Film

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, July 19, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Fremont Outdoor Movies This popular al fresco screening series begins with a free movie, courtesy of Talenti Gelato, which will probably be offering samples. Back in 2001, it wasn’t clear what kind of career Wes Anderson would enjoy after The Royal Tenenbaums; besides gathering what would almost become a repertory company of actors for him, the movie crystalized a number of key themes to recur in his later works. As in Moonrise Kingdom, there’s a longing for the protected cloister of childhood. As in The Grand Budapest Hotel, architecture provides a familiar embrace, a ritual-filled redoubt against the swift-running currents of time. As with Fantastic Mr. Fox, there’s the invigorating thrill of the caper-the illicit act, however small (like catching a ride on a garbage truck), that may not keep you young, but reminds you what it was like to be young. Made when he was only 31, Anderson’s third feature is permeated with the kind of nostalgic detail you’d associate with a man much older. Indeed, the period and place of Tenenbaums-like most of his other movies-are entirely imagined, not something he knew firsthand. You get the feeling Anderson identifies more with the regretful yet rascally old family patriarch (Gene Hackman) than the film’s younger characters (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke and Owen Wilson). I suppose you could call the picture a comedy of disappointment. Other titles on the schedule, running mostly on Saturdays through August 30, include Rushmore, Wet Hot American Summer (presented with Three Dollar Bill Cinema), Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, and that perennial Fremont favorite, The Big Lebowski. Some screenings are 21-and-over events. (R) BRIAN MILLER Fremont Outdoor Cinema, 3501 Phinney Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103 $5 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, July 19, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, July 19, 2014

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Repo Man There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening than driving around with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in this 1984 punk comedy, a memorable instance of Hollywood pushback during the Reagan era. Not yet a member of The Breakfast Club (or the Brat Pack), Estevez is suitably blank as the L.A. teen who stumbles into the auto-repossession trade, and Stanton is suitably sage as the geezer who mentors him. Englishman Alex Cox made a big impression with this shaggy satire of La-La Land losers; unfortunately, his cantankerous career really tailed off after Sid and Nancy. Despite the film’s famous tagline in Stanton’s gutter-existentialist monologue (“Ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em”), Repo Man is actually quite warm in its view of humanity. That affectionate spirit is embodied, of course, by Tracey Walter’s gentle, alien-seeking soul, who alone can drive that fateful 1964 Chevy Malibu. Then there’s the soundtrack: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, and those pioneers of punk: the Andrews Sisters. (Rated R, no show on Sat.) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Saturday, July 19, 2014, 9:30 – 10:30pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Sunday, July 20, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, July 20, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, July 20, 2014

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Repo Man There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening than driving around with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in this 1984 punk comedy, a memorable instance of Hollywood pushback during the Reagan era. Not yet a member of The Breakfast Club (or the Brat Pack), Estevez is suitably blank as the L.A. teen who stumbles into the auto-repossession trade, and Stanton is suitably sage as the geezer who mentors him. Englishman Alex Cox made a big impression with this shaggy satire of La-La Land losers; unfortunately, his cantankerous career really tailed off after Sid and Nancy. Despite the film’s famous tagline in Stanton’s gutter-existentialist monologue (“Ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em”), Repo Man is actually quite warm in its view of humanity. That affectionate spirit is embodied, of course, by Tracey Walter’s gentle, alien-seeking soul, who alone can drive that fateful 1964 Chevy Malibu. Then there’s the soundtrack: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, and those pioneers of punk: the Andrews Sisters. (Rated R, no show on Sat.) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Sunday, July 20, 2014, 9:30 – 10:30pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, July 21, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Monday, July 21, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Monday, July 21, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Monday, July 21, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Monday, July 21, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, July 21, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, July 21, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 21, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, July 21, 2014

