Film

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Friday, August 29, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 29, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, August 29, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Friday, August 29, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Friday, August 29, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Friday, August 29, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Friday, August 29, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Friday, August 29, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 29, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, August 29, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Friday, August 29, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Friday, August 29, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 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, August 30, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Saturday, August 30, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, August 30, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, August 30, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Saturday, August 30, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Saturday, August 30, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, August 30, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, August 30, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Saturday, August 30, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, August 30, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, August 30, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Saturday, August 30, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Saturday, August 30, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Sunday, August 31, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, August 31, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, August 31, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Sunday, August 31, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Sunday, August 31, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, August 31, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, August 31, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Sunday, August 31, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, August 31, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, August 31, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Sunday, August 31, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Sunday, August 31, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Monday, September 1, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 1, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 1, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Monday, September 1, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Monday, September 1, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, September 1, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, September 1, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Monday, September 1, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 1, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 1, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Monday, September 1, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Monday, September 1, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Tuesday, September 2, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Tuesday, September 2, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Tuesday, September 2, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 2, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Tuesday, September 2, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Tuesday, September 2, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Wednesday, September 3, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Wednesday, September 3, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Wednesday, September 3, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 3, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Wednesday, September 3, 2014

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E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I cried three times while revisiting Steven Spielberg’s gorgeous, influential 1982 fairy tale, which memorably stars Henry Thomas as the boy who finds and shelters E.T. and Drew Barrymore as his saucer-eyed younger sister. Hell, I choked up not only at the flying bike stuff, but at the goddamn opening title card, which was raucously applauded. Some questionable p.c. revisionism in the recent digital restoration: Although “penis breath” still makes the cut, Elliott’s brother is no longer chastised for dressing up as a “terrorist” for Halloween-but as a “hippie” instead. Recent CGI tweaks cast E.T. in Phantom Menace unreality, yet augment a welcome, restored bathtub sequence. Three decades later, the movie’s not just a classic of the ‘80s but of childhood in the generations since. (PG) ANDREW BONAZELLI Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$8 Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 7 – 8pm

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A Five Star Life Irene (Margherita Buy) travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. People keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way. With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But writer-director Maria SoleTognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen-but why? (NR) ROBERT HORTON Seven Gables, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Alive Inside Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett tags along with Dan Cohen, a music-therapy proselytizer (and founder of the nonprofit Music & Memory), as Cohen travels to facilities for people living with dementia. Cohen’s method is frequently repeated here, but never wears out its welcome. He approaches people whose memory loss has put them in a dulled or lethargic state and invites them to listen to music from an iPod shuffle. When a song begins, the change is almost immediate: Eyes light up, limbs begin twisting, and stories pour out. If it isn’t a definitive argument in favor of using music as a therapeutic tool, it’s certainly dramatic. The film then goes on to lobby in favor of getting such therapies into hospitals and retirement communities, painting a dire portrait of a pharmaceutical-industrial complex that delights in ringing up thousands of dollars of drugs for patients every month but balks at a $40 iPod. Serious establishment voices are not much heard here, but then this isn’t really a documentary-it’s a work of activism, and a beautiful one. If Alive Inside helps change the culture of treatment for the cognitively impaired, that would be a very good thing. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

Expedition to the End of the World The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc head north to be the coast of Greenland. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive. In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters-perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle, WA 98122 $6-$11 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Finding Fela Though he outlived Bob Marley, Fela Kuti never managed to connect with Western ears in the same way. His tunes were too long for our Top 40 charts, and Nigerian politics were too distant and complicated when compared to simple sing-along Caribbean liberation anthems. For that reason, mounting a 2009 Broadway musical about his eventful yet eccentric life (1938-1997) proved a challenge for Bill T. Jones and his collaborators, as we see in Alex Gibney’s comprehensive documentary about the show-which toured through Seattle last year-and its inspiration. Fela himself is most vivid in old performance clips, especially in his sinuous, jumpsuited glory during a 1978 gig at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He’s more elusive in old interviews from the archives, leaving his children (including musician Femi Kuti), manager, former bandmates, and journalists to assess his life and legacy. His Afro-fusion aesthetic is fascinating; and we see how from the early ‘60s forward he absorbed and distilled Miles Davis, the highlife music of Ghana, James Brown, Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, and even perhaps a trace of reggae into his great band Africa ‘70. No less a polymath than Questlove from the Roots here offers his tribute to Fela, who was born into privilege yet endlessly battled the petro-military-oligarchy that often jailed him (and notoriously killed his mother). One of his takeaway quotes in Finding Fela might as well be his epitaph: “Music cannot be for enjoyment. Music has to be for revolution.” In truth, his music realized both. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Frank Michael Fassbender spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his his band, the Soronprfbs, who may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent. This is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn-or at least guess at-his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara-a kind of muse and ninja.) English journalist Jon Ronson really did play in a band led by a guy like  Frank. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character-or can’t, really, given the mask. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Thursday, September 4, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 4, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, September 4, 2014

