Period Piece

Film Listings

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Frameline36, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, runs through Sun/24 at Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., SF; Victoria Theatre, 2961 16th St., SF; and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, 2966 College, Berk. For tickets (most shows $9-$11) and schedule, visit www.frameline.org.

OPENING

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter America’s 16th president jumps aboard the bloodsucker bandwagon. (1:45) Presidio.

Brave Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, and Billy Connolly star in Pixar’s fantasy about a strong-willed girl who brings turmoil upon her Scottish kingdom when she defies a long-held tradition. (1:33) Balboa, Presidio, Shattuck.

5 Broken Cameras Palestinian Emad Burnat bought his first camcorder in 2005 with the intention of bottling family memories, but when Israeli forces began the construction of settlements in Bil’in (his home village in the West Bank) Burnat stumbled into activist-filmmaker territory. In documenting his community’s nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation, Burnat’s friends and family (much like his cameras) are shot at, injured, and even killed. His son Gabreel’s first words are “wall” and “cartridge,” epitomizing the psychological toll of the struggle. Israeli forces are depicted as an eerily faceless entity, with colonialist aspirations run amok. Burnat isn’t interested in highlighting the political delicacy of the situation, and frankly, he’s given us something far more powerful than your average piece of fair-and-balanced journalism on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Splitting the difference between home-video montage and war-zone nightmare, 5 Broken Cameras skillfully merges the political and the personal, profoundly humanizing the Palestinian movement for independence. (1:30) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Taylor Kaplan)

Found Memories The literal Portuguese-to-English translation of this film’s title — “stories that exist only when remembered” — is clunky, but more poignantly accurate than Found Memories. At first, it’s not entirely clear if Brazilian Júlia Murat is making a narrative or a documentary. In an tiny, isolated community populated by elderly people, Madalena (Sonia Guedes) follows a schedule she’s kept for years, probably decades: making bread, attending church, doing chores, tending the cemetery gates, writing love letters to a long-absent partner (“Isn’t it strange that after all these years, I still find your things around the house?”), and grousing at the “annoying old man” who grinds the town’s coffee beans. One day, young photographer Rita (Lisa Fávero) drifts into the village, an exotic import from the outside, modern world. Slowly, despite their differences, the women become friends. That’s about it for plot, but as this deliberately-paced film reflects on aging, dying, and memories (particularly in the form of photographs), it offers atmospheric food for thought, and a few moments of droll humor. Note, however, that viewer patience is a requirement to reap its rewards. (1:38) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

The Invisible War Kirby Dick’s searing documentary takes a look at the prevalence of rape within U.S. military ranks, a problem whose unbelievably high levels of occurrence would long ago have caused huge public outcry and imposed reform in any other institutional context. Yet because it’s the military — where certain codes of loyalty, machismo, and insularity dominate from the grunt level to the highest ranks — the issue has not only been effectively kept secret, but perpetrators almost never suffer any disciplinary measures, let alone jail time or dishonorable discharges. Meanwhile the women — some studies estimate 20% of all female personnel (and 1% of the men) suffer sexual assault from colleagues — are further traumatized by an atmosphere that creates ideal conditions for stalking, rape, and “blame the victim” aftermaths from superiors. (Indeed, for many the superior to whom they would have reported an attack was the one who attacked them.) Most end up quitting promising service careers (often pursued because of generations of family enlistment), dealing with the serious mental health consequences on their own. The subjects who’ve come forward on the issue here are inspiring in their bravery, and dedication to a patriotic cause and vocation that ultimately, bitterly betrayed them. Their stories are so engrossing that The Invisible War is as compulsively watchable as its topic and statistics are inherently appalling. (1:39) Metreon. (Harvey) 

Oslo, August 31st Heroin movies are rarely much fun, and Oslo is no exception, though here the stress lies not in grisly realism but visceral emotional honesty. Following an abortive, Virginia Woolf-esque suicide attempt during evening leave from his rehab center, recovering addict Anders visits Oslo for a job interview. He reconnects bittersweetly with an old friend, tries and fails to meet up with his sister, and eventually submerges himself in the nightlife that once fueled his self-destruction. Expressionistic editing conveys Anders’ sense of detachment and urge for release, with scenes and sounds intercut achronologically and striking sound design which homes in on stray conversations. A late intellectual milieu is signified throughout, quite humorously, by serious discussions of popular television dramas, presumably an update of similar concerns addressed in Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le Feu follet, on which the film is based. (1:35) Elmwood, Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Sam Stander)

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World See “Apocalypse Meh.” (1:41) Marina, Piedmont, Shattuck.

Ultrasonic Is it madness to imagine a stylish new twist on the claustrophobic conspiracy thriller? Multi-hyphenate director, co-writer, and cinematographer (and musician and software engineer) Rohit Colin Rao manages just that with this head-turning indie feature film debut, while managing to translate a stark indie aesthetic encapsulated by Dischord and Touch and Go bands, lovers of Rust Belt warehouses and waffle houses, culture vultures who revere both Don DeLillo and Wisconsin Death Trip, and critics who lean too hard on the descriptor “angular.” Musician Simon York (Silas Gordon Brigham) is one denizen firmly placed in that cultural landscape, but the pressures of funding his combo’s album, coping with the diminishing returns of his music teacher livelihood, and anticipating the arrival of a baby with his wife, Ruth (Cate Buscher), seem to be piling on his murky brow. Simon begins to hear a hard-to-pin-down sound that no one else can detect, though Ruth’s eccentric and possibly certified conspiracy-theorist brother Jonas (Sam Repshas) is quick to affirm — and build on — his fears. Painting his handsome, stylized mise-en-scène in noiry blacks and wintry whites, Rohit positively revels in this post-punk jewel of a world he’s assembled, and it’s a compelling one even if it’s far from perfect and ultimately shies away from the deepest shadows. (1:30) Roxie. (Chun)

