Local & Repertory Clueless Alicia Silverstone was never sweeter or more effective

Local & Repertory

Clueless Alicia Silverstone was never sweeter or more effective than in this clever 1995 treatment of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, directed by Amy Heckerling. (PG-13)

Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com, $6-$8, March 14-18, 7 p.m.

Festival of (In)appropriation Filmmaker Josh Hite will introduce this compilation reel of oddities and finds, all wrenched from their original cinematic context. (NR)

Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 829-7863, nwfilmforum.org, $6-$11, Thu., March 13, 8 p.m.

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The Golden Age of Italian Cinema “I remember” in Italian, Amarcord (1973) is Federico Fellini’s comedic semi-autobiographical, Oscar-winning look back at his hometown Rimini during the 1930s—and oh, the memories! There’s insane Uncle Teo, who refuses to climb out of a tree because he wants a woman (and then settles for a midget nun); the giant-breasted tobacconist, whom the boys lust after; the Fascist parade with a giant floral arrangement of Mussolini’s face; the prostitute, Volpina, who trolls the town for customers; the femme fatale, Gradisca (the lovely Magali Noel), who pines for a husband like Gary Cooper—and that’s only a fraction of the colorful cast of characters involved. (NR) ANGELA ASHMAN Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3100, seattleartmuseum.org, $8 (individual), $63-$68 (series), 7:30 p.m. Thurs.

Heaven and Earth Magic Local musicians Lori Goldston, Jessika Kenney, and Susie Kozawa perform a live score to the 1962 avant garde movie by Harry Smith. (NR)

SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net, $8-$13, Tue., March 18, 7 p.m.

The Invisible Woman Playing as part of SIFF’s Recent Raves! series, The Invisible Woman features director Ralph Fiennes portraying Charles Dickens as we imagine him: vital, human, prolific, charming, flawed, driven to succeed. After siring 10 children with his wife, Dickens lost sexual interest in her, as Claire Tomalin explored in her 1990 book The Invisible Woman. That woman was Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), Dickens’ much younger mistress for the last dozen years of his life (1812–1870). Does it sound tawdry and inappropriate that Dickens basically pays Nelly’s shrewd actress mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) for this arrangement? There’s something icky about it—one thinks of Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, or of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn. There are many pleasures to The Invisible Woman, and they chiefly have to do with the man and his Victorian milieu. As both director and star, Fiennes loves the scenes of Dickens’ public readings to concert halls full of rapt fans, hanging on his every word. Because Ternan as an historical figure left little in the way of a public record, her character feels vague and conjectural; Jones and the filmmakers haven’t got an angle on her. Nelly’s just a fan, a confidante, a lover (it takes over an hour to get to the sex), and finally a scandal to be hidden. (R) BRIAN MILLER SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11, Mon., March 17, 7:30 p.m.

The Law in These Parts History is written by the victors and laws by the occupiers. That’s the way it works in Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s intelligent but tedious doc about Israel’s administration of civil justice—by military judges—in the occupied West Bank after 1967. The film comprises several interviews with retired IDF lawyers who also created some laws in the occupied territories. It was by their rule, in military courts, that thousands of Palestinians have been held in “administrative arrest” (before actually doing anything) and given long, futile sentences for throwing stones at settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. (Killing and suicide bombs are another matter.) History is written by the victors and laws by the occupiers. That’s the way it works in Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s intelligent but tedious doc about Israel’s administration of civil justice—by military judges—in the occupied West Bank after 1967. The film comprises several interviews with retired IDF lawyers who also created some laws in the occupied territories. It was by their rule, in military courts, that thousands of Palestinians have been held in “administrative arrest” (before actually doing anything) and given long, futile sentences for throwing stones at settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. (Killing and suicide bombs are another matter.) (NR) B.R.M. Keystone Congregational Church, 5019 Keystone Place N., 632-6021, keystoneseattle.org, Free, Fri., March 14, 7 p.m.