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Repo Man There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening than driving around with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in this 1984 punk comedy, a memorable instance of Hollywood pushback during the Reagan era. Not yet a member of The Breakfast Club (or the Brat Pack), Estevez is suitably blank as the L.A. teen who stumbles into the auto-repossession trade, and Stanton is suitably sage as the geezer who mentors him. Englishman Alex Cox made a big impression with this shaggy satire of La-La Land losers; unfortunately, his cantankerous career really tailed off after Sid and Nancy. Despite the film’s famous tagline in Stanton’s gutter-existentialist monologue (“Ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em”), Repo Man is actually quite warm in its view of humanity. That affectionate spirit is embodied, of course, by Tracey Walter’s gentle, alien-seeking soul, who alone can drive that fateful 1964 Chevy Malibu. Then there’s the soundtrack: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, and those pioneers of punk: the Andrews Sisters. (Rated R, no show on Sat.) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Monday, July 21, 2014, 9:30 – 10:30pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 22, 2014

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The Magnificent Andersons SIFF continues this unlikely pairing of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Tues.) and Punch-Drunk Love (Weds.) (R)

SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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Repo Man There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening than driving around with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in this 1984 punk comedy, a memorable instance of Hollywood pushback during the Reagan era. Not yet a member of The Breakfast Club (or the Brat Pack), Estevez is suitably blank as the L.A. teen who stumbles into the auto-repossession trade, and Stanton is suitably sage as the geezer who mentors him. Englishman Alex Cox made a big impression with this shaggy satire of La-La Land losers; unfortunately, his cantankerous career really tailed off after Sid and Nancy. Despite the film’s famous tagline in Stanton’s gutter-existentialist monologue (“Ordinary fucking people, I hate ‘em”), Repo Man is actually quite warm in its view of humanity. That affectionate spirit is embodied, of course, by Tracey Walter’s gentle, alien-seeking soul, who alone can drive that fateful 1964 Chevy Malibu. Then there’s the soundtrack: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, and those pioneers of punk: the Andrews Sisters. (Rated R, no show on Sat.) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 9:30 – 10:30pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 23, 2014

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The Magnificent Andersons SIFF continues this unlikely pairing of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Tues.) and Punch-Drunk Love (Weds.) (R)

SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 7 – 8pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? Or what if you needed extra incentive to purchase the records, buy concert tickets, or watch their Ed Sullivan appearances? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. American teenagers already knew the songs in ‘64 (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “She Loves You,” etc.), and they’d seen the Beatles on newsreels and TV. But what the first Beatles movie did was cement these four personalities in the public imagination. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein, their manager; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. Director Richard Lester and screenwriter Alun Owen built upon each moptop’s popular persona, layering gag upon gag on what we thought we knew about them. Was Ringo really the lazy, irresponsible one or George the quiet one? No, and it really doesn’t matter. The Beatles were cheerfully selling themselves in a vehicle that combines English music-hall humor with the cinematic energy of the French New Wave. Fifty years later, we’re still happily buying. (Also plays SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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A Summer’s Tale The movie of the summer in 1996 should have been A Summer’s Tale, a wise and bittersweet romance by then-septuagenarian filmmaker (and French New Wave co-founder) Eric Rohmer, who he died, in 2010, at 89. A would-be musician named Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) who travels to the Brittany seaside for a summer break before his grown-up duties beckon. Three young women are in his mind: loquacious waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet), with whom he can talk about his problems; assertive singer Solene (Gwenaelle Simon), ripe for a summer fling; and his quasi-girlfriend Lena (Aurelia Nolin), who’s supposed to be showing up any day now. The situation is far more nuanced than this romantic choice would suggest, and Gaspard faces long days of exploring and reassessing his attitudes about romance, most of which are charmingly in error. Nothing in the movie is glibly scenic, but the locations are beautifully and precisely captured. So is the shapelessness of youthful summer days, which could be why the movie lasts 114 minutes; if it moved quicker it might not get that drowsy quality right. And Rohmer, as always, has the touch when it comes to tracking the tiny shifts in intensity between people. The belated arrival of this neglected gem is an unusual pleasure-maybe even the movie of the summer. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