Ongoing 

Bel Ami Judging from recent attempts to shake off the gloomy atmosphere and undead company of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson enjoys a good period piece, but hasn’t quite worked out how to help make one. Last year’s Depression-era Water for Elephants was a tepid romance, and Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s belle epoque–set Bel Ami is an ungainly, oddly paced adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name. A down-and-out former soldier of peasant stock, Georges Duroy (Pattinson) — or “Bel Ami,” as his female admirers call him — gains a brief entrée into the upper echelons of France’s fourth estate and parlays it into a more permanent set of social footholds, campaigning for the affections of a triumvirate of Parisian power wives (Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas) as he makes his ascent. His route is confusing, though; the film pitches forward at an alarming pace, its scenes clumsily stacked together with little character development or context to smooth the way, and Pattinson’s performance doesn’t clarify much. Duroy shifts perplexingly between rapacious and soulful modes, eyeing the ladies with a vaguely carnivorous expression as he enters drawing rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms, but leaving us with little sense of his true appetites or other motivations. (1:42) Lumiere, Smith Rafael. (Rapoport) 

Bernie Jack Black plays the titular new assistant funeral director liked by everybody in small-town Carthage, Tex. He works especially hard to ingratiate himself with shrewish local widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), but there are benefits — estranged from her own family, she not only accepts him as a friend (then companion, then servant, then as virtual “property”), but makes him her sole heir. Richard Linklater’s latest is based on a true-crime story, although in execution it’s as much a cheerful social satire as I Love You Philip Morris and The Informant! (both 2009), two other recent fact-based movies about likable felons. Black gets to sing (his character being a musical theater queen, among other things), while Linklater gets to affectionately mock a very different stratum of Lone Star State culture from the one he started out with in 1991’s Slacker. There’s a rich gallery of supporting characters, most played by little-known local actors or actual townspeople, with Matthew McConaughey’s vainglorious county prosecutor one delectable exception. Bernie is its director’s best in some time, not to mention a whole lot of fun. (1:39) Embarcadero, Four Star, Presidio, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (1:42) Albany, Four Star, Piedmont, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

A Cat in Paris This year’s Best Animated Film nominees: big-budget entries Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, and eventual winner Rango, plus Chico and Rita, which opened just before Oscar night, and French mega-dark-horse A Cat in Paris. Sure, Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s film failed to cash in on 2011’s Paris craze, but it’s still a charming if featherweight noir caper, being released stateside in an English version that features the voices of Marcia Gay Harden and Anjelica Huston. A streetwise kitty named Dino spends his days hanging with Zoey, a little girl who’s gone mute since the death of her father — a cop killed in the line of duty. Zoey’s mother (Harden), also a cop, is hellbent on catching the murderer, a notorious crook named Costa who runs his criminal empire with Reservoir Dogs-style imprecision. At night, Dino sneaks out and accompanies an affable burglar on his prowlings. When Zoey falls into Costa’s clutches, her mom, the thief, and (natch) the feisty feline join forces to rescue her, in a series of rooftop chase scenes that climax atop Notre Dame. At just over an hour, A Cat in Paris is sweetly old-fashioned and suitable for audiences of all ages, though staunch dog lovers may raise an objection or two. (1:07) Opera Plaza. (Eddy) 

Dark Shadows Conceptually, there’s nothing wrong with attempting to turn a now semi-obscure supernaturally themed soap opera with a five-year run in the late 1960s and early ’70s into a feature film. Particularly if the film brings together the sweetly creepy triumvirate of Tim Burton, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter and emerges during an ongoing moment for vampires, werewolves, and other things that go hump in the night. Depp plays long-enduring vampire Barnabas Collins, the undead scion of a once-powerful 18th-century New England family that by the 1970s — the groovy decade in which the bulk of the story is set — has suffered a shabby deterioration. Barnabas forms a pact with present-day Collins matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer) to raise the household — currently comprising her disaffected daughter, Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), her derelict brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his mournful young son, David (Gulliver McGrath), David’s live-in lush of a psychiatrist, Dr. Hoffman (Carter), and the family’s overtaxed manservant, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley) — to its former stature, while taking down a lunatic, love-struck, and rather vindictive witch named Angelique (Eva Green). The latter, a victim of unrequited love, is the cause of all Barnabas’s woes and, by extension, the entire clan’s, but Angelique can only be blamed for so much. Beyond her hocus-pocus jurisdiction is the film’s manic pileup of plot twists, tonal shifts, and campy scenery-chewing by Depp, a startling onslaught that no lava lamp joke, no pallid reaction shot, no room-demolishing act of paranormal carnality set to Barry White, and no cameo by Alice Cooper can temper. (2:00) SF Center. (Rapoport)

