Opening
The Burning Bush From Polish director Agnieszka Holland, this is a 240-minute epic that follows the turmoil in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring and Soviet crackdown. (NR)
SIFF Cinema Uptown, 511 Queen Anne Ave. N., 324-9996, siff.net. $6-$11. Fri.-Thurs.
Local & Repertory
For Laughing Out Loud From 1937, True Confession stars Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray in a somewhat unlikely comedy about a murder trial. Lombard’s the suspect, MacMurray’s her lawyer and her husband. With John Barrymore. (NR)
Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave., 654-3121, seattleartmuseum.org. $8 individual, $42-$45 series. 7:30 p.m. Thurs. Ends. Aug. 14.
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Fremont Outdoor Movies On Friday, Wes Anderson’s droll 1998 comedy Rushmore screens. On Saturday, presented by Three Dollar Bill Cinema, the 2001 raunch-com Wet Hot American Summer will be a 21-and-over screening, meaning booze. (R) 3501 Phinney Ave. N., 781-4230, fremontoutdoormovies.com. $30 series, $5 individual. Movies start at dusk.
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Jaws Let us revisit the greatest summer movie ever made: Jaws, which became the top-grossing film of all time (not allowing for inflation) after its June 1975 release. When pitched Peter Benchley’s novel, the 28-year-old director Steven Spielberg realized, “This is kind of a sequel to Duel!” In place of the marauding big rig, a marauding shark. In place of the small car piloted by Dennis Weaver, we have the famously too-small boat containing Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss. The constant, of course, is the fear of a larger, more powerful adversary whose elusive presence is more felt—thanks to John Williams’ rumbling ostinato—than seen. Everyone’s vainly scanning the horizon in Jaws, staring into the water and looking through binoculars. Spielberg may be a master of spectacle, but its opposite is the terrifying lack of visual information, the malevolent unseen. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER Central Cinema, 1411 21st Ave., 686-6684, central-cinema.com. $6-$8. 7 p.m. Fri.-Tues. & 3 p.m. Sat./Sun.
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The Magnificent Andersons On Weds., July 23, we have Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 There Will Be Blood, which earned the terrifying Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar. Next Tues., July 29 is Wes Anderson’s 2009 stop-motion movie The Fantastic Mr. Fox, with an additional 9 p.m. screening of Moonrise Kingdom. The series ends Weds., July 30 with PTA’s 2012 The Master, starring the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman. (R)
SIFF Film Center, $6-$11. 7 p.m. Tues. & Weds.
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Moonlight Cinema
The Hangover proved a huge hit in 2009, though two lame sequels did tarnish the original’s reputation. As you know, Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and company try to reconstruct what happened during a long night of debauchery in Las Vegas. With a memorable supporting turn by Ken Jeong. (R) Redhook Ale Brewery, 14300 N.E. 145th St. (Woodinville), 425-420-1113. $5. 21 and over. Thursdays. Movie starts at dusk.
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Movies at Magnuson Park The magnificent Gravity, which earned director Alfonso Cuaron an Oscar, will probably here be presented in its 2-D iteration, which will diminish the spectacle. Still, as George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are stranded in orbit, menaced by regular bombardments of space debris, the panicked breathing and frantic radio calls provide the human pulse to the terrifying scene, as bullet-speed space garbage cascades upon the shuttle and its fragile crew. For all its technical marvels and breathtaking panoramas reflected in Bullock’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. Magnuson Park, 7400 Sand Point Way N.E., moviesatmagnuson.com. $5. Thursdays. 7 p.m.
Point Break Ah, take us back to a simpler pre-Matrix Keanu era, as Reeves plays an uptight FBI man in Kathryn Bigelow’s sun-washed, Zen-infused 1991 police procedural. He goes undercover as a surfer to infiltrate the gang of daredevil thieves led by Patrick Swayze. No amount of plot description can quite capture the zany action charm of this SoCal document of its extreme-sports times. (Bigelow’s then hubby, James Cameron, had a finger in the film’s thrills and pacing.) And it’s hard not to like a film that lets Swayze make like Yoda, uttering such classic lines as “Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.” Dude, that is so right. (NR) B.R.M. Central Cinema, $6-$8. 9:30 p.m. Fri.-Weds.
