Local & Repertory
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The Atomic Cafe Discussion follows the screening of this very influential 1982 doc, which uses old government A-bomb footage and educational films to create an effect both humorous and deeply discomfiting. (NR)
Keystone Church, 5019 Keystone Pl. N., 632-6021, meaningfulmovies.org. Free. 7 p.m. Fri.
Better Off Dead John Cusack stars as a lovelorn suicidal teen in this 1985 comedy. But, since he doesn’t succeed in offing himself, he instead opts to ski his way into the heart of a French exchange student. (PG)
Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684. $7-$9. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. & 3 p.m. Sat.-Sun.
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Cinema Italian Style The 1962 Italian road comedy Il Sorpasso was a huge hit at home but virtually unseen here. Why? It came out during the art-house epoch of Fellini and Antonioni, whose L’Eclisse gets a succinct critique from Bruno (Vittorio Gassman): “I couldn’t keep my eyes open!” Speeding into the picture in his Lancia convertible (equipped with a record player!), Bruno is open to everything in life. He flirts with every woman in sight; he drives like a maniac; he makes shady business deals on the fly; and he spontaneously befriends shy young law student Roberto (Jean-Louis Trintignant), dragging him along on a weekend road trip. Their picaresque circuit leads north from Rome, shuttered during August vacation, to various beach towns, restaurants, and clubs. Along the way we hear self-conscious Roberto’s interior monologues; he frets that he’s “too uptight,” the type who always looks before leaping. Meanwhile, Gassman reveals Bruno to be a man of depth and soul, not just some rogue. Dino Risi’s film is far slyer than its odd-couple construct. Nothing is wasted on Bruno, who opens Roberto’s eyes to life lived both high and low, where risk is inseparable from reward. (NR) BRIAN MILLER Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $63–$68 series, $8 individual. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through March 19.
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Dazed and Confused It’s 1976 all over again in Richard Linklater’s 1993 pot-hazed high-school confidential. Yet beneath the cannabis clouds there’s surprising insight into the inner lives of slackers, stoners, and jocks. Throughout, Linklater’s laid-back observational style reveals all the longing, languor, and half-understood notions of self that define what it means to be 18. And you can’t beat Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion.” Keep your (red) eyes peeled for Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, and Matthew McConaughey, whose muscle-car Romeo memorably declares, “That’s what I like about these high school girls: I keep getting older; they stay the same age.” Somehow Linklater, now in line to win an Oscar for Boyhood, almost makes that seem poignant. (R) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, 801 E. Pine St., 324-9996, siff.net. $7-$12. 11:55 p.m. Sat. & Sun.
For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky Described as “a stoner rock musical,” created by Curran Foster, this is either a film adaptation or a live stage show intended to help fund such adaptation. (NR)
Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684. $5-$10. 4:30 p.m. Mon.
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King Kong The classic creature movie from 1933 is accompanied by a discussion on race (hmmm) with three smart panelists leading the gathering: Jason Lamb, Brian McDonald, and Kris Kristensen. (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $10-$12. 8 p.m. Thurs.
Rock Out With Your VCR Out Curators from Scarecrow offer up their favorite video oddities from the Reagan era and beyond. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$9. 9 p.m. Sat.
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, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$9. $5-$9. 1 p.m. Sat.
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Shop Around the Corner/ The Philadel-phia Story Two classic screen comedies from 1940 are screened. The first stars Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart as unwitting future lovers, directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a clever Hungarian play. The second is George Cukor’s excellent screwball farce, a three-way romantic contest among Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Cary Grant. You can’t go wrong here. (NR)
Grand Illusion, $5-$9. See grandillusioncinema.org for showtimes, running Fri.-Thurs.
A Tale of Winter Eric Rohmer’s 1992 film is a comedy of manners based on the most transparent of plot contrivances. Felicie (Charlotte Very) falls in love with a wonderfully handsome man, a charismatic cook with Gallic charms and a smooth bottom. They scamper along a beach, they copulate, they muss each other’s hair. They are demonstrably in love. This all happens in a brief introductory montage. Then Felicie and Charles part, with kisses, high hopes, and promises to correspond faithfully. Several months later, having received not a single letter, Felicie realizes she gave him the wrong address. It’s the kind of thing that could happen to anyone—she simply told him the wrong city. As if you told your sweetheart that you lived in Puyallup, when really you lived in Yelm. Five years later, Felicie has had a daughter by the vanished Charles, and while she has taken up with not one but two men, she continues to carry a torch for her darling disappeared chef. She announces to both of her lovers that she doesn’t love them, at least not much, but proceeds to move in with one, and continues to exert a powerful hold over the other, a librarian who likes to talk about Catholicism and Pascal. There is a flimsy handful of charm in the film; Felicie’s deadpan young daughter is an engaging sort whose sincerity is a beacon in a fog of manufactured feeling. Felicie herself is entirely grating. Her self-absorption—in this she is a typical Rohmer heroine—knows no bounds. Her grand emotion, her beautiful lost romance, is wearying and false. Credit where credit is due, however: Rohmer seems to know full well that his characters, with their endless pseudo-intellectual blathering, are nitwits. He finds them perversely charming, even vaguely heroic. The viewer may not. (NR) MARY BRENNAN Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, nwfilmforum.org. $6-$11. 8 p.m. Fri. 3 & 7 p.m. Sat.-Sun.