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Los Angeles Plays Itself SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 25.

Lotte Reiniger Shorts with Miles & Karina Who is Lotte Reiniger? The pioneering German female animation artist (1899–1981) created exquisite short films, beginning in the 1920s, using silhouette animation. This package of shorts is set to a new score, to be performed live, by local musicians Miles & Karina (aka Dave Keenan and Nova Devonie). (NR)

SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11, Sun., March 16, 1 p.m.

Man with a Movie Camera DJ James Whetzel provides a new soundtrack for Dziga Vertov’s extravagantly edited 1929 silent film. (NR)

SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11, Thu., March 13, 7 p.m.

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Northern Lights SEE THE PICK LIST, PAGE 22.

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Sin City In adapting three stories from Frank Miller’s graphic-novel series, Robert Rodriguez reduces his palette to almost only two tones, black and white, like the ones and zeroes of his all-digital production. Morality is no less stark or violently severe. In different chapters, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, and Bruce Willis play knights in dirty armor (to borrow a phrase from Raymond Chandler). Sin City is thoroughly noir, with guns, trench coats, old cars, and female characters—played by Rosario Dawson, Jessica Alba, and Brittany Murphy—as thick as cardboard. Visually, the 2005 Sin City is wildly imaginative—but also wildly derivative, since Rodriguez set out to copy Miller’s drawings on film. Most comic-book movies are said to “leap off the page” as praise. Sin City does the opposite: It burrows into the cheap paper and ink, making a virtue of flatness. (R) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $6-$8, March 14-18, 9:30 p.m.

The Sprocket Society’s Saturday Secret Matinees The 1949 serial Batman & Robin will be screened in weekly installments. March’s surprise features will have a B-movie monster theme. (NR)

Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org, $5-$8 individual, $35-$56 pass, Saturdays, 2 p.m. Continues through March 29.

Tiger and Bunny: The Rising Familiar to some from Japanese TV, the two titular robot buddies have now been expanded into a movie. (NR)

Grand Illusion, $15, Fri., March 14, 6 p.m.; Sat., March 15, 9 p.m.; Sun., March 16, 3:30 p.m.; Mon., March 17, 6 p.m.

Ongoing

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American Hustle The latest concoction from David O. Russell is full of big roundhouse swings and juicy performances: It’s a fictionalized take on the Abscam scandal of the late 1970s, in which the FBI teamed with a second-rate con man (here called Irving Rosenfeld, played by Christian Bale) in a wacko sting operation involving a bogus Arab sheik and bribes to U.S. congressmen. Along with the FBI coercing him into its scheme, Irving is caught between his hottie moll Sydney (Amy Adams) and neglected wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). Even more complicated for Irving is that one of the targets of the undercover operation, a genially corrupt yet idealistic Jersey politico (Jeremy Renner), turns out to be a soulmate. Equally unhappy is the presiding FBI agent (Bradley Cooper, his permed hair and his sexual urge equally curled in maddening knots), who’s developed a crush on Sydney that is driving him insane. Russell encourages his actors to go for it, and man, do they go for it. (R) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, Big Picture, Pacific Place, Lincoln Square, others

August: Osage County Tracy Letts won a Pulitzer for this play and now writes the screenplay, yet there’s almost no evidence of how this display of canned yammering could possibly have won a high literary honor. Osage County is in Oklahoma, where the lemony matriarch of the Weston family, Violet (Meryl Streep), has gathered the clan in the aftermath of tragedy. She has three daughters, and while she treats sensible Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and silly Karen (Juliette Lewis) badly enough, she saves her special venom for her favorite, Barbara (Julia Roberts). Barbara’s marriage to an academic (Ewan McGregor) is unraveling, so she’s in the mood for a tussle, and we’re going to get one. While Streep is the savvy, surgical Muhammad Ali to Roberts’ blunt-punching Joe Frazier in that match, there’s a sense that even Dame Meryl is coasting on technique here. The gotcha dialogue is just a little too easy, and director John Wells encourages everybody to bop their lines right on the nose. This big serving of ham and eggs wants to be taken seriously. (R) R.H. Varsity, others

