PThe Angels’ Share

Opens Fri., May 3 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 101 minutes.

Ken Loach, that old British leftie director, keeps up his commitment to the poor and disenfranchised with The Angels’ Share, his latest collaboration with equally socially conscious screenwriter Paul Laverty. It’s set in the familiar Loach environs of troubled youth, the unemployed, and the eternal underclass—here specifically the slums of Glasgow. But after the political dramas Route Irish and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Loach instead builds an underdog, offbeat comedy on the scruffy camaraderie of some two-time losers. He directs it with warmth and affection.

Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has his past carved into his face like a road map. He’s got a prison record, a history of violence, and a short temper. But now he’s also a young father desperate for a fresh start, even while admitting he’s “stuck in the same old shite”—at least until his community-service supervisor (John Henshaw) introduces him to the venerable Scottish tradition of distilling whisky. Then Robbie discovers he has a nose and a knack for fine spirits.

Loach hits the social commentary hard and fast, forcing Robbie to confront his old thug life, a vengeful culture that refuses to let him go. That soon gives way to a good-natured buddy movie. The “angels’ share” of the title is the distiller’s name for the 2 percent of whisky that evaporates in the casks during the aging process. But you could also call it the film’s tacit approval of a particularly unconventional bit of larceny, as Robbie and his urban cohort don kilts and head to the Highlands to steal a rare, precious barrel of Malt Mill. They’re no angels, but Loach likes these kids, and he makes the whole low-tech caper their due, given the hopeless prospects they face back home.

Loach and Laverty aren’t concerned with the irony of Robbie and company resorting to crime to finance a fresh start. Loach is famed for his uncompromising politics, but here we see his whimsical side, his sympathy for his likable young performers, all first-time actors cast from the harsh streets of Scotland.

Those street accents are heavy, at times impenetrable, but don’t worry. The Angels’ Share arrives stateside with English subtitles, which lets you enjoy the musicality of the banter without missing the meaning. SEAN AXMAKER

PDeceptive Practice: 
The Mysteries and Mentors 
of Ricky Jay

Opens Fri., May 3 at Varsity. 
Not rated. 89 minutes.

Ricky Jay is arguably the greatest master of sleight-of-hand and legerdemain in America today, but he’s more than an old-school magician with contemporary wit. He’s an actor, sure, a familiar presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson, yet he’s also a historian of magic and showbiz oddities, a collector of stories and lore. He’s an author, raconteur, and showman who prefers to work as “a close-up magician,” as he’s called in Molly Bernstein’s admiring documentary. He is a wonder with cards, his tool of choice; and the nonchalance of his presentation makes his mastery all the more riveting.

There’s plenty of footage here of Jay and his cards, from his long-hair days performing on The Tonight Show (at age 20) and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert to his one-man Broadway shows (directed by David Mamet). Still, don’t expect any secrets to be spilled. A magician doesn’t reveal his illusions, and Jay is as guarded with his personal life as he is with his professional secrets. Just like his act, it’s a matter of misdirection: Jay tells captivating stories about the magicians who mentored him and the culture of magic that he loves. He’s such a seductive host and storyteller that we get through his entire career without learning much about who he is.

What we do get is an entertaining and loving roll call of obscure figures like Cardini, Slydini, Al Flosso, and “the greatest sleight-of-hand artists in the world,” Charlie Miller and Dai Vernon. Jay makes you feel as if you’ve been invited into their society, to share in their camaraderie and mentorship. Even if he’s a cipher about his personal history, you learn enough about Jay’s character from the respect and affection he lavishes upon his teachers. SEAN AXMAKER

PEden

Opens Fri., May 3 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Rated R. 98 minutes.

Proposed: One of the basic concerns for a storyteller is what to put in and what to leave out. That sounds really obvious. But it’s a huge deal, and deciding what should go in—as opposed to all the other stuff that might, but shouldn’t—makes the difference between a spellbinding experience and a nap. It matters even more in movies than in literature: Ten pages of dull writing in a 400-page novel can be forgiven, but 10 off-key minutes in a movie will break an audience’s faith.