As Is It in Heaven The new spiritual leader of a small religious sect in the American South has received the word. That is, the Word. And the Word is that the group must become purified to be sufficiently prepared for the final days, which-according to their own in-house prophet-will arrive about a month hence. This setup provides not only the countdown structure of Joshua Overbay’s debut feature  but also its style. This low-budget indie is itself purified, stripped bare, and ornament-free. We don’t find out much about the recent convert, David (the haunted Chris Nelson), who abruptly takes over the leadership of the group. There is some tension surrounding a rival (Luke Beavers) and the possible ambivalence of a brand-new recruit (Jin Park), but for the most part the film rolls out on its sweltering-summer mood and the growing sense of escape routes closing. Although his production design is simple, Overbay is fond of the moving camera, so the film never feels static. There are amateurish performances in the mix, and at times the simplified storyline probably errs on the side of purity-one occasionally yearns for intrigue or a pinch of melodramatic spice. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Thursday, July 24, 2014

Coherence In James Ward Byrkit’s modestly suspenseful thriller, a dinner party coincides with a comet passing close to the Earth. (No, it doesn’t awaken the dead and turn them into zombies; I’ll stop your supposition right there.) These four L.A. couples are more than a little complacent and self-satisfied, in need of a jolt. Then cell phones stop working and the Internet goes down, the universal tokens of crisis in any modern disaster movie. Soon the power is out, and our eight bumblers are navigating by candles and glow sticks. What’s happening? One guy makes a worrisome reference to something his brother, a physicist, had warned about. They send a search party to the one house outside that seems to have electricity, but this only complicates matters-perhaps by a factor of two, maybe more on a logarithmic scale (I stopped counting at a certain point). In the realm of low-budget sci-fi, without the expensive crutch of CGI and special effects, your script has to be airtight. Coherence is essentially a chamber piece where, most problematically, the writer let his cast improvise the script. Byrkit gave them an outline, then the ensemble ad-libbed during five nights of shooting. I’m spoiling nothing to say that a giant monster doesn’t arrive a la Cloverfield to settle things by stomping Los Angeles into ruin. But Coherence would be a much better movie if it did. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$7 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film is full-bodied and sneaky-funny, a catalog of his trademark interests yet a totally fresh experience. It’s his best work since Dead Man (1995). Eve (Tilda Swinton) is a denizen of Tangier, where she slouches around the atmospheric streets at night. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) lives in Detroit, where he creates arty rock music and collects guitars. Adam needs Eve, so she joins him for sessions of nocturnal prowling. One does not expect much in the way of plot; and when Eve’s reckless sister (Mia Wasikowska) comes to town, it almost seems like an intrusion. The pace has been so languid and luxurious until then, you might actually resent this suggestion that a story is threatening to break out. Why would vampires need a storyline? They live on without much change or growth, and can’t even look forward to an ending. So Jarmusch’s dilatory style actually suits their world nicely. The timeless vampires seem depressed about what has happened to the world. All one can do is cling to culture and wait out the decline, holding tight to the books and vintage LPs and centuries-old apparel that serve as markers of a better time. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, July 24, 2014