Moebius Kim Ki-duk’s latest opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and-just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread-more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced (though given no dialogue to speak). (NR) ROBERT HORTON Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St, Seattle, WA 98105 $5-$9 Thursday, September 4, 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 Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 $6-$11 Thursday, September 4, 2014

Song of the New Earth Maybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars-drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie. Though a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. (NR) GAVIN BORCHERT SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Congress Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer-but no porn!-now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. The movie’s directed by Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir), and it’s rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. Twenty years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert, then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge-entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, September 4, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Thursday, September 4, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 4, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 4, 2014

To Be Takei George Takei has become America’s favorite gay uncle. Closeted during his Star Trek days, now enthusiastically, emphatically out, he’s a terrific subject for Jennifer Kroot’s admiring new documentary. The only problem for them both? Takei has told his story so much since 2005, maybe too often, on Howard Stern and sundry TV talk shows. There isn’t much new to learn here, since Takei has been so effective in selling his brand and commenting on the culture via Twitter. Such irony: After decades of coy silence about his personal affairs, Takei’s late-life outspokenness has left him with little new to say. With his dyed hair and determined affability, he’s the kind of professional ham whose spiel is expertly timed to last through the dinner course on the lecture circuit. And yet still we applaud, maybe a little teary, just when dessert arrives. How sweet it is to see a life thus validated. (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109 $6-$11 Thursday, September 4, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, September 5, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, September 5, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Friday, September 5, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, September 5, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, September 5, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, September 5, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, September 5, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Friday, September 5, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, September 5, 2014

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The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, September 5, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Saturday, September 6, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, September 6, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, September 6, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Saturday, September 6, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, September 6, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, September 6, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Sunday, September 7, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, September 7, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Sunday, September 7, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, September 7, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, September 7, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 8, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, September 8, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Monday, September 8, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 8, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 8, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 8, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 8, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Monday, September 8, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 8, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 8, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 9, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, September 9, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Tuesday, September 9, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 9, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 9, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Tuesday, September 9, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 10, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Wednesday, September 10, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Wednesday, September 10, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Wednesday, September 10, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Wednesday, September 10, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 10, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Wednesday, September 10, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 11, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Thursday, September 11, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Thursday, September 11, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Thursday, September 11, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, September 11, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 11, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Thursday, September 11, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 11, 2014

• 

The Trip to Italy Director Michael Winterbottom reunites with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon for another eating-kvetching tour, this time ranging from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one. Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. (Not Rated. Also plays at SIFF Cinema Uptown) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Thursday, September 11, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, September 12, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Friday, September 12, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Friday, September 12, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Friday, September 12, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, September 12, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, September 12, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Friday, September 12, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Friday, September 12, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Friday, September 12, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, September 13, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Saturday, September 13, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Saturday, September 13, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Saturday, September 13, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, September 13, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, September 13, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Saturday, September 13, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Saturday, September 13, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Saturday, September 13, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, September 14, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Sunday, September 14, 2014

• 

Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Sunday, September 14, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Sunday, September 14, 2014

• 

Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, September 14, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, September 14, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Sunday, September 14, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Sunday, September 14, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Sunday, September 14, 2014

• 

Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 15, 2014

• 

Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Monday, September 15, 2014

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Guardians of the Galaxy Give thanks to the Marvel gods for Guardians of the Galaxy. If you’ve ever had to suppress a giggle at the sight of Thor’s mighty hammer, this movie will provide a refreshing palate-cleanser. First, understand that the Guardians of the Galaxy tag is something of a joke here; this is a painfully fallible batch of outer-space quasi-heroes. Their leader is an Earthling, Peter Quill (Lake Stevens native Chris Pratt, from Parks and Recreation, an inspired choice), who calls himself “Star-Lord” even though nobody else does. In order to retrieve a powerful matter-dissolving gizmo, he has to align himself with a selection of Marvel Comics castoffs, who will-in their own zany way-end up guarding the galaxy. (His costars, some voicing CGI creatures, are Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, and the pro wrestler Dave Bautista.) Director James Gunn (Super) understands that getting character right-and keeping the story’s goals simple-can create a momentum machine, the kind of movie in which one scene keeps tipping giddily over into the next. Guardians isn’t exactly great, but it comes as close as this kind of thing can to creating explosive moments of delight. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Majestic Bay, 2044 N.W. Market St., Seattle, WA 98107 Price varies Monday, September 15, 2014