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Child’s Pose Something happened on a dark road outside Bucharest, and a boy is dead. The dead adolescent, a kid from a peasant family, was running across the road when a car driven by Barbu (Bogdan Dumitrache) hit him. The cowardly sluggard Barbu was trying to pass another car and probably speeding. Under ordinary circumstances he’d be a sure bet for prison, but ordinary circumstances do not include his mother Cornelia (Luminita Gheorghiu), an elegant but ferocious upper-class woman determined to control this situation—just as she’s controlled every other aspect of her grown son’s life. Directed by Calin Peter Netzer, Gheorgiu’s performance captures Cornelia with brittle, I’m-still-standing exactitude. Cornelia reeks of clueless entitlement (her conversation with her maid is a small gem of generosity laced with manipulation), yet you’d want her on your side in a street fight. (NR) R.H. Varsity

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Dallas Buyers Club Making a straight white Texas homophobe the hero of a film about the ’80s AIDS crisis doesn’t seem right. It’s inappropriate, exceptional, possibly even crass. All those qualities are reflected in Matthew McConaughey’s ornery, emaciated portrayal of Ron Woodroof, a rodeo rider and rough liver who contracted HIV in 1985. Fond of strippers, regularly swigging from his pocket flask, doing lines of coke when he can afford them, betting on the bulls he rides, Ron has tons of Texas-sized character. Directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, the unruly Dallas Buyers Club goes easy on the sinner-to-saint conversion story. McConaughey and the filmmakers know that once Ron gets religion, so to speak, their tale risks tedium. As Ron desperately bribes and steals a path to off-label meds, his allies and adversaries do read like fictional composites (played by Griffin Dunne, Jennifer Garner, Denis O’Hare, and Steve Zahn). Best among them is the transvestite Rayon, who becomes Ron’s right-hand woman (Jared Leto). They’re both fellow gamblers who delight in beating the house. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Meridian, Big Picture, others

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Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me The core audience for this showbiz documentary is self-selecting: If you’ve heard of the Broadway legend, age 87 at the time of filming, then you will go see the movie and be entirely delighted. Produced by Alec Baldwin, an admirer who played Stritch’s son on 30 Rock, this is emphatically a tribute to old-school musical-theater prowess. It’s not all sadness and nostalgia as Stritch prepares for a new show (all Sondheim, natch), grudgingly tolerates the camera of director Chiemi Karasawa, and collects praise from her Broadway epigones (Baldwin, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, James Gandolfini, etc.). She wears her legend blithely, but never lets you forget she’s a legend. Her photo albums and polished stories are suitably glamorous (JFK tries and fails to seduce her), yet this is equally a portrait of aging—of working to the end, of the structure and dignity that work provides. We see this trouper’s slips in rehearsal and watch her tell the audience, “If I forget my lyrics, fuck it!” (NR) B.R.M. Sundance

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Gravity George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are stranded in orbit, menaced by regular bombardments of space debris. The oxygen is running out and there’s no prospect of rescue from Earth. Their dilemma is established in an astonishing 12-minute opening sequence, seamlessly rendered via CGI by the Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Y Tu Mama Tambien). The camera occupies no fixed position. There is no up or down in the frame as it pushes and swoops among the wreckage and flailing astronauts. (Here let’s note that the 3-D version is essential; don’t even consider seeing the conventional rendering.) Dr. Stone (Bullock) at first can’t get her bearings; and the rest of the film consists of her navigating from one problem to the next. For all its technical marvels and breathtaking panoramas reflected in Stone’s visor, Gravity is a very compact and task-oriented picture. It’s both space-age and hugely traditional, though with a modern, self-aware heroine. (PG-13) B.R.M. Big Picture, others