I thought about this principle while watching Eden, a harrowing film by Seattle director Megan Griffiths. Handled in middling fashion, the subject would have some punch: Eden is based on the true story of Chong Kim, a victim of the U.S. sex-trafficking trade, so horror and suspense are already built into it.

Even with that backbone in place, there are ways to mess this up, but Eden rarely sets a foot wrong. Given the potentially lurid material, Griffiths gives the film a sort of committed austerity—which comes to seem more horrifying for its calm approach.

The film’s protagonist (played with a tempered focus by Jamie Chung) is given the name Eden when forced into sex slavery. Within what appears to be a warehouse in the American Southwest, we witness a system in place, a collection of routines for breaking down the women trapped inside. These include not just physical cruelty but also emotional dependence, which turns out to be the captors’ creepiest strategy.

As grueling as this portrait is, something happens to shift the narrative weight: Eden herself begins to use a system. The movie doesn’t do anything so vulgar as announce this to the audience, so we gradually sense her transition from victim to calculating survivor. Much of the film’s suspense comes from Eden’s fraught relationship with one of her captors, Vaughan (Matt O’Leary)—an increasingly tangled connection inventively played by the actors. (The cast also includes Beau Bridges as a corrupt lawman.) The dead, dry locations—actually eastern Washington—are exactly right as a setting for this elemental drama.

Having worked in a variety of moviemaking jobs before directing her first feature (The Off Hours), Griffiths has already gained something like local-legend status. (She recently finished shooting Lucky Them, a project Paul Newman was working on before he died.) Eden has garnered its share of film-fest buzz, including awards at SIFF last year, and it deserves the attention. A project that might have emerged as either dutiful docudrama or exploitation comes to us on a measured tread that is disturbing and genuinely eerie. (Note: A panel discussion on human trafficking follows the Friday-night screening; Griffiths and others will appear Saturday night for a Q&A.) ROBERT HORTON

No Place on Earth

Opens Fri., May 3 at Harvard Exit. 
Rated PG-13. 81 minutes.

Just as the world is sadly running out of Holocaust survivors, the movies are also running out of new documentary topics on that subject. Directed by Janet Tobias, No Place on Earth is surely bound for The History Channel, where its reenactment scenes may cause fewer noses to wrinkle in disapproval. For me, the practice is wrong—it just feels like false dramatic padding for a story that could be told from archives and interviews in less than an hour. (Or in a National Geographic story, as it previously was.)

In brief, an extended family of some 36 Ukrainian Jews spent over 500 days underground, living in two large, uncomfortable caves, while villagers aboveground were being sent to the camps. Their survival tale is both remarkable and familiar, since survival was the exception, not the rule, during the Holocaust. Narrow escapes, Nazi roundups (“Schnell! Schnell!”), bribes and betrayals, foraging and near starvation—these are the staples of the genre, which No Place on Earth typifies. To otherwise advance the story, diaries and letters are read, newsreels excerpted, and survivors interviewed.

The livelier sections involve spelunker Chris Nicola, a garrulous New Yorker and amateur historian who over a decade connected his subterranean finds with the Stermer family descendents, now living in Canada and the U.S. (This became the 2004 National Geographic story.) When he returns to Ukraine with a few of these octogenarians, grandkids in tow, the party revisits the caves. There they find the grindstone the Stermers used to mill flour—not an ancient artifact, but still part of living history, some 70 years later. BRIAN MILLER

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Opens Fri., May 3 at guild 45th. 
Rated R. 128 minutes.

The 2010 film Four Lions is about a British cell of Islamic fundamentalists plotting to plant homemade explosive devices at—among other targets—the London marathon. It’s an uproarious comedy.

Too soon after the Boston bombings to recall this scathing movie? Maybe, but it shouldn’t be—Chris Morris’ prediction of stupid, self-styled jihadists looks even keener and more furious than it did three years ago.