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The Thing Stalked by a shape-shifting, DNA-infiltrating alien on their Antarctic base, Kurt Russell and company dissolve into mutual suspicion and distrust. The beast could be inside any of them, so you have to shoot your pal—or incinerate him with a flame thrower—without hesitation to save your own skin. John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is a reverse guys-on-a-mission flick, where unit cohesion falters and leader turns against crew. It’s morning in America, and utter darkness at the South Pole. (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $7-$9. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Tues.
Ongoing
Big Eyes The pancake-eyed-waif portraits of Walter and Margaret Keane became inexplicably popular during the ’60s. For director Tim Burton, at least, they still hold a kitschy fascination. As we see in this lighthearted, factually inspired account, the Keanes’ success was born from the beatnik Bay Area of the late ’50s, reversed at the 1964 World’s Fair, and collapsed during the Nixon end of the ’70s. The nation turned more cynical during that span, or developed more sophistication, but Burton isn’t interested in diagnosing the American mood or deciding why the Keanes’ art had its appeal. Big Eyes is a simple comedy of female vindication, and it’s enjoyable as such. Any film with Amy Adams (as the naive painter Margaret), Christoph Waltz (as her credit-stealing husband Walter), and Terence Stamp (as the New York Times critic who calls them out) is a film I want to see. Because of Waltz’s lupine charm, Walter’s decision to slap his name on Margaret’s art doesn’t seem so implausible. (“People don’t buy lady art,” he says, and it’s true during this sexist Mad Men era.) Burton’s been down this road before with Ed Wood, also written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Yet if Margaret is a less colorful figure than Wood, and if we can laugh about her art today, we can never mock her. (PG-13) B.R.M. Pacific Place, Oak Tree, others
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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). Birdman serves so many heady moments it qualifies as a bona fide happening. It has a few stumbles, but the result is truly fun to watch. And Keaton—the former Batman, of course—is a splendidly weathered, human presence. Ironically or not, he keeps the film grounded. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, Pacific Place, others
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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) R.H. Admiral
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Citizenfour Fugitive leaker Edward Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room. In this absorbing character study, they debate how and when to spill the information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. Clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny. One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. By the end of the film, we get a scene that suggests that Snowden is not alone in his whistleblowing status—a tantalizing hint (scribbled by Greenwald on pieces of paper) of another story to come. (NR) R.H. Crest
Foxcatcher The wrestler Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), who won gold in the 1984 Olympic Games, isn’t very bright. He’s got a puppy-dog earnestness; his ears have turned to cauliflowers after so much time on the mat; he’s accustomed to taking orders from his older brother Dave (Mark Ruffalo), who also won gold in ’84. Yet Mark is suddenly on his own when he accepts the patronage of the eccentric multimillionaire John E. du Pont (Steve Carell). In Bennett Miller’s clinically chilly true-crime tale, the murderous outcome is never in doubt. One brother will perish and du Pont go to jail (where he died in 2010). There was the same kind of underlying criminal inevitability to Miller’s 2005 Capote, where the surprise lay in how a talented, frivolous writer created his unlikely masterpiece. Here, I’m sorry to say, there’s no such consolation. Foxcatcher is uniformly well crafted and acted, though Carell playing the villain isn’t really the selling point. With his birdlike prosthetic nose, craned neck, and opaque, upper-toothed smile, Carrell’s du Pont remains a mystery, but not an interesting mystery. Yet even if Miller can’t find a satisfying denouement for Foxcatcher, Mark—whom Tatum ably invests with inchoate currents beneath that bulging brow—becomes a clay-footed figure of inarticulate tragedy. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Meridian, Lincoln Square, Oak Tree, others
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. She seems to have taken the attitude that if vampires have nothing but time, why shouldn’t scenes just keep going on and on? (NR) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown
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Gone Girl What’s exceptional about Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her 2012 novel, directed with acid fidelity by David Fincher, is that Gone Girl doesn’t like most of its characters. Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) soon falls under suspicion of murdering his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). The small-town Missouri police investigation (led by Kim Dickens) goes entirely against Nick for the first hour. He behaves like an oaf and does most everything to make himself the prime suspect, despite wise counsel from his sister (Carrie Coon) and lawyer (a surprisingly effective, enjoyable Tyler Perry). Second hour, still no body, but flashbacks turn us against the absent Amy. The movie poster and tabloid-TV plot suggest a standard I-didn’t-kill-my-wife tale, but matrimony is what’s being murdered here. Gone Girl is all about manipulation—Fincher’s stock in trade, really, which helps make the film such cynical, mean-spirited fun. (R) B.R.M. Crest