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The Great Beauty Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning account of an aging playboy journalist in Rome casts its eye back to La Dolce Vita (also about a playboy journalist in Rome). Yet this movie looks even further back, from the capsized Costa Concordia to the ruins and reproachful marble statues of antiquity. “I feel old,” says Jep (the sublime Toni Servillo) soon after the debauch of his 65th birthday party. He’s been coasting on the success of his first and only novel, 40 years prior, content with his goal to be king of Rome’s high life. Jep is a dandy with thinning hair brushed back and a girdle beneath his silk shirt. False appearances are all that count, but it takes intelligence to deceive. Disgust—and then perhaps self-disgust—begins to color his perception of a Botox party, the food obsessions of a prominent cardinal, the splatter-art demonstration of a child artist, and the whole “debauched country.” Servillo makes Jep both suave and somber, a guy living parallel lives in hectic ballrooms and in his head. His wry glances are both mocking and wincing, appropriate for a movie that’s simultaneously bursting with life and regret. (NR) B.R.M. Sundance, Kirkland Parkplace, Ark Lodge, Lynwood (Bainbridge), others

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Her Spike Jonze’s unlikely romance is set in a smooth, efficient near-future Los Angeles. There are no poor people, no upsetting stories on the news. Technology works perfectly. Everyone ought to be happy, and that’s the problem for mopey Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix). Gradually it emerges that he’ separated from his wife (Rooney Mara), but won’t sign the divorce papers. Impulsively deciding to upgrade his phone and home PC, Theodore opts for the new OS1 ( “It’s not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness”). He chooses a female voice (Scarlett Johansson’s) called Samantha, which soon takes over his life. Before long they’re going on dates together—and more. When Theodore finally spills his secret, his friend Amy (Amy Adams) treats it like no big news—everyone’s falling in love with an OS, she tells him. In this ingenious and unexpectedly touching story, both humans and programs worry about being alone. And both yearn to connect across the digital divide between sentience and software. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Harvard Exit, others

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Inside Llewyn Davis While there are funny bits in this simple story of a struggling folk musician in 1961 Greenwich Village, very loosely inspired by Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the situation for Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is fairly dire. He has no money, no apartment, and no real prospects in the music industry—apart from an album that isn’t selling. He’s the wrong guy at the right moment, as the movie’s poignant final scenes make clear. The Coen brothers aren’t really making a comedy here, and you should temper your expectations to appreciate the movie’s minor-key rewards. Isaac can really sing and play guitar; the sterling soundtrack, by T Bone Burnett, is built around live music performances; and the catchiest tune—an astronaut ditty called “Please, Mr. Kennedy”—is a knowingly cornball novelty song. But Llewyn’s a jerk to fellow musicians and benefactors, rude to his sister, and dismissive of others’ talent—possibly because he’s unsure of his own. Llewyn is a self-described asshole offstage; he’s only at his best onstage. If music can’t save him or provide a career, it’s also his only succor against life’s crushing disappointments. (R) B.R.M. Admiral, Tin Theater, Crest