Whitey After a life in crime that began in the ‘50s, Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger went underground in 1995-tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent to avoid arrest-and was basically forgotten until his California discovery in 2011. His arrest and 2013 trial were widely reported (the verdict: guilty). that’s the challenge for documentary director Joe Berlinger, whose greatest successes have come in chronicling unknown stories (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, etc.). Bulger’s case is the opposite. Why should we care about him now? Berlinger’s thesis, which he can’t quite prove, is that Bulger was never previously prosecuted because he was a protected informant for the FBI, owing to the notorious leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. It’s a sensational charge; but, again, he can’t prove it. The sources are mostly dead; the public records aren’t there; and Whitey becomes one of those speculative, comprehensive, well-intentioned dead-ends that would’ve been better served by a fictional treatment-maybe even an opera. Whitey is an admirable and thorough effort by an outsider to comprehend this blight upon clannish Southie, a betrayal by one of its sons. If the film falls short on final answers, it hints at a pervasive, fatalistic Catholicism that-along with some sector of the FBI-enabled Bulger for so long. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Witching and Bitching This is the kind of comedy where a divorced father-covered in gold body paint, lugging a giant cross (with a shotgun inside) while portraying Christ at a street fair-brings his 10-year-old son along for a jewelry store robbery. After a police shootout (kid still in tow), the robbers complain that women expect too much in bed; that men have become essentially disposable, powerless. It’s an old complaint, rooted in the folklore of pre-Christian Europe; and it’s into such a pagan redoubt that our fugitives flee from Madrid. In a Basque village forgotten by time, three women hold sway-a matriarchal coven of witches led by Graciana (Carmen Maura, gleefully displaying all her Almodovarian expertise). Up against supernatural forces, the guys are like Abbott and Costello in a monster movie, or The Three Stooges versus vampires-woefully and hilariously mismatched. Body paint removed, Jose (Hugo Silva) tries to protect his son and fellow robbers, but they don’t stand a chance against these literal maneaters . . . unless, of course, Graciana’s sexy daughter Eva (Carolina Bang) takes a different kind of carnal interest in Jose. Witching and Bitching is the latest romp from Alex de la Iglesia, whose The Last Circus and 800 Bullets previously played during SIFF. Those unfamiliar with his earlier works will find the tone here to be the Brothers Grimm meet John Waters, though Graciana makes a solid argument for overthrowing the patriarchal system known as the Christian church. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, July 24, 2014

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Movies at Magnuson Park This popular series begins with Grease. Gates open at 7 p.m. Movie at dusk. 1978’s most popular film cemented John Travolta’s movie superstardom, and gave Olivia Newton-John her only taste of it. And, make no mistake, Grease-despite the fact that everyone in the cast is obviously old enough to be running the P.T.A.-still looks like the stuff of which legends are made. When the T-Bird gang first calls out “Hey, Zuko!” and the camera zooms in to capture Travolta’s magnificent mug, you know you’re in the presence of a god. Zac Efron? As if. (PG-13) STEVE WIECKING Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98115 $5 Thursday, July 24, 2014, 7 – 8pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Friday, July 25, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Friday, July 25, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, July 25, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Friday, July 25, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, July 25, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Friday, July 25, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Friday, July 25, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, July 25, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, July 25, 2014

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Fremont Outdoor Movies This popular al fresco screening series begins with a free movie, courtesy of Talenti Gelato, which will probably be offering samples. Back in 2001, it wasn’t clear what kind of career Wes Anderson would enjoy after The Royal Tenenbaums; besides gathering what would almost become a repertory company of actors for him, the movie crystalized a number of key themes to recur in his later works. As in Moonrise Kingdom, there’s a longing for the protected cloister of childhood. As in The Grand Budapest Hotel, architecture provides a familiar embrace, a ritual-filled redoubt against the swift-running currents of time. As with Fantastic Mr. Fox, there??s the invigorating thrill of the caper-the illicit act, however small (like catching a ride on a garbage truck), that may not keep you young, but reminds you what it was like to be young. Made when he was only 31, Anderson’s third feature is permeated with the kind of nostalgic detail you’d associate with a man much older. Indeed, the period and place of Tenenbaums-like most of his other movies-are entirely imagined, not something he knew firsthand. You get the feeling Anderson identifies more with the regretful yet rascally old family patriarch (Gene Hackman) than the film’s younger characters (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke and Owen Wilson). I suppose you could call the picture a comedy of disappointment. Other titles on the schedule, running mostly on Saturdays through August 30, include Rushmore, Wet Hot American Summer (presented with Three Dollar Bill Cinema), Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, and that perennial Fremont favorite, The Big Lebowski. Some screenings are 21-and-over events. (R) BRIAN MILLER Fremont Outdoor Cinema, 3501 Phinney Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103 $5 Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 26, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Saturday, July 26, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, July 26, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, July 26, 2014