The Dictator As expected, The Dictator is, yet again, Sacha Baron Cohen doing his bumbling-foreigner shtick. Said character (here, a ruthless, spoiled North African dictator) travels to America and learns a heaping teaspoon of valuable lessons, which are then flung upon the audience — an audience which, by film’s end, has spent 80 minutes squealing at a no-holds-barred mix of disgusting gags, tasteless jokes, and schadenfreude. If you can’t forgive Cohen for carbon-copying his Borat (2006) formula, at least you can muster admiration for his ability to be an equal-opportunity offender (dinged: Arabs, Jews, African Americans, white Americans, women of all ethnicities, and green activists) — and for that last-act zinger of a speech. If The Dictator doesn’t quite reach Borat‘s hilarious heights, it’s still proudly repulsive, smart in spite of itself, and guaranteed to get a rise out of anyone who watches it. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Double Trouble When crooks nab a priceless painting from a Taipei museum, two security guards — wannabe hero Jay (Jaycee “Son of Jackie” Chan) and Chinese-tourist-on-vacation Ocean (Xia Yu) — reluctantly team up to recover the piece. A road trip of sorts ensues, laden with petty bickering, wacky melees, bonding moments, mistaken identity, gangsters both comical and sinister, and other buddy-comedy trappings. As expected, there are a few high-flying fight scenes; in the film’s production notes, director David Hsun-Wei Chang reveals he was inspired by the Rush Hour movies. Alas, Chan is neither as charismatic nor as breathtakingly nimble as his father (and, obvi, Xia is no Chris Tucker). It should be noted, however, that one of the slithery art thieves is played by underwear model Jessica C., famed in Hong Kong for her “police siren boobs.” So there’s that. (1:29) Metreon. (Eddy)

Elena The opening, almost still image of breaking dawn amid bare trees — the twigs in the foreground almost imperceptibly developing definition and the sky gradually growing ever lighter and pinker in the corners of the frame — beautifully exemplifies the crux of this well-wrought, refined noir, which spins slowly on the streams of dog-eat-dog survival that rush beneath even the most moneyed echelons of Moscow. Sixtyish former nurse Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is still little more than a live-in caretaker for Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), her affluent husband of almost 10 years. She sleeps in a separate bed in their modernist-chic condo and dutifully funnels money to her beloved layabout son and his family. Vladimir has less of a relationship with his rebellious bad-seed daughter (Yelena Lyadova), who may be too smart and hedonistic for her own good. When a certain unlikely reunion threatens Elena’s survival — and what she perceives as the survival of her own spawn — a kind of deadly dawn breaks over the seemingly obedient hausfrau, and she’s driven to desperate ends. Bathing his scenes in chilled blue light and velvety dark shadows, filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (2003’s The Return) keeps a detached but close eye on the proceedings while displaying an uncanny talent for plucking the telling detail out of the wash of daily routine and coaxing magnetic performances from his cast. (1:49) Lumiere. (Chun)

Headhunters Despite being the most sought-after corporate headhunter in Oslo, Roger (Aksel Hennie) still doesn’t make enough money to placate his gorgeous wife; his raging Napoleon complex certainly doesn’t help matters. Crime is, as always, the only solution, so Roger’s been supplementing his income by stealthily relieving his rich, status-conscious clients of their most expensive artworks (with help from his slightly unhinged partner, who works for a home-security company). When Roger meets the dashing Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones) — a Danish exec with a sinister, mysterious military past, now looking to take over a top job in Norway — he’s more interested in a near-priceless painting rumored to be stashed in Greve’s apartment. The heist is on, but faster than you can say “MacGuffin,” all hell breaks loose (in startlingly gory fashion), and the very charming Roger is using his considerable wits to stay alive. Based on a best-selling “Scandi-noir” novel, Headhunters is just as clever as it is suspenseful. See this version before Hollywood swoops in for the inevitable (rumored) remake. (1:40) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The Hunger Games Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is a teenager living in a totalitarian state whose 12 impoverished districts, as retribution for an earlier uprising, must pay tribute to the so-called Capitol every year, sacrificing one boy and one girl each to the Hunger Games. A battle royal set in a perilous arena and broadcast live to the Capitol as gripping diversion and to the districts as sadistic propaganda, the Hunger Games are, depending on your viewpoint, a “pageant of honor, courage, and sacrifice” or a brutal, pointless bloodbath involving children as young as 12. When her little sister’s name comes up in the ann­ual lottery, Katniss volunteers to take her place and is joined by a boy named Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), with whom she shares an old, unspoken bond. Tasked with translating to the screen the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s rabidly admired trilogy, writer-director Gary Ross (2003’s Seabiscuit, 1998’s Pleasantville) telescopes the book’s drawn-out, dread-filled tale into a manageable two-plus-hour entertainment, making great (and horrifying) use of the original work’s action, but losing a good deal of the narrative detail and emotional force. Elizabeth Banks is comic and unrecognizable as Effie Trinket, the two tributes’ chaperone; Lenny Kravitz gives a blank, flattened reading as their stylist, Cinna; and Donald Sutherland is sufficiently creepy and bloodless as the country’s leader, President Snow. More exceptionally cast are Woody Harrelson as Katniss and Peeta’s surly, alcoholic mentor, Haymitch Abernathy, and Stanley Tucci as games emcee Caesar Flickerman, flashing a bank of gleaming teeth at each contestant as he probes their dire circumstances with the oily superficiality of a talk show host. (2:22) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Hysteria Tanya Wexler’s period romantic comedy gleefully depicts the genesis of the world’s most popular sex toy out of the inchoate murk of Victorian quackishness. In this dulcet version of events, real-life vibrator inventor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is a handsome young London doctor with such progressive convictions as a belief in the existence of germs. He is, however, a man of his times and thus swallows unblinking the umbrella diagnosis of women with symptoms like anxiety, frustration, and restlessness as victims of a plague-like uterine disorder known as hysteria. Landing a job in the high-end practice of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), whose clientele consists entirely of dissatisfied housewives seeking treatments of “medicinal massage” and subsequent “parosysm,” Granville becomes acquainted with Dalrymple’s two daughters, the decorous Emily (Felicity Jones) and the first-wave feminist Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). A subsequent bout of RSI offers empirical evidence for the adage about necessity being the mother of invention, with the ever-underused Rupert Everett playing Edmund St. John-Smythe, Granville’s aristocratic friend and partner in electrical engineering. (1:35) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

