9:30 p.m., Uptown
PICK: Bronson
Pusher director Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson is a blistering biopic of the notorious British felon Michael Gordon Peterson (aka Charles Bronson), who has spent most of his adult life in solitary confinement, where he has managed to become a physical-fitness expert and an award-winning poet and artist. With a grab-bag of visual and sonic tricks borrowed from the likes of Kubrick and Peter Greenaway, Refn stages Bronson as a kind of sociopathic vaudeville, as Peterson (played with an all-consuming mania by actor Tom Hardy) recounts his life before an audience while a series of abstract formalist flashbacks illustrate his violent journey from the crib to various other barred enclosures. (NR) SCOTT FOUNDAS Also: Neptune, 9:30 p.m. Tues., May 26.
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9:30 p.m., Pacific Place
PICK: Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country
How we view the relationship between traditional and new media should forever be changed by Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard's terrific documentary about a loosely organized network of scrappy underground videographers who risked their lives photographing the abortive 2007 uprising against Myanmar's military dictatorship. Spooked by memories of a similar rebellion in 1988, the government shut down the Internet and local media and banned foreign journalists from covering the demonstrations, which were led by Buddhist monks and students with growing support from an emboldened public. Burma VJ takes us on a roller coaster of alternating hope and despair as the young guerrilla reporters, always on the lookout for ubiquitous informers, wade into the thick of the struggle with Handycams hidden in bags, then transmit the footage to a hidden colleague who smuggles it out of the country via satellite. The raw, shocking images of courage and brutal backlash, here enhanced by added voiceover from two anguished young cameramen, were then broadcast, uncanned and unpolished, by the mainstream media. There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst. (NR) ELLA TAYLOR Also: Pacific Place, 5 p.m. Tues., May 26.
Sunday, May 24
3:45 p.m., Egyptian
PICK: The Cove
"I was buying a new Porsche every year," says a rueful Ric O'Barry, who as a young man was instrumental in the '60s TV show Flipper. He caught and trained the several dolphins who made the program a hit (inspiring countless divers and marine biologists along the way); then when the show was cancelled and its mammalian stars abandoned, he claims his favorite, Cathy, committed suicide in his arms. Go ahead and cry now, because this Sundance prizewinning documentary gets even heavier. O'Barry was radicalized by his Flipper experience, dedicating his life to freeing or protecting the thousands of dolphins that because of Flipper became profitable trained attractions for commercial aquariums around the world. The Cove director Louie Psihoyos, himself a diver and environmentalist, here follows O'Barry and a Dirty Dozen–style brigade of eco-activists to Taiji, Japan, where migratory dolphins are corralled by the thousands in a hidden cove. A few are sold to marine parks for six figures an animal. The rest...well, imagine the worst. The Cove is, in a way, the companion documentary to a real-life horror movie, a maritime snuff film. Few SIFFgoers will have a guilty conscience about eating dolphin meat (which carries dangerous levels of mercury), but some will have to explain to their kids why the summer trip to SeaWorld is being cancelled. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: Neptune, 6:30 p.m. Mon., May 25.
4 p.m., Harvard Exit
PICK: Welcome
Europeans—the filmmakers, at least—are fascinated with the subject of immigration. Recent dramas like Michael Winterbottom's In This World have been unsparing in their view of Fortress Europe, which slams the door on refugees from countries destabilized by the wars and politics of the West. From France, Philippe Lioret's Welcome tackles the same topic, though with more of a conventional coach-and-athlete Rocky approach. The coach (Vincent Lindon) is a middle-aged former swimming star who now leads water-aerobics classes at a municipal pool in Calais, on the English Channel. The athlete is a 17-year-old Kurdish Iraqi refugee (Firat Ayverdi) trying to reach his girlfriend in London. He fails at other avenues of smuggling (boat, truck, etc.), so you can guess his next thought when he shows up at the pool for a swimming lesson. It's illegal to help the refugees who huddle outside a Red Cross feeding station, where the coach's soon-to-be ex-wife volunteers. He wants to impress her. But more than that, he's lonely; and the couple has no kids. Yes, formula is strongly at work here, but Casablanca was formulaic, too. And the veteran actor Lindon displays some of that same Bogart weariness: the burden of ideals one dares not show, the yearning of a cause worth fighting for. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: Harvard Exit, 9:15 p.m. Tues., June 2.
4:30 p.m., Neptune
Maradona by Kusturica
Fallen idols both, former Argentine soccer great Diego Maradona is trailed around the world by Bosnian expat director Emir Kusturica. Both peaked in the '80s—Maradona leading his team to victory in the 1986 World Cup with the notorious "hand of God" goal, Kusturica with films like the Oscar-nominated While Father Was Away on Business. Time hasn't been kind to either figure. Making like Oliver Stone and Castro, Kusturica treats the pudgy former coke-head footballer like some kind of political hero, but the politics here are awfully confused. Kusturica seems stuck in the '90s, still pissed about NATO bombing the Serbs. And poor clueless Maradona inveighs against the second President Bush as if he were responsible for the Falklands War, NAFTA, and the entire "economic subjugation of Latin America." As usual, Kusturica has absolutely no discipline as a filmmaker, and the few good bits here are almost random: black-and-white newsreels of Maradona as a football prodigy; a Church of Maradona whose members, Guffman-like, venerate him as a saint; and a stunning montage of his greatest goals set to the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen." Skip the film and look for those clips on YouTube. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Also: Harvard Exit, 9:45 p.m. Wed., May 27.