Movies at the Mural The Saturday-night series features The Princess Bride, Gravity, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Great Gatsby, and Star Trek Into Darkness. Seattle Center, 305 Harrison St., Seattle, WA 98109 free Saturday, July 26, 2014, 9pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 27, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Snowpiercer Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all. That’s because director Bong Joon-ho, making his first English-language film, has gone whole hog in imagining this self-contained universe. The poor folk finally rebel-Captain America’s Chris Evans and Jamie Bell play their leaders-and stalk their way toward the godlike inventor of the supertrain, ensconced all the way up in the front. This heroic progress reveals food sources, a dance party, and some hilarious propaganda videos screened in a classroom. Each train car is a wacky surprise, fully designed and wittily detailed. (Various other characters are played by Ed Harris, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Song Kang-ho, star of Bong’s spirited monster movie The Host.) The progression is a little like passing through the color-coded rooms of The Masque of the Red Death, but peopled by refugees from Orwell. The political allegory would be ham-handed indeed if it were being served up in a more serious context, but the film’s zany pulp approach means Bong can get away with the baldness of the metaphor. Who needs plausibility anyway? (R) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Sunday, July 27, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, July 27, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, July 27, 2014

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Monday, July 28, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Monday, July 28, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 28, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Monday, July 28, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 28, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Monday, July 28, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, July 28, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, July 28, 2014

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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The Magnificent Andersons SIFF continues this unlikely pairing of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Tues.) and Punch-Drunk Love (Weds.) (R)

SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 7 – 8pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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The Magnificent Andersons SIFF continues this unlikely pairing of Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson with The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Tues.) and Punch-Drunk Love (Weds.) (R)

SIFF Film Center, 305 Harrison St. (Seattle Center), Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, July 30, 2014, 7 – 8pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 31, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 31, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Thursday, July 31, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, July 31, 2014

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Movies at Magnuson Park This popular series begins with Grease. Gates open at 7 p.m. Movie at dusk. 1978’s most popular film cemented John Travolta’s movie superstardom, and gave Olivia Newton-John her only taste of it. And, make no mistake, Grease-despite the fact that everyone in the cast is obviously old enough to be running the P.T.A.-still looks like the stuff of which legends are made. When the T-Bird gang first calls out “Hey, Zuko!” and the camera zooms in to capture Travolta’s magnificent mug, you know you’re in the presence of a god. Zac Efron? As if. (PG-13) STEVE WIECKING Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98115 $5 Thursday, July 31, 2014, 7 – 8pm

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Friday, August 1, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Friday, August 1, 2014

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Ida After the calamity of World War II, your family exterminated by the Nazis (or their minions), how important would it be to reclaim your Jewish identity? That’s the question for Anna, 18, who’s soon to take her vows as a Catholic nun in early-’60s Poland. Now early-’60s Poland is not a place you want to be. The Anglo-Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort, My Summer of Love) films his black-and-white drama in the boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio, like some Soviet-era newsreel. Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), she discovers, is a Jew-an orphan delivered to the church as an infant during the war, birth name Ida. Her heretofore unknown aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) insists they find their family homestead, and a desultory road trip ensues. The surly peasants won’t talk to them; Wanda smashes their car; and Anna’s too shy to flirt with a handsome, hitchhiking sax player (Dawid Ogrodnik) who invites them to a gig. The usual Holocaust tales celebrate endurance or escape. Ida suggests something simpler and deeper about survival and European history in general. Pawlikowski and his co-writer, English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, poke at the pit graves and pieties of the Cold War era and find an unlikely sort of strength for their heroine: the courage to turn her back. (Rated PG-13, also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown.) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 1, 2014

Jersey Boys This 2005 Broadway smash is a still-touring musical that revealed a few genuinely colorful tales lurking in the backstory of the falsetto-driven vocal group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Clint Eastwood directs; and though more a jazz man, he appears to have responded to the late-’50s/early-’60s period and the ironies beneath this success story. Turns out the singers emerged from a milieu not far removed from the wiseguy world of GoodFellas. In the case of self-appointed group leader Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza from Boardwalk Empire), the mob connections are deep and troublesome, including the protection of a local godfather (Christopher Walken). The movie presents Frankie Valli (John Lloyd Young, a veteran of the stage show) as a much straighter arrow, but even he understands the value of having friends in the right places. It would seem natural to apply a little Scorsese-like juice to this story, but Eastwood goes the other way: The film exudes a droll humor about all this, as though there really isn’t too much to get excited about. Despite some third-act blandness, Jersey Boys is quite likable overall. Eastwood’s personality comes through in the film’s relaxed portrait of the virtues of hard work and the value of a handshake agreement. This may be the least neurotic musical biopic ever made. (R) ROBERT HORTON Kirkland Parkplace, 404 Park Place, Kirkland, WA, 98033 Price varies Friday, August 1, 2014