The Intouchables Cries of “racism” seem a bit out of hand when it comes to this likable albeit far-from-challenging French comedy loosely based on a real-life relationship between a wealthy white quadriplegic and his caretaker of color. The term “cliché” is more accurate. And where were these critics when 1989’s Driving Miss Daisy and 2011’s The Help — movies that seem designed to make nostalgic honkies feel good about those fraught relationships skewed to their advantage—were coming down the pike? (It also might be more interesting to look at how these films about race always hinge on economies in which whites must pay blacks to interact with/educate/enlighten them.) In any case, Omar Sy, portraying Senegalese immigrant Driss, threatens to upset all those pundits’ apple carts with his sheer life force, even when he’s shaking solo on the dance floor to sounds as effortlessly unprovocative, and old-school, as Earth, Wind, and Fire. In fact, everything about The Intouchables is as old school as 1982’s 48 Hrs., spinning off the still laugh-grabbing humor that comes with juxtaposing a hipper, more streetwise black guy with a hapless, moneyed chalky. The wheelchair-bound Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is more vulnerable than most, and he has a hard time getting along with any of his nurses, until he meets Driss, who only wants his signature for his social services papers. It’s not long before the cultured, classical music-loving Philippe’s defenses are broken down by Driss’ flip, somewhat honest take on the follies and pretensions of high culture — a bigger deal in France than in the new world, no doubt. Director-writer Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano aren’t trying to innovate —they seem more set on crafting an effervescent blockbuster that out-blockbusters Hollywood — and the biggest compliment might be that the stateside remake is already rumored to be in the works. (1:52) Embarcadero. (Chun)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi Celebrity-chef culture has surely reached some kind of zeitgeist, what with the omnipresence of Top Chef and other cooking-themed shows, and the headlines-making power of people like Paula Deen (diabetes) and Mario Batali (sued for ripping off his wait staff). Unconcerned with the trappings of fame — you’ll never see him driving a Guy Fieri-style garish sports car — is Jiro Ono, 85-year-old proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, world-renowned sushi restaurant tucked into Tokyo’s Ginza station. Jiro, a highly-disciplined perfectionist who believes in simple, yet flavorful food, has devoted his entire life to the pursuit of “deliciousness” — to the point of sushi invading his dreams, as the title of David Gelb’s reverential documentary suggests. But Jiro Dreams of Sushi goes deeper than food-prep porn (though, indeed, there’s plenty of that); it also examines the existential conflicts faced by Jiro’s two middle-aged sons. Both were strongly encouraged to enter the family business — and in the intervening years, have had to accept the soul-crushing fact that no matter how good their sushi is, it’ll never be seen as exceeding the creations of their legendary father. (1:21) Bridge. (Eddy)

Lola Versus Greta Gerwig’s embattled late-twentysomething, the titular Lola, apologetically invokes the Saturn return to explain the chaos that enters her life when her emotionally underdeveloped boyfriend proposes, panics, and dumps her. Workaday elements of the industry-standard romantic comedy surface, lightly revised: a crass, loopy BFF (co-writer Zoe Lister Jones) who can’t find true love and says things like “I have to go wash my vagina”; a vaguely soulful male friend (Hamish Linklater, 2011’s The Future) who’s secretly harboring nonplatonic feelings (or maybe just an opportunistic streak); wacky yet vaguely successful Age of Aquarius parents (a somewhat toneless Debra Winger and a nicely gone-to-seed Bill Pullman). One can see why it would be tempting to blame a planet’s galactic travels for the solipsistic meandering that Lola engages in, bemusedly lurching, often under chemical influences, from one bout of poor decision-making to the next. She claims to be searching for a path out of the chaos into some calmer place (fittingly, she’s a comp lit Ph.D. candidate who’s writing her dissertation on silence), but as the movie transports us mercilessly from one scene of turmoil to the next, we have little reason to believe her. The script has funny moments, and Gerwig sometimes succeeds in making Lola feel like a charming disaster, but her personal discoveries, while certainly valuable, feel false and forced. (1:26) Metreon. (Rapoport)

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted (1:33) Balboa, Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio.