This is Your VCR on Drugs Scarecrow presents a compendium of psychedelic oddities from its hallowed vaults. (NR)
Grand Illusion, 1403 N.E. 50th St., 523-3935, grandillusioncinema.org. $5-$8. 9 p.m. Thurs.
Visitors Shot in super-high-def black-and-white digital video, this is the latest state-of-the world doc from Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, etc.), and he doesn’t like what he’s seeing. He also doesn’t like how we’re seeing the world, which increasingly means small, flat screens held in our hands and laps. Absent any narration, as usual for Reggio, the film presents a succession of somber images that eventually settles into cliche: a gorilla’s face, a giant hand manipulating a computer mouse, sports fans watching a game in slo-mo, a mangrove swamp, an albino posed between two black people (yes, really), the lunar surface, a New Orleans cemetery, and so on. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, $6-$11. 7 p.m. Mon.
Ongoing
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Edge of Tomorrow Earth has been invaded by space aliens, and Europe is already lost. Though no combat veteran, Major Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) is thrust into a kind of second D-Day landing on the beaches of France, where he is promptly killed in battle. Yes, 15 minutes into the movie Tom Cruise is dead—but this presents no special problem for Edge of Tomorrow. In fact it’s crucial to the plot. The sci-fi hook of this movie, adapted from a novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, is that during his demise Cage absorbed alien blood that makes him time-jump back to the day before the invasion. He keeps getting killed, but each time he wakes up he learns a little more about how to fight the aliens and how to keep a heroic fellow combatant (Emily Blunt) alive. It must be said here that Cruise plays this exactly right: You can see his exhaustion and impatience with certain scenes even when it’s our first time viewing them. Oh, yeah—he’s been here before. There’s absurdity built into this lunatic set-up, and director Doug Liman—he did the first Bourne picture—understands the humor of a guy who repeatedly gets killed for the good of mankind. (PG-13) ROBERT HORTON Sundance, others
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A Hard Day’s Night The music business is fond of remastering old tracks and selling us new versions of familiar songs. You get that, plus a full visual restoration, in this 50th-anniversary edition of A Hard Day’s Night. Beatlemania was famously launched in the U.S. with the band’s February 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and mini-tour. Returning to the States that summer, the Beatles played Seattle on August 21, their third stop on a 23-city tour. But what if you weren’t lucky enough to live in one of those cities? That’s what A Hard Day’s Night, cannily released in August (with the eponymous album), was all about. It’s both a genius marketing device and an enjoyably shaggy comedy-with-music. Never mind that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were the somewhat-manufactured roles devised by Brian Epstein; A Hard Day’s Night gave these characters room to roam. (NR) B.R.M. SIFF Cinema Uptown, SIFF Film Center
Sex Tape Despite the title, this marital comedy is a surprisingly tame affair, and fans expecting Jason Segel to again drop trou will be disappointed. He and Cameron Diaz haven’t got the same antagonistic chemistry displayed in Bad Teacher (a sequel is said to be in the works). There’s not enough sex, and the tape unspools too slowly. It takes 30 minutes for these tired, suburban parents to drunkenly film every position in The Joy of Sex. Not until the movie’s midpoint do they discover their video has accidentally been synced on a half-dozen iPads that Segel’s gifted away (to Diaz’s mom, her boss, friends, etc.). Anyone entering the theater already knows the plot, and that’s where Sex Tape ought to begin: with the frantic recovery effort. Apart from pacing, the pursuit becomes a journey into the heart of blandness. Not even a coked-up Rob Lowe, with Slayer blaring and tramp stamp on his back, can send the film into the wild adventure we want. Instead of an urgent screwball comedy, director Jake Kasdan and his writers keep steering the plot back to mundane marriage-counseling mode, as if we’re seriously concerned that bond will break—especially with two cute kids, who save their parents from an ominous porn magnate (cameo alert). Technology, not sex, is their real undoing. Segel wails that “nobody understands the cloud!,” and plenty of viewers will know the same shame. (R) B.R.M. Sundance, Bainbridge, others