In Four Lions, Oxford-educated actor and hip-hop artist Riz Ahmed played the leader of the hapless terrorists. That movie’s a better vehicle for the wunderkind artist Ahmed than this tepid new effort from director Mira Nair, which passes glumly over distantly related turf.

Ahmed, a quick, compact performer, is the main draw here. He plays Changez, a charismatic professor in Lahore, who recounts his story to a U.S. journalist (Liev Schreiber). While the two sweat out a crisis involving a kidnapped Western academic, Changez’s past life unfolds in big blocks of flashback.

Having come to America at 18, Changez goes through mostly expected ups and downs: upper-class girlfriend (Kate Hudson, dark-wigged for the serious material), brilliant success at Manhattan financial firm specializing in cannibalizing small companies, mentorship from tough-but-supportive boss (Kiefer Sutherland).

And September 11. You probably figured that was coming. Changez absorbs anti-Muslim anger and lets his beard grow out, eventually returning to Pakistan. If this tale has a shot at succeeding, it probably needs a better frame than the present-day kidnapping story, which feels like a tricked-up stab at suspense.

Nair is a talented image-maker, and the grainy widescreen cinematography (by Declan Quinn) is convincing. But except for the occasional zinger from Sutherland’s Wall Street shark, the clunky dialogue sets forth one issue after another, betraying a seriously tin ear for the way people actually speak. There was a time when Nair could be socially conscious in her films while creating a real flow (Salaam Bombay and Mississippi Masala), but that hasn’t been true in a while.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is adapted from Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, and in almost every way it feels like a wrongheaded attempt to juice up a book. In this case, Ahmed is the real juice, and the movie around him operates on a noticeably dimmer wattage. ROBERT HORTON

Renoir

Opens Fri., May 3 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Rated R. 111 Minutes.

Pretty pictures in a movie are sometimes dismissed as eye candy, the implication being that empty calories are no substitute for the sound nutrition of noble stories and thematic depth. That may be, although it would be difficult to deny the chocolate-box allure of Renoir, a lushly photographed gloss on a real-life moment in an artistic family.

The title identifies the family; the moment is 1915. As war rages on the other side of France, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), by now elderly and arthritic, paints at his sun-dappled estate on the Cote d’Azur. He employs a new model, Andree (Christa Theret), a willful redhead who suits Renoir’s vision of glowing flesh and interior mystery.

Actually we have to take the mystery on faith, because Theret doesn’t suggest much beyond a handsome surface. Andree also falls under the gaze of Renoir’s middle son, during his return home to convalesce from a war injury; a quiet rivalry for her attention emerges between the already-awkward father and son.

The young soldier will one day be Jean Renoir, the director of Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game and a giant of world cinema. The filmmaker that we know from his later life—large, bearish, warm—doesn’t resemble actor Vincent Rottiers, although Rottiers does well at suggesting a certain impatience with the privileged world around him. For her part, Andree will later become Catherine Hessling, Jean Renoir’s wife and an actress he tried to make, without much success, into a silent-movie star. But that’s years after our perspective in Renoir, which prefers to wallow in a great deal of late-afternoon sunshine and lush trees whispering in the Mediterranean wind.

This, to return to the eye candy, is not a terrible place to wallow. Director Gilles Bourdos does his best to conjure up a warm Impressionist’s summer, and he wisely hired cinematographer Mark Ping Bing Lee (In the Mood for Love, Flowers of Shanghai) to catch both the suppleness of magic-hour light and the hardness of the painter’s ravaged hands.

Bourdos hints at the brotherly feeling between the Renoir boys and the possibly feminist glimmerings within the defiant Andree, but nothing goes deep enough to draw blood—except perhaps Bouquet’s finely focused performance, a strong, flinty turn from an actor who began his film career in 1947. Renoir is a failure in many ways. But there are lots of reasons to see movies, and spending a couple of languid, summery hours on the Renoir estate is not an entirely contemptible one, even if the drama falls well shy of its subject. ROBERT HORTON

Simon Killer

Runs Fri., May 3–Thurs., May 9 
at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not Rated. 105 Minutes.