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Life Itself For the last 25 years of his life, Roger Ebert was the most famous film critic in America. In his final decade-he died in April 2013-Ebert became famous for something else. He faced death in a public way, with frankness and grit. This new documentary about Ebert focuses perhaps too much on the cancer fight. This is understandable; director Steve James-whose Hoop Dreams Ebert tirelessly championed-had touching access to the critic and his wife Chaz during what turned out to be Ebert’s last weeks. It’s a blunt, stirring portrait of illness. The movie’s no whitewash. The most colorful sections cover Ebert’s young career as a Chicago newspaper writer, which included hard drinking and blowhardiness. Some friends acknowledge that he might not have been all that nice back then, with a nasty streak that peeked out in some of his reviews and in his partnership with TV rival Gene Siskel. Life Itself gives fair time to those who contended that the Siskel and Ebert TV show weakened film criticism. Ebert’s own writing sometimes fills the screen, along with clips of a few of his favorite films, yet this isn’t sufficient to explore Ebert’s movie devotion, which was authentic. Still, this is a fine bio that admirably asks as many questions as it answers. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

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Obvious Child Written and directed by Gillian Robespierre, this movie has already been pegged as the abortion rom-com, which is great for the posters and pull-quotes but isn’t strictly accurate. The movie doesn’t embrace abortion. It doesn’t endorse cheesy love matches between unlikely partners. What it does-winningly, amusingly, credibly-is convey how a young woman right now in Brooklyn might respond to news of an unplanned pregnancy. And this fateful information comes for Donna (SNL’s excellent Jenny Slate) after being dumped by her boyfriend, told that her bookstore day job is about to end, and rejected at her comedy club, where a drunken stand-up set of TMI implodes into self-pity and awkward audience silence. Obvious Child is foremost a comedy, and it treats accidental pregnancy-caused by an earnest, likable Vermont dork in Top Siders, played by Jake Lacy from The Office-as one of life’s organic pratfalls, like cancer, childbirth, or the death of one’s parents. But as we laugh and wince at her heroine’s behavior, Robespierre gets the tone exactly right in Obvious Child. The movie doesn’t “normalize” abortion or diminish the decision to get one. Rather, we see how it doesn’t have to be a life-altering catastrophe, and how from the ruins of a one-night stand a new adult might be formed. (R) BRIAN MILLER Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed (and non-fans perhaps relieved). He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex (though much talking about it), and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex (a weirdly out-of-date volume to be on their shelves). Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break-especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 1, 2014

Tammy Melissa McCarthy has earned her moment, and it is now. After scaring up an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids and dragging The Heat and Identity Thief into the box-office winner’s circle, McCarthy gets to generate her own projects. So here’s Tammy, an unabashed vehicle for her specific strengths: She wrote it with her husband, Ben Falcone, and he directed. Tammy is an unhappy fast-food worker who gets fired the same day she discovers her husband with another woman. This prompts a road trip with her man-hungry, alcoholic grandmother, played with spirit if not much credibility by Susan Sarandon. Grandma hooks up with a swinger (Gary Cole, too little used) whose son (indie stalwart Mark Duplass) is set up as a possible escort for Tammy. This is where the movie gets tricky: We’ve met Tammy as an uncouth, foul-mouthed dope, but now we’re expected to play along as emotional realities are introduced into what had been a zany R-rated comedy. That kind of shift can be executed, but McCarthy and Falcone haven’t figured out the formula yet. (R) ROBERT HORTON Pacific Place, 600 Pine St., Seattle, WA 98101 Price varies Friday, August 1, 2014