Maidentrip Dutch teenager Laura Dekker gained fame for her attempt at sailing solo around the world before she even left port; family-court hearings were held, to great European interest, to determine if she had the right—even with the permission of her divorced parents—to undertake such a risky voyage. American director Jillian Schlesinger skips most of the hoopla and courtroom proceedings, and her documentary mainly relies on Dekker’s own video footage. The effect is like a 75-minute-long selfie, as Dekker cheerfully narrates her voyage in diary form, showing us ravioli mishaps, resting birds, visiting dolphins, and new hairstyles. For viewers with a sailing background, Maindentrip is the like the anti-All Is Lost : Everything that can go right does go right. (Schlesinger is vague about the sponsors of Dekker’s adventure, though her 40-foot ketch is festooned with various corporate logos.) Should you take your daughters to see the movie? Sure—Dekker emerges as a thoroughly likable and self-reliant young woman (age 16 at journey’s end in 2012). I don’t think many parents would send their girls out to sea to follow her, but she seems an excellent role model in all other respects. Except for the ravioli. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Monuments Men Leading Allied military unit charged with finding and securing the stolen artworks of WWII, George Clooney first appears as Danny Ocean with professorial beard: Frank Stokes, a museum curator with FDR’s mandate to assemble a crack team of art experts for active duty. As director and co-writer of the film (based on true events), Clooney knows he can’t entirely escape the air of the Ocean’s Eleven pictures, so he doesn’t try; the all-star assembly this time returns Matt Damon to the ranks, with new enlistees Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin (the Oscar winner for The Artist), Bob Balaban, and John Goodman. The old-fashioned humor includes some kidding-in-the-face-of-possible-death, suggesting that Clooney has recently enjoyed a few Howard Hawks pictures. Meanwhile, a subplot involving Hugh (Downton Abbey) Bonneville’s disgraced British curator has an agreeable old-Hollywood simplicity—Clooney could be trying to make a movie that really might’ve been produced in the 1940s. There’s also a bit about Damon’s art restorer passing an evening in Paris with his contact, a museum employee (Cate Blanchett). For a moment, Damon and Blanchett get a palpably human connection going amid the historical do-goodery. There’s a movie that might be made from that moment, but The Monuments Men is too dutiful for that. (PG-13) R.H. Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, Sundance, others

Non-Stop Neesploitation. The Full Neeson. Release the Neeson. After Bronson and Eastwood, is there any more satisfying expression of cranky white codgerhood than the resurgent Liam Neeson? His latest, aka Neeson on a Plane, is a hokey but effective thriller encapsulated by our hero’s throwaway line: “I hate flying.” And yet flying is what this alcoholic federal air marshal does for a job. Bill Marks is a familiar distillation of Neeson’s prior roles in The Grey, Taken, and Unknown—a mournful pessimist who only bothers with life out of habit, loyalty, or revenge. Who’s sending him text messages on a London-bound flight, threatening to kill a passenger every 20 minutes for a ransom of $150 million? The plot mechanics don’t really add up, but the constant indignity and annoyance of post-9/11 air travel are what rings true here. Marks trusts no one on his plane, and his fellow flyers have cause to distrust him, too. (Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery, Scott McNairy, and recent Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o are also on board.) Everyone’s a suspect, and every passenger’s petty complaint signals the breakdown of community. That Neeson plays a loner here is a given. What’s darkest about Non-Stop is how isolated and suspicious his seat-mates are of one another. It’s like a journey … Into the Neeson, as it were. (PG-13) B.R.M. Kirkland Parkplace, Meridian, Bainbridge, Lincoln Square, others

Omar Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated new film tries to humanize people stuck in the cycle of violence in the Palestinian community of the occupied West Bank. The central figure here is a none-too-bright young man, Omar (Adam Bakri), who’s a kind of budding revolutionary. He’s not affiliated with a known terrorist group; it’s more like he’s hanging out with friends who’ve gradually become more radical of late. Led by the serious Tarek (Eyad Hourani), these amateurs will end up murdering an Israeli soldier one night, an act that brings them to the attention of an Israeli investigator (Waleed Zuaiter, a deft actor). You can see the Oscar appeal here: global issue, human approach, dramatic punch. Abu-Assad is a skilled filmmaker, but Omar is significantly less daring than his 2005 Paradise Now—really just a middlebrow treatment of an automatically invigorating subject. The final action is a “shocker” meant to be open-ended and thought-provoking, but it leaves behind a faint taste of smugness. (NR) R.H. Sundance