If I Stay Based on a popular 2009 YA novel by Gayle Forman, this film largely unfolds in the flashbacks that follow a terrible car accident. All the members of a family have been seriously injured, and our narrator, Mia (Chloe Grace Moretz), is in a coma. She’s also walking around the hospital as a sort of astral projection, looking down at her unconscious self and listening to everybody else talking about her. Mia’s a promising cellist, with a shot at attending Juilliard after she graduates from her Portland high school. The only problem is that that would take her away from her boyfriend Adam (Jamie Blackley). The movie puts a great deal of dramatic weight on this Juilliard decision, perhaps because somebody realized that despite the gravity of the car accident hanging over everything, the script doesn’t actually have much in the way of suspense for the flashbacks. Director R.J. Cutler gets a few pleasantly quirky line readings out of his cast, although there’s not much Moretz (the ineffable Hit-Girl from the Kick-Ass movies) or Blackley can do with their plywood roles. If I Stay is blunt about mortality when it comes to the accident’s toll. That makes it a tough spin as a summer movie. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Varsity Theatre, 4329 University Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Monday, September 15, 2014

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Land Ho! Dr. Mitch is well into his 60s, adult kids gone, divorced, eating dinner alone when we meet him. He won’t admit it, of course, especially to his somber visitor Colin, his former brother-in-law, who carries the weight of post-midlife more heavily. Colin initially seems the guy in need of cheering up, which the earthy, garrulous Mitch makes his mission by taking the two of them to Iceland. Land Ho! is a buddy movie and a road-trip picaresque with an unusual pedigree. It was directed and written (with a healthy dollop of improv) by indie filmmakers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens; the latter cast her loud, colorful cousin, Earl Lynn Nelson (a non-actor), as Mitch; and the Bellevue-based Australian Paul Eenhoorn actor plays his quiet foil. These old goats are in need of an adventure-through the discos and fashionable restaurants of Reykjavik; out to the remote hot springs and black-sand beaches-and they’re fully aware it could be their last adventure. (“Life is too short to sit still,” says Mitch, who gradually reveals his own problems and need for companionship.) What Nelson and Eenhoorn have is genuine Hope and Crosby-style chemistry, which makes the film so charming. And though Colin quietly protests the overbearing Mitch, we see-thanks to Eenhoorn’s expert performance-how he’s secretly pleased by the attention and reanimated by Mitch’s vulgar vigor. (R) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 15, 2014

Lucy Insofar as playing transcendent thinking/killing machines, Scarlett Johansson is definitely on a roll. Last year she was the omniscient OS Samantha in Her. This spring she was the alien huntress in Under the Skin. Now, in Luc Besson’s enjoyably silly sci-fi shoot-em-up, she’s a young woman whose brain achieves 100 percent of potential, owing to a forced drug-mule errand gone wrong. The bogus conceit that humans only use 10 percent of our cerebellum takes way too long for Besson to advance, with Morgan Freeman’s tedious scientist and nature documentary footage used to amplify his dubious theory. No matter: Lucy is soon learning Mandarin, electrical engineering, mad handgun skills, and Formula One-level driving on the fly. (Telekinesis soon follows, of course.) Her goal, which takes her from Taiwan to Paris, is to track down the other couriers with bags of IQ-growth hormone sewn in their guts and mainline those purple crystals-all for the good of humanity, which she hopes to enlighten before her apotheosis. (Pursuing her is the vengeful drug lord Jang, played by Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, who wants his stash back.) Beneath the gunfire and philosophical malarky, there is-as in Besson’s best action efforts-a sound sentimental foundation to Lucy. This slacker turned godhead-assassin interrupts her mission to call her mom. “I feel everything. I remember everything,” she says tearfully, describing memories back to infancy. For anyone who’s ever forgotten where they put the car keys, Lucy makes 11 percent seem awfully tempting. (R) BRIAN MILLER Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 15, 2014

