SIFF Week 1: Picks & Pans

Thursday, May 21

7 p.m., The Paramount

PICK: In the Loop

Wait—they're showing a British TV satire for SIFF's gala opener? Not exactly. The creative team behind the BBC's The Thick of It has reunited much of the original cast, added a few Yanks (led by James Gandolfini in the Colin Powell role), and rewritten history—the lead-up to the Iraq War, though Iraq is never mentioned—into a transatlantic political farce. I loved it. The movie is talk talk talk, interrupted by a little sex and drinking, then back to the talking, which soon becomes shouting, screaming, and cursing. The Brits are led by Peter Capaldi, who plays a foul-mouthed and thoroughly frightening Scotsman at a British government ministry. We've all heard of the Boss From Hell. Well, Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is the boss to whom all the underling Bosses From Hell report. Around him swirl doctored intelligence reports, leaks, blunders, and neocon ideologues. The latter fly especially thick when In the Loop jets over to Cheneyland, aka Washington, D.C., where the younger Brit bureaucrats meet their American counterparts. (Look! There's Anna Chlumsky, the girl from My Girl way back when.) Steve Coogan has a small supporting role, but the movie is Capaldi's. "Walk the fucking line!" he barks at a polite, weak, idealistic MP (Tom Hollander), who later asks himself, "Is the really brave thing doing what you don't believe?" Well, in politics I guess you can convince yourself of anything. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

Friday, May 22

4:30 p.m. Harvard Exit

PICK: Eldorado

The title of Bouli Lanners' modest yet surprisingly affecting road-trip/buddy movie, which refers to an imaginary place of great wealth and opportunity, isn't necessarily ironic: The writer-director-actor has a profound love for the flat expanses of the film's southern Belgium and its gas stations, snack shops, and RV parks. Eldorado is a tale of two guys, fat and thin: Stroppy vintage-car dealer Yvan (Lanners, dressed like a Walloon Kevin Smith) comes home one night to find smack-scrawny Elie (Fabrice Adde) robbing him. Instead of calling the cops, Yvan becomes oddly protective of the pathetic felon and offers to drive him to his parents' house near the French border. The voyage provides both lovely shots of low-country landscapes—which suggest not the starker palette of Dardenne brothers' territory, but magic-hour prairie heartland—and genuinely funny encounters with weirdos (a car-accident fetishist, a nudist named Alain Delon). When the traveling companions reveal their backstories, the monologues avoid mawkishness, further upending all low expectations of this frequently trite genre. In its final act, Lanners' film is smart and confident enough to acknowledge that certain lives are dead ends while others get tired of just spinning their wheels. (NR) MELISSA ANDERSON Also: Pacific Place, 9 p.m. Mon., May 25.

4:30 p.m., Egyptian

PICK: The Higher Force

Yo, wassup! This movie's straight outta South Central. But I'm talking about South Central Reykjavík, where David and his homies form possibly the worst band of criminals in cinema history. (Or at least Icelandic cinema history.) The Higher Force takes its name from the instructional/inspirational kung fu lessons our hero watched on VHS as a boy. The lessons didn't take. In his 20s, aspiring poet David (Pétur Jóhann Sigfússon) is still just a pudgy, flunky loan collector in a gang whose uniform seems to be track suits, NBA jerseys, and cornrows. (Some even sport grills!) The women are so tacky they'd look up to Britney Spears. The wangstas are so weak that they listen to hip-hop on cassette tape. In an all-white country, they're poor white Viking trash. David's stock rises within the gang, however, when he implicates a lonely old schoolteacher as being, in secret, a top-level mobster. David's VHS guru tells him "Nothing is as it seems," which seems to be the operating principle behind this scruffy gangster spoof by Olaf de Fleur Johannesson. At a certain point, Michael Imperioli even appears to impart a little Sopranos cred (most of the dialogue's in English). None of it makes any sense; all of it made me laugh. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: Neptune, 7 p.m. Wed., May 27.

4:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema

PICK: Summer Hours

With Summer Hours, director Olivier Assayas stages a tactical retreat from the hookers and junkies of his Boarding Gate and Clean to the heart of a bourgeois French family. Summer Hours opens with a gaggle of first cousins romping around the verdant grounds of the rustic estate, somewhere north of Paris, where their parents grew up. The occasion is a 75th-birthday celebration for their chic grandmother, Hélène (Edith Scob). Assayas, who has always excelled at choreographing a fête, uses the first half-hour to introduce Hélène's three grown children, as well as her devotion to the estate. For all the local color, there's a global backbeat: The youngest child (Jérémie Renier) runs a Puma factory in China; his sister (Juliette Binoche) is a New York designer; and, though living in Paris, the eldest son, Frédéric (Charles Berling), is an economist. Lunch devoured, everyone rushes off, leaving Hélène to sit in the dark. She's alone—and she does die, off-screen, perhaps a year later. Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value—as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world. Assayas has his own preservationist agenda. Praised as "classically French" by the hipsters of culture weekly Les Inrockuptibles, Summer Hours exemplifies, even as it ponders, France in the age of unstoppable globalization. (NR) J. HOBERMAN Also: Uptown, 6:30 p.m. Sun., May 24.