Local & Repertory
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Actress It doesn’t really matter if you remember Brandy Burre from The Wire or not; nor is it worth looking up her scant credits on IMDb. This recursive documentary about her increasingly discontented life as a mother and housewife in the Hudson River Valley, meanwhile trying to resume her old trade, provides a definitive role. Burre—surely with some sort of publicity agenda in mind—agrees to let director Robert Greene trail her through what proves an eventful period in her life. With two small children and a mostly silent boyfriend, Burre faces a familiar female dilemma. Her youthful identity is being smothered by domestic life. The next two decades are set for her in sleepy, snowy Beacon—unless she can somehow revive her career. Burre remains unknowable—to Greene, to us, and to her increasingly baffled, stoic boyfriend. Actress raises but refuses to answer some unsettling questions. How strong is your marriage? And: How well do you know your spouse? (NR) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Film Center (Seattle Center), 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 7 p.m. Mon.
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Children’s Film Festival Seattle This annual festival offers a lot more than movies. Music, dance, filmmaking workshops, a pancake breakfast, and other kiddie activities are also on the schedule. Several packages of animated and live-action shorts are presented in themed screenings throughout the fest. Visiting filmmakers will attend selected screenings. (NR)
Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, childrensfilmfestivalseattle.nwfilmforum.org. $6-$8. Ends Feb. 7.
Enter The Dangerous Mind An EDM musician may or may not be schizophrenic in this new indie thriller by Youssef Delara and Victor Teran. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. 9 p.m. Fri.-Sat.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night This debut feature by Ana Lily Amirpour is a very studied mood piece, dryly humorous and more inclined toward the arthouse than the drive-in. There will be blood—and it will be sucked—but Amirpour has more on her mind than horror in this black-and-white, Farsi-language vampire movie. Sheila Vand plays our unnamed heroine, a young woman who walks (and yes, sometimes skateboards) down the streets of Bad City at night. Clad in her chador, drenched in the movie’s black-and-white gloom, she has a great vampire vibe. Her soulmate also moves through the nocturnal city: Arash (Arash Marandi), whose vintage T-bird has been claimed by a local gangster—yet even without wheels, he’s still cool. When he dresses as Count Dracula for a costume party and runs into the vampire there, their union is written in blood. Amirpour, an experienced hand at short films, is content to let the movie float along on its gorgeous monochrome look and punk attitude. (NR) ROBERT HORTON SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Sat.
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My Last Year With the Nuns This adaptation of Matt Smith’s 1997 stage monologue has three irresistible selling points if you’re a) Catholic, b) were raised on East Capitol Hill during the 1960s, and c) have an aversion to warm and easy nostalgia. Directed by Bret Fetzer (who also staged the original monologue), Nuns doesn’t cover a lot of ground, but it also doesn’t need to. It’s a condensed, somewhat fictionalized account of what it meant to be a teenage troublemaker during 1966–67, when Smith and his buddies were in the eighth grade at St. Joseph’s. Smith is unsparing—and often hilarious—about his clannish, insular, and bigoted parish, populated by large families whose kids were just beginning to sense the liberal breeze of the late ’60s. The anecdotes and adventures Smith relates aren’t terribly novel (stealing from the collection plate, etc.); but again, they don’t need to be. Their snotty, profane details transport us back to our city’s preliberal roots. Seattle is then seen through the parochial perspective of a lad Smith calls “a 13-year-old white Catholic boy who is cluelessly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, and is only now just barely beginning to confront the horror of his thinking.” (NR) B.R.M. Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 3 p.m. Sun., 7 p.m. Mon.-Tues.
Saturday Secret Matinee Hosted by The Sprocket Society, this Saturday matinee series (through March 28) features the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, preceded by various vintage cartoons and shorts. Total program length is about two hours. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 1 p.m. Sat.