Marvel’s The Avengers The conflict — a mystical blue cube containing earth-shattering (literally) powers is stolen, with evil intent — isn’t the reason to see this long-hyped culmination of numerous prequels spotlighting its heroic characters. Nay, the joy here is the whole “getting’ the band back together!” vibe; director and co-writer Joss Whedon knows you’re just dying to see Captain America (Chris Evans) bicker with Iron Man (a scene-stealing Robert Downey Jr.); Thor (Chris Hemsworth) clash with bad-boy brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston); and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) get angry as often as possible. (Also part of the crew, but kinda mostly just there to look good in their tight outfits: Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.) Then, of course, there’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) running the whole Marvel-ous show, with one good eye and almost as many wry quips as Downey’s Tony Stark. Basically, The Avengers gives you everything you want (characters delivering trademark lines and traits), everything you expect (shit blowing up, humanity being saved, etc.), and even makes room for a few surprises. It doesn’t transcend the comic-book genre (like 2008’s The Dark Knight did), but honestly, it ain’t trying to. The Avengers wants only to entertain, and entertain it does. (2:23) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Men in Black III Why not? It’s been ten years since Men in Black II (the one where Lara Flynn Boyle and Johnny Knoxville — remember them? — played the villains), Will Smith has barely aged, and he hasn’t made a full-on comedy since, what, 2005’s Hitch? Here, he does a variation on his always-agreeable exasperated-guy routine, clashing with his grim, gimlet-eyed partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones, and in a younger incarnation, a spot-on Josh Brolin) in a plot that involves a vicious alien named Boris (Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement), time travel, Andy Warhol, the moon (as both space-exploration destination and modern-day space-jail location), and lines that only Smith’s delivery can make funny (“This looks like it comes from planet damn.“) It’s cheerful (save a bit of melodrama at the end), crisply paced, and is neither a must-see masterpiece nor something you should mindfully sleep through if it pops up among your in-flight selections. Oh, and it’s in 3D. Well, why not? (1:42) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Moonrise Kingdom Does Wes Anderson’s new film mark a live-action return to form after 2007’s disappointingly wan Darjeeling Limited? More or less. Does it tick all the Andersonian style and content boxes? Indubitably. In the most obvious deviation Anderson has taken with Moonrise, he gives us his first period piece, a romance set in 1965 on a fictional island off the New England coast. After a chance encounter at a church play, pre-teen Khaki Scout Sam (newcomer Jared Gilman) instantly falls for the raven-suited, sable-haired Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, ditto). The two become pen pals, and quickly bond over the shared misery of being misunderstood by both authority figures and fellow kids. The bespectacled Sam is an orphan, ostracized by his foster parents and scout troop (much to the dismay of its straight-arrow leader Edward Norton). Suzy despises her clueless attorney parents, played with gusto by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand in some of the film’s funniest and best scenes. When the two kids run off together, the whole thing begins to resemble a kind of tween version of Godard’s 1965 lovers-on the-lam fantasia Pierrot le Fou. But like most of Anderson’s stuff, it has a gauzy sentimentality more akin to Truffaut than Godard. Imagine if the sequence in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot and Richie run away to the Museum of Natural History had been given the feature treatment: it’s a simple yet inspired idea, and it becomes a charming little tale of the perils of growing up and selling out the fantasy. But it doesn’t feel remotely risky. It’s simply too damn tame. (1:37) California, Metreon, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

Music From the Big House See review at sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:27) Sundance Kabuki.

Peace, Love and Misunderstanding How is that even as a bona fide senior, Jane Fonda continues to embody this country’s ambivalence toward women? I suspect it’s a testament to her actorly prowess and sheer charisma that she’s played such a part in defining several eras’ archetypes — from sex kitten to counterculture-heavy Hanoi Jane to dressed-for-success feminist icon to aerobics queen to trophy wife. Here, among the talents in Bruce Beresford’s intergenerational chick-flick-gone-indie as a loud, proud, and larger-than-life hippie earth mama, she threatens to eclipse her paler, less colorful offspring, women like Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen, who ordinarily shine brighter than those that surround them. It’s ostensibly the tale of high-powered lawyer Diane (Keener): her husband (Kyle MacLachlan) has asked for a divorce, so in a not-quite-explicable tailspin, she packs her kids, Zoe (Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff), into the car and heads to Woodstock to see her artist mom Grace (Fonda) for the first time in two decades. Grace is beyond overjoyed — dying to introduce the grandchildren to her protests, outdoor concerts, and own personal growhouse — while urbanite Diane and her kids find attractive, natch, diversions in the country, in the form of Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Cole (Chace Crawford), and Tara (Marissa O’Donnell). Yet there’s a lot of troubled water for the mother and daughter to cross, in order to truly come together. Despite some strong characterization and dialogue, Peace doesn’t quite fly — or make much sense at its close — due to the some patchy storytelling: the schematic rom-com arch fails to provide adequate scaffolding to support the required leaps of faith. But that’s not to deny the charm of the highly identifiable, generous-spirited Grace, a familiar Bay Area archetype if there ever was one, who Fonda charges with the joy and sadness of fallible parent who was making up the rules as she went along. (1:36) Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Prometheus Ridley Scott’s return to outer space — after an extended stay in Russell Crowe-landia — is most welcome. Some may complain Prometheus too closely resembles Scott’s Alien (1979), for which it serves as a prequel of sorts. Prometheus also resembles, among others, The Thing (1982), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Event Horizon (1997). But I love those movies (yes, even Event Horizon), and I am totally fine with the guy who made Alien borrowing from all of them and making the classiest, most gorgeous sci-fi B-movie in years. Sure, some of the science is wonky, and the themes of faith and creation can get a bit woo-woo, but Prometheus is deep-space discombobulation at its finest, with only a miscast Logan Marshall-Green (apparently, cocky dude-bros are still in effect at the turn of the next millennium) marring an otherwise killer cast: Noomi Rapace as a dreamy (yet awesomely tough) scientist; Idris Elba as Prometheus‘ wisecracking captain; Charlize Theron as the Weyland Corportation’s icy overseer; and Michael Fassbender, giving his finest performance to date as the ship’s Lawrence of Arabia-obsessed android. (2:03) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Rock of Ages (2:03) California, Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