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The Imitation Game A ripping true story can survive even the Oscar-bait effect. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the brilliant English code-breaker Alan Turing as a borderline-autistic personality, a rude brainiac who during World War II fiddles with his big computing machine while his colleagues stand around scratching their heads. Turing’s homosexuality only gradually enters the picture, and even when he proposes marriage to fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley), it isn’t treated as a really big deal. Even if the movie sketches simplistic conflicts among its principal characters, the wartime world is so meticulously re-created and the stakes so compelling that it emits plenty of movie-movie sparks. But the real reason to like this movie is that it’s so diligently pro-weirdo. Especially in Cumberbatch’s truly eccentric hands, Turing stays defiantly what he is: an oddball who uses rationality to solve problems. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Egyptian, Sundance, Lincoln Square, Thornton Place, Cinebarre, Kirkland, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others
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Inherent Vice Why Thonas 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 in which the real-estate developer in question. 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.) The squares of Nixon’s silent majority are represented by Martin Donovan (as a string-pulling tycoon), Reese Witherspoon (a D.A. and Doc’s new squeeze), and Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen: police detective, part-time actor, and Doc’s possible doppelganger. Both Bigfood and Doc are confronting the MacGuffin that is the Golden Fang: possibly a conspiracy, possibly a paranoid stoner misunderstanding. 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. In Anderson’s loosest, most purely enjoyable film to date, the indigestible apricot pit of The Master is blissfully washed away. Plot matters less than the telling and serendipitous details of the tale. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, Meridian, Thornton Place, Oak Tree, others
Into the Woods Cue the irony that this sly modern classic musical (songs by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine) has been taken up by Disney, history’s busiest purveyors of the happy ending. Its fairy-tale happy ending comes halfway through the action, then Cinderella and company must decide what to do next. Into the Woods presents a crowded roster, with Meryl Streep earning top billing as the Witch, the blue-haired crank who sets things in motion with a curse. (James Corden and Emily Blunt play the baker and wife who want a child; also on hand are Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, and Johnny Depp as various familiar fairy-tale characters.) The blend of rustic locations and studio-built woods is eye-filling, especially when the characters cross the border from the realistic realm to the enchanted forest. In general, though, director Rob Marshall (Chicago) brings his usual clunky touch. The singing tends toward the Broadway-brassy, although Blunt and Corden—working in a more casual style—are completely charming. A bit of the 1987 show’s subversive message still peeks through, making this an unusual blockbuster to unleash at Christmastime. (PG) R.H. Majestic Bay, Pacific Place, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Thornton Place, others
Selma A lot of Selma is good, and a lot of it is dutiful lesson-telling. But even when it feels like civics class, Selma benefits from its timing: Coming at the tail-end of 2014, a truly rotten year for race in America, the film’s depictions of protest marches and boiled-over tensions can’t help but create ripples of excitement in a movie theater. Director Ava DuVernay keeps her focus on the events surrounding the march to Selma, when the horrifying violence of Alabama law enforcement against black protesters—televised in a newly immediate way—helped turn public opinion toward the idea of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This very American story has a curiously Brit-dominated cast, including David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta. The casting is not a huge issue, although anybody with direct memories of the larger-than-life presences of LBJ and Alabama governor George Wallace can be forgiven for finding Tom Wilkinson and Tim Roth (respectively) insufficiently vulgar in the roles. Cameos by the likes of Oprah Winfrey (as a victim of the ludicrously unfair methods of keeping African-Americans away from the voting booth) and Cuba Gooding, Jr., carry an unfortunate TV-movie guest-star air about them, although one understands the value of getting marquee players in a relatively low-budget project. (PG-13) R.H. SIFF Cinema Uptown, Sundance, Ark Lodge, Majestic Bay, Kirkland, Bainbridge, others
Wild Though I have reservations about the fulsome emotional blasts of director Jean-Marc Vallee (lDallas Buyers Club), and though the adaptation by Nick Hornby (About a Boy) leans rather too hard on the death of bestselling memoirist Cheryl Strayed’s mother (played by Laura Dern), this is a movie that—like its solitary hiker heroine—cannot be stopped. Reese Witherspoon’s ironclad casting makes matters even more inevitable. Here is a woman who bottoms out—with men, drugs, and grief—then straightens out while hiking 1,100 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon, even without disavowing all her past actions. Wild is essentially a memory trip, presented non-sequentially, as Cheryl plods north. In the movie’s second half, more maudlin than its smart start, Wild is all about mommy. Yet don’t mistake Wild for an easy, conventional healing narrative (though healing does of course come at the end). Rather, it’s more a coming-to-terms account. (R) B.R.M. Guild 45th, SIFF Cinema Uptown, Kirkland, Lincoln Square, others