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Secretary Based on a 1989 short story by Mary Gaitskill, Secretary’s oddly affirmative tale is one of private pathology turned to self-discovery. Instead of therapy (she’s fresh from the nut house), Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) finds a healthier, if still unconventional, outlet for her masochistic tendencies while being bound, spanked, and dominated by her anal-retentive attorney boss (James Spader). Proofreading has never been so sexually charged. In a movie about erotic and emotional displacement, each of Lee’s typos invites stern correction. The 2002 Secretary treats the S&M stuff for laughs, not titillation, yet the two excellent lead performers never wink at the audience or belittle their characters. (Also note that a very different sort of romance, Sleepless in Seattle, is also playing the theater this week; see website for schedule.) (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Tues.
Ongoing
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Birdman A movie star in a career skid since he stopped playing a masked superhero named Birdman back in the ’90s, Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) is preparing his big comeback in a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver stories, funded and directed by himself. Obstacles abound: Riggan’s co-star (Andrea Riseborough) announces she’s pregnant with his child; his grown daughter (Emma Stone) is his assistant, and not his biggest fan; a critic plans to destroy the play. And, in the movie’s funniest headache, Riggan must endure a popular but insufferable stage actor (Edward Norton, doing a wonderful self-parody) who’s involved with the play’s other actress (Naomi Watts). This is all going on while Riggan maintains a tenuous hold on his own sanity—he hears Birdman’s voice in his head, for one thing. To create Riggan’s world, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki present the film as a continuous unbroken shot (disguised with artful digital seams). The result is truly fun to watch. (R) R.H. Sundance, Pacific Place, Big Picture, Kirkland, Majestic Bay, others
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Inherent Vice Why Thomas Pynchon would go back to 1970 with his late (2009) hippie detective spoof is obvious: nostalgia, command of period color, and unfinished business as one optimistic decade curdles into another—trying to locate Where It All Went Wrong. But what mysteries are there for Paul Thomas Anderson to plumb? Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is a mutton-chopped gumshoe operating near the L.A. beach, salt air and cannabis fumes constantly in his lungs, vaguely pursuing a missing-person case. His “old lady” Shasta (Katherine Waterston) turned him onto the case, which sends him stumbling through a gallery of SoCal eccentrics. (These include Martin Short, Owen Wilson, and Benicio Del Toro.) Don’t expect any mysteries to be solved here; Doc is a P.I. who collects very little hard evidence, yet he persists, unperturbed by the absence of such facts. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Meridian, others
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Two Days, One Night Sandra (Marion Cotillard) has been on medical leave from her workplace, owing to depression. She has a low-level job in a manufacturing plant in Belgium. She’s ready to go back to work, but management has decided to cut her position. According to labor laws, her 16 fellow employees can vote to keep her on the job—but the boss has offered them each a 1,000-euro bonus if they agree to lay off Sandra. She has a weekend to plead her case to each co-worker. Every few minutes we are reminded of the cruelty of being put in this position, and the humiliation of having to repeat her argument. Throughout, the deglammed Cotillard is more than up to the task of convincing us of Sandra’s modest place in the world. The very human stories of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have always had a political purpose, and this superb film’s portrait of the power of manipulation and greed is one of their clearest. (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown
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Whiplash Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is an unbridled asshole for art’s sake, a petty Stalin figure inside the Juilliard-like music academy that greets the innocent Andrew (Miles Teller). Andrew has fled Long Island and his kindly, weak mensch of a father (Paul Reiser) to be the best drummer in the best studio band at the best school in the country. That means pleasing the imperious, bullying Fletcher, a man who seems endlessly displeased with the world’s lax standards. (The Oscar-worthy Simmons, who originated this role in writer/director Damien Chazelle’s prior short, doesn’t oversell the villainy or froth at the mouth.) How Andrew responds to such abuse—quite calculated, as we shall learn—is the heart of this thrillingly propulsive drama, an intense, brutal, and often comical tale of mentorship gone amok. Chazelle, a genuine new talent, has compared his Sundance prizewinner to a war movie or a gangster picture; yet it’s a battle where the two antagonists share the same musical goals. (R) B.R.M. Ark Lodge