Safety Not Guaranteed San Francisco-born director Colin Trevorrow’s narrative debut feature Safety Not Guaranteed, written by Derek Connolly, has an improbable setup: not that rural loner Kenneth (Mark Duplass) would place a personal ad for a time travel partner (“Must bring own weapons”), but that a Seattle alt-weekly magazine would pay expenses for a vainglorious staff reporter (Jake Johnson, hilarious) and two interns (Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) to stalk him for a fluff feature over the course of several days. The publishing budget allowing that today is true science-fiction. But never mind. Inserting herself “undercover” when a direct approach fails, Plaza’s slightly goth college grad finds she actually likes obsessive, paranoid weirdo Kenneth, and is intrigued by his seemingly insane but dead serious mission. For most of its length Safety falls safely into the category of off-center indie comedics, delivering various loopy and crass behavior with a practiced deadpan, providing just enough character depth to achieve eventual poignancy. Then it takes a major leap — one it would be criminal to spoil, but which turns an admirable little movie into something conceptually surprising, reckless, and rather exhilarating. (1:34) Metreon, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Snow White and the Huntsman It’s unclear why the zeitgeist has blessed us this year with two warring iterations of the Snow White fairy tale, one broadly comedic (April’s Mirror Mirror), one starkly emo. But it was only natural that Kristen Stewart would land in the latter rendering, breaking open the hearts of swamp beasts and swordsmen alike with the chaste glory of her mien. As Snow White flees the henchmen and hired killers dispatched by her seriously evil stepmother, Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron), and traverses a blasted, virulent forest populated with hallucinogenic vapors and other life-threatening obstacles, Stewart need not act so much as radiate a dazzling benignity, weeping the tears of a martyr rather than a frightened young girl. (Unfortunately, when required to deliver a rallying declaration of war, she sounds as if she’s speaking in tongues after a heavy hit on the crack pipe.) It’s slightly uncomfortable to be asked, alongside a grieving, drunken huntsman (The Avengers’ Chris Hemsworth), a handful of dwarfs (including Ian McShane and Toby Jones), and the kingdom’s other suffering citizenry, to fall worshipfully in line behind such a creature. But first-time director Rupert Sanders’s film keeps pace with its lovely heroine visually, constructing a gorgeous world in which armies of black glass shatter on battlefields, white stags dissolve into hosts of butterflies, and a fairy sanctuary within the blighted kingdom is an eye-popping fantasia verging on the hysterical. Theron’s Ravenna, equipped in modernist fashion with a backstory for her sociopathic tendencies, is credible and captivating as an unhinged slayer of men, thief of youth, destroyer of kingdoms, and consumer of the hearts of tiny birds. (2:07) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

That’s My Boy (1:55) Metreon, SF Center.

Turn Me On, Dammit! The 15-year-old heroine of writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s Turn Me On, Dammit! is first heard in voice-over, flatly cataloging the over familiar elements of the small town in rural Norway where she lives — and first seen lying on the kitchen floor of her house sharing an intimate moment with a phone sex operator named Stig (Per Kjerstad). Largely ruled by her hormones and longing to get it on with someone other than herself and the disembodied Stig, Alma (Helene Bergsholm) spends large segments of her life unspooling sexual fantasies starring Artur (Matias Myren), the boy she has a crush on, and Sebjorn (Jon Bleiklie Devik), who runs the grocery store where she works and is the father of her two closest friends: burgeoning political activist Sara (Malin Bjorhovde) and full-fledged mean girl Ingrid (Beate Stofring). Back in real life, a strange and awkward physical interaction with Artur leads Alma, excited and confused, to describe the experience to her friends, a mistake that precipitously leads to total social ostracism among her peers. With the possible exception of some unnecessary dog reaction shots during the aforementioned opening scene, documentary maker Jacobsen’s first narrative feature film is an engaging and impressive debut, presenting a sympathetic and uncoy depiction of a young girl’s sexuality and exploiting the rich contrast between Alma’s gauzier fantasies and the realities of her waking world to poignantly comic effect. (1:16) Opera Plaza. (Rapoport)

The Woman in the Fifth A rumpled American writer with a hinted-at dark past (Ethan Hawke) shows up in Paris, to the horror of his French ex-wife and confused delight of his six-year-old daughter. An ill-advised nap on public transportation results in all of his bags being stolen; broke and out of sorts, he takes a grimy room above a café and a gig monitoring the surveillance-cam feed at what’s obviously some kind of illegal enterprise. During the day he stalks his daughter and romances both sophisticated Margit (Kristen Scott Thomas) and nubile Ania (Joanna Kulig); he also dodges his hostile neighbor (Mamadou Minte) and shady boss (Samir Guesmi). Based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel, the latest from Pawel Pawlikowski (2004’s My Summer of Love), offers some third-act twists (gory, distressing ones) that suggest Hawke’s character (and, by extension, the viewer) may not be perceiving reality with 100 percent accuracy. Moody, melancholy, not-entirely-satisfying stuff. (1:23) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

Your Sister’s Sister The new movie from Lynn Shelton — who directed star and (fellow mumblecore director) Mark Duplass in her shaggily amusing Humpday (2009) — opens somberly, at a Seattle wake where his Jack makes his deceased brother’s friends uncomfortable by pointing out that the do-gooder guy they’d loved just the last couple years was a bully and jerk for many years before his reformation. This outburst prompts an offer from friend-slash-mutual-crush Iris (Emily Blunt) that he get his head together for a few days at her family’s empty vacation house on a nearby island. Arriving via ferry and bike, he is disconcerted to find someone already in residence — Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), who’s grieving a loss of her own (she’s split with her girlfriend). Several tequila shots later, two Kinsey-scale opposites meet, which creates complications when Iris turns up the next day. A bit slight in immediate retrospect and contrived in its wrap-up, Shelton’s film is nonetheless insinuating, likable, and a little touching while you’re watching it. That’s largely thanks to the actors’ appeal — especially Duplass, who fills in a blunderingly lucky (and unlucky) character’s many blanks with lived-in understatement. (1:30) Albany, Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

 

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, and Lynn Rapoport. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete film listings, see www.sfbg.com.

