautiful they are: Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden as Prince Charming (in some very flattering tight pants) and Downton Abbey’s Lily James as the demure and free-spirited Ella, who wears butterflies in her hair because that’s just her brand of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (Let’s also here bestow the praising-hands emoji upon James’ eyebrows, the boldness of which is unprecedented by any other Disney princess.) The familiar plot has been gently tweaked. Prior to the fateful ball, Ella now meets Prince Charming in the forest, where he claims to be a humble apprentice working at the palace. Ella’s also been given more agency. Unlike most adaptations of the Perrault folk tale, this Ella is hardly embarrassed by her low station. She soon adopts a strong take-me-as-I-am attitude, surely designed to appeal to girls raised on Frozen. After being christened “Cinderella” by her evil stepmother (Cate Blanchett) and stepsisters, she chooses to reclaim the demeaning nickname and make it her own. Is that the best message for how to respond to bullying? Perhaps not the worst. (PG) DIANA M. LE Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Varsity, others
Danny Collins As related in this simultaneously hackneyed and likable rock-’n’-roll redemption tale, there really was a guy who, 40 years after the fact, discovered that John Lennon had written him a letter telling him to stay true to his art. Al Pacino plays Danny as a music celebrity living high on his legacy, doing what looks like a lounge-act version of Mick Jagger on the casino circuit. He’s on showbiz autopilot, performing his greatest hits for the AARP demo. The belated arrival of the Lennon letter sends Danny to a sleepy New Jersey Hilton. From there, he hopes to finally connect with his neglected son Tom (Bobby Cannavale), born from a backstage hookup. It’s hard to get worked up over the emotional journey of a spoiled celeb who’s milked a bubblegum pop anthem into a fortune. What exactly happened to the earnest young folk singer of the prologue? We never learn. Yet such questions fade as Danny becomes part of Tom’s family. Pacino’s chemistry with Cannavale and Annette Bening (as his not-quite-but-getting-closer-to-age-appropriate love interest) overrides the plot contrivances. Like Danny, Pacino has also been a showman verging on—if not spilling over into—self-parody in recent decades, but he turns Danny’s showmanship into a character trait, a reflexive instinct to connect with and charm everyone he meets, whether a sold-out concert hall or a gobsmacked parking valet. Even in a momentary bit of banter, Pacino makes that moment feel genuine. (R) SEAN AXMAKER Sundance, Meridian, others
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 TK any?
The Gunman Sean Penn and Taken maestro Pierre Morel have updated a 1981 French novel to our present age of African strife: mercenaries and aid workers mixing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict minerals, covert assassinations, and—after an eight-year surfing safari from that dirty game—a U.S. congressional subpoena that pulls shirtless Jim Terrier (Penn) back in. You know the rest: Jim’s mad killing skills are wrenched back into service; the baddies nab the only woman he ever loved (no, not Madonna); and we hear weary professions of disgust at the whole sordid business (mercenary-dom, not movies). Though The Gunman does offer one genre twist: Jim’s a TBI concussion case, brain-addled almost to the point of Still Alice, who must write everything down in notebooks. Through London, Barcelona, and Gibraltar, Penn serviceably kills dozens of flak-jacketed rejects from the Bourne movies’ Operation Treadstone. Everything here is routine, though there’s a bit of pleasure in watching supporting players Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance tick off scenes before their characters’ inevitable demise. Since Liam Neeson has announced his looming retirement from AARP action movies, Penn and his bulging, hairless pecs are well positioned to take his place. (R) B.R.M. Meridian, Thornton Place, Lincoln Square, Bainbridge, others
Insurgent
Insurgent picks up three days after the end Divergent, with teenage Tris (Shailene Woodley), Four (Theo James), and Caleb (Ansel Elgort) on the run from Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and her goons. So far, so good: We came to see some action. However, Insurgent soon falls into the typical second-movie slump so common to trilogies. (Though four movies are actually being made from Veronica Roth’s three novels.) The fun to 2014’s Divergent came from the introduction of a whole new futuristic world, and in seeing misfit Tris blossom and get to know her new faction. Now, after the death of her parents and a friend, Tris is understandably troubled—but her nightmares weigh heavily on us, too. Insurgent feels exhausted by its latter half; even the ever-energetic Woodley seems a little depleted. Early in Insurgent, Tris cuts her hair short, without any thought to whether or not her boyfriend will like it. Because she doesn’t draw her strength or beauty from his approval, I dug Shailene’s no-makeup, androgynous look—believable for fugitive life. Tris also loses her virginity in a no-nonsense manner, another small touch of realism in this dystopia. (PG-13) D.M.L. Big Picture, Meridian, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, 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) R.H. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance
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—and possibly mental illness. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, 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. (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
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, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, others
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. Crest