The Grand Seduction For all its super-nice intentions, attractive players, and right-thinking messages, this thing might’ve come out of a can. It is, literally, from formula: an English-language remake of the French-Canadian film Seducing Dr. Lewis, seen at SIFF ‘04 and written by Ken Scott. A dying Canadian harbor town will see its only shot at landing a new factory shrivel away unless a full-time doctor settles there. The local fishing industry’s broken, but the movie mostly blames government regulation, not overfishing. By hook and crook, they get a young M.D. (Taylor Kitsch) to take a month’s residency; now every townsperson must connive to convince the guy this is the only place to live. I’m sorry to say that the great Brendan Gleeson is the leader of the Tickle Point conspiracy, supported by Canadian legend Gordon Pinsent (Away From Her) in the Wilford Brimley crusty-curmudgeon role. Kitsch comes off rather well; he looks far more relaxed here than in the blockbuster haze of John Carter and Battleship, perhaps because he isn’t shamelessly twinkling at every turn. The French-language original was just as overbearing. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

Third Person The latest movie from Paul Haggis (Crash) has at its center a novelist (Liam Neeson) hard at work on a new manuscript. He’s holed up in a Paris hotel after a traumatic incident, his mistress (Olivia Wilde) in a nearby room and his wife (Kim Basinger) back home in the States. We also watch a tale set in Rome, where a shady businessman (Adrien Brody) gets ensnared in a human-trafficking scenario involving a single mother (the impressive Moran Atias). And there’s a Manhattan story, in which a hapless hotel maid (Mila Kunis) fights for shared custody of her son with an angry ex (James Franco, listless). The latter story is by far the weakest; it feels necessary only to triangulate the main theme. The Rome tale has some authentic intrigue, and it’s good to see Brody (something of a wanderer since his Oscar for 2002’s The Pianist) given a shot to play to his strengths. There’s some refreshingly grown-up play between Neeson and Wilde, who pull flirtatious pranks on each other as he tries to dodge her questions about her own writing. The story threads take too long to gather, and the concept behind their co-existence is both enigmatic and a little thin for everything we’ve just sat through (it would make a decent short story, though). (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 1, 2014

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Venus in Fur In this adaptation of the 2010 stage play by David Ives, Roman Polanski casts his wife in the main role and makes his leading man look as much like himself as possible. The movie’s basically an extended and often hilarious riff on power plays and erotic gamesmanship, both of which are offered here in ripe-flowering abundance. The conceit is that a stage director, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), is caught at the end of a day of auditions by an obnoxious, gum-chewing actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner). He’s casting the lead in an adaptation of the notorious 19th-century novel Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. By overpowering this diminutive director and flashing her physique, Vanda convinces Thomas to read with her, in an encounter that increasingly muddies the lines between the written material and their own rehearsal process. We watch this push-me/pull-you dance as it moves around the theater, morphing into something very close to a full-on horror movie by the end. What’s especially bracing about the movie is how funny it is-even Alexandre Desplat’s entrance and exit music is amusingly bombastic. The humor comes from the movie’s worldly attitude and the performances. Someone will undoubtedly suggest that Vanda is a misogynistic projection, but the male creators here-novelist, playwright, film director-are instead conspiring to depict how feebly men understand women. Seigner is absolutely in on that plot. (NR) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

Violette French writer Violette Leduc (1907-1972) hit her peak of renown a half-century ago. Until the late success of her raw, unfiltered memoirs (beginning with La Batarde), she was best known-if at all beyond Parisian literary circles-as the protegee of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom Leduc was unhappily in love. Because Leduc’s struggle was so long, the task is not an easy one for director Martin Provost in this admiring biopic. There’s a lot of life material to pack in here, setback after setback, in a picture spanning almost 30 years. His approach is comprehensive and linear, too much so. You can’t fault Devos’ fierce, committed performance as an insecure author who forever rates herself an ugly duckling, provincial and untalented. She plops her first completed manuscript into the startled lap of de Beauvoir (Sandrine Kiberlain), whose slightly aloof poise is rattled by her pupil’s sheer neediness-Sartre never behaves this way! Oh, yeah, that’s another problem with Provost’s approach: the historical footnoting and encyclopedic name-dropping. Violette is thick with the musk of Sartre, Camus, and Jean Genet (only the latter is depicted), plus Leduc’s various patrons and detractors, none of whom we care about. It may be accurate, but it’s way too much. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, August 1, 2014

