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Do Nascimento during the Bus siege.
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Bus 174
Opens Fri., March 5, at Varsity
Forget about O.J. and the white Bronco. So far as reality TV is concerned, no live televised drama was more compelling than the 2000 busjacking and hostage standoff in Rio de Janeiro that's the subject of this prize-winning Brazilian documentary. In addition to news footage of the four-hour crisis, the film adds interviews with journalists, cops, social workers, and the glue-sniffing street kids of Rio's favelas that spawned the illiterate, high-as-a-kite 21-year-old gunman, Sandro do Nascimento. You may not agree with the film's thesis that he's the real victim, particularly since two hostages were shot in the siege, one fatally. You'll need lots of tolerance for tendentious, idiot academics ("He redefined the social narrative") in a film most easily apprehensible to social workers fluent in Portuguese. But the tension keeps mounting unbearably as Sandro alternately hectors and bonds with his hostages—it's like the Stockholm syndrome in reverse, both harrowing and real. (NR) BRIAN MILLER
A Certain Kind of Death
8 p.m. Fri., March 5–Sun., March 7, at Consolidated Works ($5–$7, 500 Boren Ave. N., 206-381-3218)
Unlike Six Feet Under's darkly funny take on the business of dying, this frank documentary from directors Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock (who will introduce the screenings) approaches the L.A. County Coroner's Office without a satiric agenda. We simply observe the similarities and differences in the cases of three men who die in their apartments without any known next of kin. That's the "certain kind of death": unnoticed by anyone save the apartment manager. Disheartening as that may sound, Death reassures us that although these shut-in "decedents" (as the dead are called in coroner-speak) seem alone in the world, they still matter. Why else would the intrepid caseworkers doggedly pursue every conceivable lead to find a family member? Surprisingly, this bureaucratic process is compelling enough to sustain a 70-minute feature; more than that, on the other hand, might be the death of you. NEAL SCHINDLER
Irish Reels Film Festival
Runs Thurs., March 4–Sun., March 14,at multiple venues
I previewed two of the 20-odd titles being shown during this two-weekend mini-fest, which includes a three-film retrospective dedicated to Neal Jordan: The Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1985), and The Crying Game (1992)—don't give away the secret!
There are Jews in Ireland? I was as surprised as anyone to learn this fact in the documentary Shalom Ireland. The hour-long doc (screening at 6 p.m. Saturday, March 7, at SAM) isn't particularly well organized in its statistics and chronology, but it's a kick to hear Hebrew prayers being delivered with a brogue. And the subjects interviewed are doubly garrulous and engaging, twice as personable as anyone has a right to be. Although wandering Jews may have reached Ireland during the Middle Ages, initial settlement followed trade routes in the 1700s. Pogroms in Lithuania and other Russian-dominated lands drove subsequent waves of emigration from the late 19th-century onward. Estimates are that the country's Jewish population peaked after World War II at around 5,000 (most in Dublin). Today, one learns after some fascinating stuff about the IRA–Zionist connection, it's dwindled to less than 2,000 with subsequent emigration to the U.S. and Israel, making for some sad synagogue closures and aging congregations.
On a sunnier note, the new comic ensemble piece Intermission opens the fest (7 p.m. Thursday, March 4, at the Harvard Exit) with a speech by Colin Farrell that shows why the bad-boy thespian was snapped up so fast by Hollywood. "Love's not something you can plan for, is it?" he asks, beginning a breakup-induced roundelay of mishaps and broken hearts with ample charisma (and some nifty handling of a shovel). Redeeming himself nicely for S.W.A.T., he plays a petty hooligan who ends up part of an inept bank robbery scheme that chiefly involves a lovelorn grocery-store peon (28 Days Later's Cillian Murphy) and the woman he disastrously dumps (Trainspotting's Kelly Macdonald, worth more than any amount found in the safe). The film, which begins its regular engagement March 26, jumps around briskly among its various plot strands, then sews them up neatly in a satisfying, if predictable, manner. Close on the heels of Farrell, Macdonald's also getting her Hollywood due: Look for her opposite Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet in J.M. Barrie's Neverland (expected this fall), in which she plays Peter Pan. B.R.M.
Full schedule, tickets, and information: 206-722-2184 and www.irishreels.org.
Monsieur Ibrahim
Opens Fri., March 5, at Seven Gables
Hollywood is too stupid to make good use of Omar Sharif. In Egypt, he's the king of cool, but nobody since David Lean has had the sense to cast him as anything but a cigar-store Arab or a generically hunky object of Streisand's desire. His Funny Girl character, "Nicky" Arnstein, got the nickname by racing a flashy nickel-plated bike in the Gay '90s bicycling craze; to Hollywood, Sharif was simply a shiny, metallic object.
At last, he gets a worthwhile role—and he's a tarnished 71, and it's a tiny French indie flick with more spirit than script. Sharif plays Ibrahim, a wise old widowed Sufi dude running a hole-in-the-wall grocery in 1960s Paris. It's a movie slum, patrolled by gorgeous, maternal hookers and adorably troubled kids à la early Truffaut. The whole scene is too New Wave for words, and old Ibrahim and his teenage sidekick Momo (superbly morose Pierre Boulanger) both need a new wave in their stagnant lives. Momo was abandoned by his mom, and his dad is a failed businessman whose practice of Judaism amounts to sitting around the apartment in despair. Momo takes comfort from the latest dance craze, the upbeat new rock and roll on the radio (which makes me want to buy the soundtrack), and the hookers, giving one his tattered childhood teddy bear. (Momo's subsequent sexual initiation seems creepy in the context of Mary Kay LeTourneau, but evidently not to the French.)