There are interesting movie sociopaths, and there are the ones whose misbehavior is just plain dull. I’m not talking about serial killers who paint the walls with blood. If you’re going to make a film about a petty grifter, he’d better have some charisma, because we go to the movies to get fooled along with his victims. Our being duped is part of the transaction.

In his second film (after the little-seen Afterschool), Antonio Campos introduces us to Simon (Brady Corbet) in a long-take dialogue scene that appears to be in his shrink’s office. But no, Simon is borrowing a Paris apartment from a friend of his mom’s. (She’ll later appear, worried, via Skype.) Simon seems like a smart but aimless young dude just out of college, where he claims to have studied neuroscience. But wires have been crossed in his own brain: Simon is stuck on his ex, Michelle, and we hear his constant e-mails in voiceover—both pleading and unsettling.

Soon Simon hooks up with a prostitute (Mati Diop), and the sex scenes between them require some fairly brave, raw performances. In the movie’s most implausible turn, Victoria takes a liking to Simon, and they become a couple. He comes to depend on her completely, though Campos will later complicate that dependency. Simon is nothing if not methodical, and possibly mad. Simon Killer is all about the slow, psychological reveal, and Campos has an admirable command of mood and careful compositions. Between scenes, the Paris skyline dissolves into a red miasma—like dyed cancer cells being examined under a microscope. Simon is a malign specimen, too, but not one worth this slow character study. He’s no Ripley, and the film never feels like more than a low-stakes con. BRIAN MILLER

PThe Source Family

Opens Fri., May 3 at SIFF Film Center. 
Not Rated. 98 Minutes.

We know how this story is supposed to end, and yet we’re wrong about that. The Source Family was an early-’70s cult that followed its charismatic leader from L.A. to Hawaii, where death and diaspora followed. Yet The Source Family turns out to be an oddly affirmative and sympathetic portrait of the disciples, if not the guru, during an era when many were casting about for alternative forms of spirituality. (Maria Demopoulos and Jodi Willie directed the film.) Based on an insider’s prior written account, the doc benefits from fantastically evocative period stills, home movies, and audio recordings of Yod (aka Yahowa, aka Jim Baker), a World War II hero and restaurant entrepreneur. His health-food eatery The Source, which featured the hottest waitresses on the Sunset Strip (cult members all), catered to celebrities and inspired jokes in Annie Hall and on Saturday Night Live. Yod was himself a celebrity: tall, handsome, copiously bearded, Jesus-looking, dressed in white flowing robes. He also took 14 wives from among his gorgeous young flock—but it was the ’70s, right? Rock stars will have their due.

Yod was no Charles Manson or Jim Jones, yet those associations have dogged him—and his acolytes—in life and legacy. Those gray-haired seekers now share mixed recollections of Father Yod. “I know this sounds insane,” says one. “It was truly utopia,” says another. “We thought he was God,” another chimes in. “All these fantastic orgies? No, it wasn’t that at all,” insists another. (Their cult names are too silly to type out, so I won’t.)

You have to place the Source Family in its Nixon/Vietnam-era context. Health food and yoga were exciting and new. “Sex magic” seemed like a good idea at the time. Yod was unquestionably a dirty old man, a power-mad user, but his 140-odd followers remained loyal. He never killed anyone. There was no violence. Warren Beatty, Goldie Hawn, and Steve McQueen ate in his restaurant. And Yod’s worshippers faithfully documented him right up to his Icarus-like demise. Their archives—and the film’s soundtrack—include psychedelic musical improv sessions now lauded by Devendra Banhart, Rick Rubin, and Billy Corgan. Neo-hippie revivalism is today a marketable trend, but Yod’s old disciples maintain a stubborn dignity outside of fashion and time.

How many today eat organic and do yoga? How many live off the grid? The Source Family followers are both ridiculous and timely. “I don’t regret any of it,” says one. “Would I do it again? No way.” BRIAN MILLER

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