OPENING

Bel Ami Judging from recent attempts to shake off the gloomy atmosphere and undead company of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson enjoys a good period piece, but hasn’t quite worked out how to help make one. Last year’s Depression-era Water for Elephants was a tepid romance, and Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s belle epoque–set Bel Ami is an ungainly, oddly paced adaptation of the Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name. A down-and-out former soldier of peasant stock, Georges Duroy (Pattinson) — or “Bel Ami,” as his female admirers call him — gains a brief entrée into the upper echelons of France’s fourth estate and parlays it into a more permanent set of social footholds, campaigning for the affections of a triumvirate of Parisian power wives (Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas) as he makes his ascent. His route is confusing, though; the film pitches forward at an alarming pace, its scenes clumsily stacked together with little character development or context to smooth the way, and Pattinson’s performance doesn’t clarify much. Duroy shifts perplexingly between rapacious and soulful modes, eyeing the ladies with a vaguely carnivorous expression as he enters drawing rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms, but leaving us with little sense of his true appetites or other motivations. (1:42) Clay, Smith Rafael. (Rapoport)

Double Trouble When crooks nab a priceless painting from a Taipei museum, two security guards — wannabe hero Jay (Jaycee “Son of Jackie” Chan) and Chinese-tourist-on-vacation Ocean (Xia Yu) — reluctantly team up to recover the piece. A road trip of sorts ensues, laden with petty bickering, wacky melees, bonding moments, mistaken identity, gangsters both comical and sinister, and other buddy-comedy trappings. As expected, there are a few high-flying fight scenes; in the film’s production notes, director David Hsun-Wei Chang reveals he was inspired by the Rush Hour movies. Alas, Chan is neither as charismatic nor as breathtakingly nimble as his father (and, obvi, Xia is no Chris Tucker). It should be noted, however, that one of the slithery art thieves is played by underwear model Jessica C., famed in Hong Kong for her “police siren boobs.” So there’s that. (1:29) Metreon. (Eddy)

Elena The opening, almost still image of breaking dawn amid bare trees — the twigs in the foreground almost imperceptibly developing definition and the sky gradually growing ever lighter and pinker in the corners of the frame — beautifully exemplifies the crux of this well-wrought, refined noir, which spins slowly on the streams of dog-eat-dog survival that rush beneath even the most moneyed echelons of Moscow. Sixtyish former nurse Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is still little more than a live-in caretaker for Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), her affluent husband of almost 10 years. She sleeps in a separate bed in their modernist-chic condo and dutifully funnels money to her beloved layabout son and his family. Vladimir has less of a relationship with his rebellious bad-seed daughter (Yelena Lyadova), who may be too smart and hedonistic for her own good. When a certain unlikely reunion threatens Elena’s survival — and what she perceives as the survival of her own spawn — a kind of deadly dawn breaks over the seemingly obedient hausfrau, and she’s driven to desperate ends. Bathing his scenes in chilled blue light and velvety dark shadows, filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (2003’s The Return) keeps a detached but close eye on the proceedings while displaying an uncanny talent for plucking the telling detail out of the wash of daily routine and coaxing magnetic performances from his performers. (1:49) Lumiere. (Chun)

Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted The animated zoo animals (voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer, and Jada Pinkett Smith) join a circus. Hence the clown wigs. (1:33)

Peace, Love and Misunderstanding How is that even as a bona fide senior, Jane Fonda continues to embody this country’s ambivalence toward women? I suspect it’s a testament to her actorly prowess and sheer charisma that she’s played such a part in defining several eras’ archetypes — from sex kitten to counterculture-heavy Hanoi Jane to dressed-for-success feminist icon to aerobics queen to trophy wife. Here, among the talents in Bruce Beresford’s intergenerational chick-flick-gone-indie as a loud, proud, and larger-than-life hippie earth mama, she threatens to eclipse her paler, less colorful offspring, women like Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen, who ordinarily shine brighter than those that surround them. It’s ostensibly the tale of high-powered lawyer Diane (Keener): her husband (Kyle MacLachlan) has asked for a divorce, so in a not-quite-explicable tailspin, she packs her kids, Zoe (Olsen) and Jake (Nat Wolff), into the car and heads to Woodstock to see her artist mom Grace (Fonda) for the first time in two decades. Grace is beyond overjoyed — dying to introduce the grandchildren to her protests, outdoor concerts, and own personal growhouse — while urbanite Diane and her kids find attractive, natch, diversions in the country, in the form of Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Cole (Chace Crawford), and Tara (Marissa O’Donnell). Yet there’s a lot of troubled water for the mother and daughter to cross, in order to truly come together. Despite some strong characterization and dialogue, Peace doesn’t quite fly — or make much sense at its close — due to the some patchy storytelling: the schematic rom-com arch fails to provide adequate scaffolding to support the required leaps of faith. But that’s not to deny the charm of the highly identifiable, generous-spirited Grace, a familiar Bay Area archetype if there ever was one, who Fonda charges with the joy and sadness of fallible parent who was making up the rules as she went along. (1:36) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Prometheus Ridley Scott returns to Alien (1979) turf with this sci-fi thriller starring Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace, and Guy Pearce. (2:03)

ONGOING

Bernie Jack Black plays the titular new assistant funeral director liked by everybody in small-town Carthage, Tex. He works especially hard to ingratiate himself with shrewish local widow Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), but there are benefits — estranged from her own family, she not only accepts him as a friend (then companion, then servant, then as virtual “property”), but makes him her sole heir. Richard Linklater’s latest is based on a true-crime story, although in execution it’s as much a cheerful social satire as I Love You Philip Morris and The Informant! (both 2009), two other recent fact-based movies about likable felons. Black gets to sing (his character being a musical theater queen, among other things), while Linklater gets to affectionately mock a very different stratum of Lone Star State culture from the one he started out with in 1991’s Slacker. There’s a rich gallery of supporting characters, most played by little-known local actors or actual townspeople, with Matthew McConaughey’s vainglorious county prosecutor one delectable exception. Bernie is its director’s best in some time, not to mention a whole lot of fun. (1:39) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