Philomena Based on actual events, our film begins with journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), a brittle Oxbridge type, newly out of a job and lowering himself to write a human-interest story. That’s how he meets Philomena (Judi Dench), an Irish lady with the kinds of questions that perhaps only a reporter could answer. As a teenager in the 1950s, Philomena got pregnant, was sent to a Catholic convent to hide her sin, and gave birth there. She remained at the convent as unpaid labor, and her little boy was taken at age 3, never to be seen or heard from again. The pair’s discoveries are a matter of record now, but we’ll hold off on the revelations . . . except to say that there are some doozies. Maybe it’s Coogan’s acerbic personality (he scripted, with Jeff Pope), or director Stephen Frears’ unpretentious take on the material, but Philomena generally succeeds in distinguishing itself from the average weepie. The calm roll-out is effective; Coogan’s performance is shrewd; and anytime the camera gets near the convent, the Irish chill is almost palpable. (PG-13) R.H. Ark Lodge, others

Stranger by the Lake Written and directed by Alain Guiraudie, this slow, quietly disturbing French film is no thriller. Don’t expect echoes of Hitchcock or Chabrol. At a gay cruising spot, the killer’s identity is obvious; the guy who falls for him is handsome and kind; and the film’s sole voice of reason is a sad, chubby closet case who observes the cruising rituals from his lonely, pebbled peninsula. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) witnesses a murder-by-drowning, but reports nothing to the authorities. Neither do his cruising cohort say anything about the beach blanket and car that remain unclaimed for days afterward. Franck has a crush on the sinister, mustachioed hunk Michel (Christophe Paou); to go the cops would be to hurt his chances with him. Consequences, like the outside world, don’t figure here. Guiraudie’s drama never leaves the lake, and there are only a few passing references to jobs and dinner dates in town. Franck may speak of love and the desire for a companion back home, yet he keeps coming back to the woods, where a man waits with a knife. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown

300: Rise of an Empire As befits a graphic-novel adaptation heavy on blood-spilling and war-mongering, the computer-generated skies of this world are perpetually roiling with black clouds and gloomy foreboding. 300: Rise of an Empire is based on Frank Miller’s Xerxes, and it provides a sequel to the 2006 hit 300. Or not quite a sequel, exactly: This is a rare instance in serial-making in which the action actually takes place at the same time as the events of the first film. Rise of an Empire shifts the action to sea, where the Athenian general Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) leads his ships into battle against the Greek turncoat Artemisia (Eva Green, from Casino Royale), who has allied herself with the Persians. Then there’s Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo, returning from the first movie and as full of bravado as before. In fact, despite the overwhelming—and perhaps overcompensating—masculinity that dominates these silly films, the appeal here is almost entirely thanks to the two women. The promise of a showdown between them is sadly unfulfilled—and would of course be historically inaccurate, if you’re still clinging to such old-timey notions. (R) R.H. Sundance, Bainbridge, Meridian, Thornton Place, Kirkland Parkplace, Lincoln Square, others

Tim’s Vermeer How did Vermeer do it? This question is apparently important to some people, including a Texas millionaire named Tim Jenison. He decided to prove that the 17th-century Dutch master must’ve had help from special lenses and mathematical devices to create his luminous canvases, so he sets out to replicate the hypothetical methods by which Vermeer might have turned the trick. The word “trick” is key here, for Tim’s Vermeer is by magicians Penn and Teller (offscreen friends of Jenison). Teller directs, and Penn Jillette acts as producer and—of course—garrulous narrator. Entertainingly, the movie tracks the months Jenison spent on his project. This kind of historical inquiry is interesting, but the impetus behind it feels a little like the persistent efforts to demonstrate that Shakespeare didn’t write the works of Shakespeare. There’s something undemocratic about the idea of genius, so the debunkers must disprove the romantic idea of the artist holding his thumb in front of his eye and miraculously solving the problems of perspective and light. (PG-13) R.H. Sundance