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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 (“Every piano is like a person. They build them the same way; they never come out the same way”). 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
Song of the Sea Dazzling in its visual presentation, though not so thrilling in its conventional storytelling, the Irish-animated Song features a plot is drawn from Celtic folklore, specifically the tradition of the selkie, those mythological shapeshifters who can live on land or sea, as humans or seals. Our hero is Ben (voiced by David Rawle), a young lad whose mother vanishes under dramatic circumstances the night his mute younger sister Saoirse is born. They live on a wee shard of an island with their mournful father (Brendan Gleeson), a red-bearded lighthouse-keeper, but a series of marvelous events lead Ben into a secret world of magical creatures and spell-spinning songs. Director Tomm Moore lets the movie’s forward momentum run aground at various moments, but he and the Cartoon Saloon crew seem more interested in creating the gorgeous vistas that occupy virtually every frame. The character designs follow circular, looping patterns, and the visual influences seem inspired by anime and the line drawings of 1950s-era UPA cartoons (Mr. Magoo is not forgotten, people). (PG) R.H. Crest
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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 (and the earnest teen soap opera of Twilight), the silly deadpan tone is quite welcome. Clement and Waititi know this is a sketch writ large (forget about plot), 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. Things have gotten to the point, Vladislav admits, where they’re even cribbing from The Lost Boys. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, SIFF Cinema Egyptian
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Whiplash Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is an unbridled asshole for art’s sake, a petty Stalin figure inside the Juilliard-like music academy that greets the innocent Andrew (Miles Teller). Andrew has fled Long Island and his kindly, weak mensch of a father (Paul Reiser) to be the best drummer in the best studio band at the best school in the country. That means pleasing the imperious, bullying Fletcher, a man who seems endlessly displeased with the world’s lax standards. (The Oscar-worthy Simmons, who originated this role in writer/director Damien Chazelle’s prior short, doesn’t oversell the villainy or froth at the mouth.) How Andrew responds to such abuse—quite calculated, as we shall learn—is the heart of this thrillingly propulsive drama, an intense, brutal, and often comical tale of mentorship gone amok. Chazelle, a genuine new talent, has compared his Sundance prizewinner to a war movie or a gangster picture; yet it’s a battle where the two antagonists share the same musical goals. At some moments, Whiplash pushes past realism into the fugue state of practice and performance. (Black Swan comes to mind.) Apotheosis or psychosis—what’s the difference? For Andrew, there may be none. (R) B.R.M. Crest
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. Crest
Wild Tales The opening sequence to Damian Szifron’s Argentine anthology movie sets up a Twilight Zone-style series of revelations, compressed into just a few minutes. Passengers riding on a suspiciously underfilled plane begin to realize that there might be a reason for their presence there, beyond the obvious business of getting to a destination. Szifron wants to get his movie started with a bang, and he does—though the rest of Wild Tales doesn’t live up to the wicked curtain-raiser. But there are enough moments of irony and ingenuity to make it worthwhile. In one episode, a lone driver has a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, which allows the slowpoke he antagonized earlier to stop by and exact revenge. In another, an explosives expert becomes enraged by a parking ticket—rage that leads him to lose everything. But there’s a twist. A lot of these segments rely on a twist, a technique that doesn’t quite disguise how in-your-face the lessons are. The twists also can’t disguise the way some of the tales rely on illogical behavior to allow their plots to develop. Wild Tales is a showy exercise (you can see why Pedro Almodovar signed on as a producer), and Szifron has undoubtedly punched his ticket for bigger and better things. (R) R.H. Guild 45th
Woman in Gold The last time Helen Mirren went up against the Nazis, in The Debt, it was really no contest. So you will not be surprised to learn that the Austrian art thieves of the Third Reich fare no better against her Holocaust refugee Maria Altmann. Woman in Gold takes its title from the alternate, Nazi-supplied moniker for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Adele was Maria’s beloved aunt, and Maria became the plaintiff in a long-fought art-restitution case, begun in 1998, against the Austrian government. As Maria’s sidekick in this true-life-inspired tale, Ryan Reynolds plays the unseasoned young attorney Randy Schoenberg (forever judged against his genius forebear Arnold Schoenberg). This odd couple is obviously going to prevail against the stubborn, post-Waldheim Austrian establishment. As Maria says, “If they admit to one thing, they have to admit to it all.” Were the writing better, this would’ve made a good courtroom procedural (Elizabeth McGovern and Jonathan Pryce show up as judges), but director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) instead chooses to add copious flashbacks to the Anschluss era and Maria’s narrow escape from the Nazis. So while this is a serviceable star vehicle that depends on Mirren’s reliably purring V-12 engine, two other actresses play Maria at different ages—depriving us of the regular pleasure of her smackdowns upon poor Randy. (PG-13) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Pacific Place, others