Magic in the Moonlight Set during the interwar period in the South of France, Magic in the Moonlight isn’t Woody Allen’s worst picture (my vote: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion), but it’s close. Colin Firth plays a cynical magician, who keeps repeating Allen’s dull ideas over and over and fucking over again. Emma Stone, in her first career misstep (Allen’s fault, not hers), plays a shyster mentalist seeking to dupe a rich family out of its fortune (chiefly by marrying its gullible, ukulele-playing son, Hamish Linklater). The recreations of this posh ‘20s milieu seem curiously literal, like magazine spreads, so soon after seeing Wes Anderson’s smartly inflected period detail in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which both revered and ridiculed the past. Magic feels like Allen’s re-rendering of a thin prewar British stage comedy he saw at a matinee during his youth, now peppered with references to Nietzsche and atheism. It’s dated, then updated, which only seems to date it the more. Period aside, no one wants to see Firth, 53, and Stone, 25, as a couple. The math doesn’t work. It’s icky. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Guild 45th, 2115 N. 45th St., Seattle, WA, 98103 $10.50 Monday, September 15, 2014

The Hundred-Foot Journey In the South of France, the zaniness begins when the Kadam family, newly arrived in France from India, fetch up with car trouble in a small town. Restaurateurs by trade, they seize the opportunity to open an Indian place-in a spot across the street from a celebrated bastion of French haute cuisine, Le Saule Pleureur. This Michelin-starred legend is run by frosty Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren), whose demeanor is the direct opposite of the earthy Kadam patriarch (Om Puri, a crafty old pro). It’s culinary and cultural war, but will the cooking genius of Papa’s 20-something son Hassan (Manish Dayal) be denied? Madame Mallory can recognize a chef’s innate talent by asking a prospect to cook an omelet in her presence. You can already hear the eggs breaking in Hassan’s future-the movie’s like that. Daval is a good-looking and likable leading man, so it’s too bad he’s given an unpersuasive love story with Madame Mallory’s sous-chef, Marguerite-Charlotte Le Bon, a pretty actress who doesn’t look convinced by the love story, either; her facial expression perpetually conveys the silent question, “Are you sure this is in the script?” Mirren hits her marks, and the food is of course drooled over. Director Lasse Hallstrom (Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, etc.) knows how to keep things tidy, and Journey is pleasant product, even if it seems as premeditated as a Marvel Comics blockbuster. (PG) ROBERT HORTON Ark Lodge, 4816 Rainier Ave. S., Seattle, WA 98118 Price varies Monday, September 15, 2014

The November Man Sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder). The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. This film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute-it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 Price varies Monday, September 15, 2014

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Boyhood Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was shot in the director’s native Texas in short bursts over a 12-year period-Linklater knew the shape of the film, but would tweak its script as time marched on, incorporating topical issues and reacting to his performers. This means that unlike most movies, which remake the world and impose an order on it, Boyhood reacts to the world. Protagonist Mason (Ellar Coltrane), tracked from first grade to high-school graduation, is learning that life does not fit into the pleasing rise and fall of a three-act structure, but is doled out in unpredictable fits and starts. Linklater doesn’t reject melodrama so much as politely declines it, opting instead for little grace notes and revealing encounters. Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are terrific as the parents, and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei is distinctive as Mason’s older sister. Other folks come and go, like people do. As we reach the final stages, there’s definitely a sense of rounding off the story, and a few appropriate nods toward lessons learned-the movie’s not as shapeless as it might seem. Let’s also appreciate how Linklater calls for us to reimagine how we might treat movies and childhood: less judgment, less organization, more daydreaming. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance Cinemas, 4500 Ninth Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105 $10.50 Tuesday, September 16, 2014

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Calvary This is a bumpy, uneven picture full of colorful digressions-is that simply to say it’s Irish?-and narrative dead-ends. Its writer and director is John Michael McDonagh, whose The Guard was no less unwieldy (though more comical). But both pictures are given ballast, and a deep keel beyond that, by the greatness of Brendan Gleeson. Gleeson’s cleric, Father James, tends a small ungrateful flock on the windswept west coast of Ireland. Catholicism is fading fast, even in Ireland, and the widening pedophilia scandal has made the church a damaged brand. Father James is a newcomer in a village now venting what seems to be centuries of resentment against the old ecclesiastical control. That anger is expressed in the film’s very first scene, set in a confessional, where Father James is told he’ll be killed in a week, to be sacrificed for the sins of his church. Calvary is equally a thriller about a man investigating his own murder and a consideration of what it means for a nation to lose its collective, unifying faith. Father James’ seven-day search leads him through an array of sinners, skeptics, wife-beaters, adulterers, suicide contemplators, and such. They’re a colorful lot, not entirely plausible as people-more like movie archetypes or illustrative characters in Pilgrim’s Progress. Still, this is Gleeson’s show, and he’s what makes Calvary worthwhile. (R) BRIAN MILLER Harvard Exit, 807 E. Roy St., Seattle, WA 98102 $10.50 Tuesday, September 16, 2014