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12 Years a Slave Made by English director Steve McQueen, this Oscar-winning historical drama is based on a memoir by Solomon Northup (here played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man from Saratoga, New York, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Solomon passes through the possession of a series of Southern plantation owners. One sensitive slave owner (Benedict Cumberbatch) gives Solomon—a musician by trade—a fiddle. Then he’s sold to the cruel cotton farmer Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who also owns the furiously hard-working Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey, like Solomon, is caught inside the terror of not knowing how to play this hand. Do they keep their heads down and try to survive, or do they resist? Instead of taking on the history of the “peculiar institution,” the film narrows itself to a single story, Solomon’s daily routine, his few possessions. The film’s and-then-this-happened quality is appropriate for a memoir written in the stunned aftermath of a nightmare. Along the way, McQueen includes idyllic nature shots of Louisiana, as though to contrast that unspoiled world with what men have done in it. The contrast is lacerating. (R) R.H. Seven Gables, Ark Lodge, Lincoln Square, Meridian, others

Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago In Lydia Smith’s cheerful, international, uplifting documentary, a few priests explain the history of the pilgrimage paths to Santiago, Spain, where St. James is supposedly buried. At 500 miles from southwestern France, the Camino is a strenuous walk on both paved roads and pastoral trails, a trek that takes a month for most walkers. Not all of these half-dozen trekkers are strictly religious. For one young Portuguese businessman, the Camino is a personal challenge. A cheerful, sturdy Danish woman wants the time alone—then falls in step with a handsome Canadian. Annie, the lone American, is a New Agey but engagingly candid woman of a certain age. Then there’s the British-accented Samantha, a brash Brazilian who says she’s lost her job, boyfriend, and apartment back in London. She stops for regular smoking breaks, flirts shamelessly, and would be a far better heroine than Julia Roberts in the Eat Pray Love/Under the Tuscan Sun memoir category. This engaging travelogue could well have been produced by the Spanish National Tourist Board. I’m not saying it’s an infomercial, but the fellowship among these travelers is enormously appealing. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Wind Rises Beloved animator Hayao Miyazaki has announced this as his final feature, which means the Oscar-nominated The Wind Rises ought to be arriving on a parade float of acclaim, buoyed by pastel clouds and pulled by a collection of amazing imaginary creatures. On the one hand, a biographical study of engineer and airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi sounds like a great match for Miyazaki’s wistful style: It allows for beautiful flying sequences and perhaps some self-portraiture in its study of a detail-minded dreamer who assembles his creations from a combination of math-based design and pure imagination. The problem? Horikoshi’s masterpiece was the Zero, Japan’s lethally efficient World War II fighter plane. There’s something head-in-the-clouds about this movie’s soft treatment of its central character. The film is so full of dream sequences and wistful humor and regret about a lost love that it doesn’t begin to suggest a deep internal conflict in Horikoshi’s work on the machinery of death, if indeed he felt any. (PG-13) R.H. Cinerama, Majestic Bay, others

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The Wolf of Wall Street Hugely, rudely entertaining, Martin Scorsese’s three-hour tale of rogue stock traders during the early ‘90s stars a ferociously funny Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, upon whose jailhouse memoir the movie is based. Wolf almost seems like a remake of Scorsese’s Goodfellas—or two of them, given its length. Here again are the crazed, colorful criminals, the mountains of blow, the army of hookers, the venal vitality of a life lived outside the law. The crucial difference, however, is the absence of mobsters and violence; this film is a greed-com, and the clowns include Jonah Hill, Rob Reiner, Matthew McConaughey, Jean Dujardin, and Spike Jonze. In a way, this is the movie Brian De Palma tried and failed to make out of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (a book Belfort read in prison, inspiring his memoir). Belfort is a guy programmed to sell, fuck, steal, and get high, only fun to watch while engaged in those core activities. In the film’s coda, Belfort finally recognizes as much: The only thing worse than being poor is being bored. Fortunately for us, Scorsese’s Wolf is the opposite of boring. (R) B.R.M. Meridian, Sundance, Thornton Place, others