22 Jump Street Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are back, again looking too old for their class-in this case,  college freshmen. Again filled with self-referential humor, 22JS is aptly timed for college grads wafting through nostalgia. As the film points out on multiple occasions, it’s the same plot as two years ago: Undercover cops Schmidt (Hill) and Jenko (Tatum) are again assigned to infiltrate the dealers and find the supplier. What’s changed from 21JS? This movie does feature more explosions, flashier police department headquarters, and more obvious physical and racial comedy. Hill and Tatum’s onscreen chemistry still works, and it still relies on the wavering hetero/homo overtones to the Schmidt-Jenko relationship. These two often ask whether or not “it should be done a second time,” then decide the second time is never as good. 22JS is not as good as 21JS, and the movie’s self-awareness suggests that the filmmakers knew this. (The team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, of The Lego Movie, directs; Hill oversaw the writers’ room.) This sequel just about having fun, backsliding into old habits, and disparaging the value of liberal arts degrees. (Jobless grads may share the feeling.) Movie franchises by nature stay in a state of arrested development; we wouldn’t expect anything less of Schmidt and Jenko. (R) DIANA M. LE Cinebarre, 6009 244th St. S.W., Mountlake Terrace, WA 98043 $10.50 Saturday, August 2, 2014

Begin Again As with his 2007 hit Once, writer/director John Carney again presents such an optimistic story, with all its dreamers, losers, opportunists-and original score-this time framed in Manhattan instead of Dublin. Keira Knightley is Greta, faithful girlfriend to up-and-coming rocker Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) and an aspiring songwriter herself. (Knightley performs her own songs, which bear some resemblance to Aimee Mann’s.) After Kohl scores a record deal, the pair moves to Manhattan, where he’s quickly seduced by the industry’s trappings. When Greta turns to fellow busker Steve (James Corden), he whisks her out to an open-mike night in the Village, where she’s discovered by down-on-his luck record exec Dan (Mark Ruffalo). Obviously we expect these two to connect, just as in Once. That film worked for me (and many others) because I could buy the central couple played by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (both of them real musicians). Begin Again feels more like something purchased in a SoHo boutique. Greta’s supposed thrift-store chic simply reads as Knightley being expensively styled as Annie Hall. While Carney is again peddling the notion that a musician with a dream can get discovered, the reality of “making it” in the music biz has everything to do with hard work-not simple luck, as is the case here. (R) GWENDOLYN ELLIOTT Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, August 2, 2014

Chef There is nothing wrong with food porn or the happy camaraderie of a restaurant kitchen. Nor can I fault writer/director/star Jon Favreau for making a midlife-crisis movie that lets slip his Hollywood complaints. The commercial pressures in directing formulaic blockbusters like Iron Man must surely be great, and film critics are surely all assholes. Chef is the simple though overlong story of a chef getting his culinary and family mojo back, and my only real criticism-apart from the constant Twitter plugs-is that absolutely nothing stands in the way of that progress for chef Carl (Favreau). Dustin Hoffman barely registers as a villain (as Carl’s gently greedy “play the hits” boss, who goads him into quitting); Robert Downey Jr., as the prior ex of Carl’s ex (Sofia Vergara), briefly shadows the scene-but no, he’s only there to help. And even Oliver Platt, as the churlish food critic who becomes involved in a Twitter war with Carl, turns out to be a decent guy, not an asshole at all. (Wait, what?) So what are the obstacles here? There are none. If you like endless scenes of chopping vegetables, salsa montages, and juicy supporting players (John Leguizamo, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Scarlett Johansson), Chef is an entirely agreeable dish. It even adds a road trip-Miami to L.A.-and a wedding as extra toppings. Just expect no salt. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, August 2, 2014

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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead-but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. The further Cage gets in his progress, the more possible outcomes we see. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah-he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman-he did the first Bourne picture-understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Call for price Saturday, August 2, 2014