A Cat in Paris This year’s Best Animated Film nominees: big-budget entries Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, and eventual winner Rango, plus Chico and Rita, which opened just before Oscar night, and French mega-dark-horse A Cat in Paris. Sure, Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s film failed to cash in on 2011’s Paris craze, but it’s still a charming if featherweight noir caper, being released stateside in an English version that features the voices of Marcia Gay Harden and Anjelica Huston. A streetwise kitty named Dino spends his days hanging with Zoey, a little girl who’s gone mute since the death of her father — a cop killed in the line of duty. Zoey’s mother (Harden), also a cop, is hellbent on catching the murderer, a notorious crook named Costa who runs his criminal empire with Reservoir Dogs-style imprecision. At night, Dino sneaks out and accompanies an affable burglar on his prowlings. When Zoey falls into Costa’s clutches, her mom, the thief, and (natch) the feisty feline join forces to rescue her, in a series of rooftop chase scenes that climax atop Notre Dame. At just over an hour, A Cat in Paris is sweetly old-fashioned and suitable for audiences of all ages, though staunch dog lovers may raise an objection or two. (1:07) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

The Color Wheel Carlen Altman, a nervous comedian who moonlights as a Jewish rosary maker, was doing stand-up in Brooklyn when filmmaker Alex Ross Perry approached her about collaborating on a project. The idea for a brother-sister movie came to be: The Color Wheel, a droll and perverse take on vexed lives in transition, tinged with 16mm. Perry directed, produced, and edited the film while co-writing with Altman. When the film begins, a dopey JR (Altman) shows up at the apartment of her misanthropic brother Colin (Perry). JR convinces him to help move her stuff out of her professor ex-boyfriend’s place. Inevitably, their Northeastern road trip follows other tangents, taking the pair on a hilarious and sad journey that raises more questions than answers about their fraught relationship. They meet a lot of jerks, but no one more so than themselves; their characters, filterless with no desire to grow up or shut up, are far behind everyone they encounter. With all its zeitgeisty humor and lovably awful people, The Color Wheel takes some dark turns — it begins as a charming, dour comedy, but ends up viscerally queasy and pitiful, with its two leads as mixed-up as ever. (1:23) Roxie. (Ryan Lattanzio)

I Wish It’s tempting to hold Hirokazu Kore-eda’s I Wish up to that other kids adventure story in the theaters, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, but that’s a disservice to Anderson: his arch look back at an age of innocence comes off as loftily contrived in contrast to this gently empathetic, ground-level view of children’s dreams and desires, one that falls well short of preciousness, thanks to Kore-eda’s acute eye for a changing Japan. Brothers Koichi and Ryunosuke (real-life sibs Koki and Ohshiro Maeda) are living apart like their two parents: the former bunks with his mother (Nene Otsuka) and grandparents in Kagoshima, where he plots to get his parents together again and frets over the ash-spewing still-active volcano; the latter is busy enabling his laid-back guitar-playing father (Jo Odagiri of 2003’s Bright Future) on the other side of the island, where he grows fava beans, eats takeout, and hangs out with pals like budding actress Megumi (Kara Uchida). These offspring of Peter Pan-like parents, who have had a tough time growing up and fulfilling their own dreams, have been forced to grow up fast — but Koichi is pinning his hopes on something faster: the new bullet train line that will link his town with his brother’s. He gets it in his mind that if a wish is made when the first trains pass each other, a miracle, like his bickering parents’ reunion, will occur. The kids conspire to grab to that magical moment, by hook or crook, and a little help from an elderly couple that might have stepped out of an older, more gracious Japan, as rhapsodized by Yasujiro Ozu. And as with his devastating portrait of abandoned kids eking out a living on their own, Nobody Knows (2004), Kore-eda effortlessly coaxes great performances out of his child actors. Like Nobody Knows‘s Akira, Koichi and Ryunosuke are determined to persevere, post-familial meltdown, through all personal Armageddons, be they triggered by volcano, tsunami, or heartbreak. (2:08) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Chun)

Moonrise Kingdom Does Wes Anderson’s new film mark a live-action return to form after 2007’s disappointingly wan Darjeeling Limited? More or less. Does it tick all the Andersonian style and content boxes? Indubitably. In the most obvious deviation Anderson has taken with Moonrise, he gives us his first period piece, a romance set in 1965 on a fictional island off the New England coast. After a chance encounter at a church play, pre-teen Khaki Scout Sam (newcomer Jared Gilman) instantly falls for the raven-suited, sable-haired Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, ditto). The two become pen pals, and quickly bond over the shared misery of being misunderstood by both authority figures and fellow kids. The bespectacled Sam is an orphan, ostracized by his foster parents and scout troop (much to the dismay of its straight-arrow leader Edward Norton). Suzy despises her clueless attorney parents, played with gusto by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand in some of the film’s funniest and best scenes. When the two kids run off together, the whole thing begins to resemble a kind of tween version of Godard’s 1965 lovers-on the-lam fantasia Pierrot le Fou. But like most of Anderson’s stuff, it has a gauzy sentimentality more akin to Truffaut than Godard. Imagine if the sequence in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot and Richie run away to the Museum of Natural History had been given the feature treatment: it’s a simple yet inspired idea, and it becomes a charming little tale of the perils of growing up and selling out the fantasy. But it doesn’t feel remotely risky. It’s simply too damn tame. (1:37) Metreon, Sundance Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

Snow White and the Huntsman It’s unclear why the zeitgeist has blessed us this year with two warring iterations of the Snow White fairy tale, one broadly comedic (April’s Mirror Mirror), one starkly emo. But it was only natural that Kristen Stewart would land in the latter rendering, breaking open the hearts of swamp beasts and swordsmen alike with the chaste glory of her mien. As Snow White flees the henchmen and hired killers dispatched by her seriously evil stepmother, Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron), and traverses a blasted, virulent forest populated with hallucinogenic vapors and other life-threatening obstacles, Stewart need not act so much as radiate a dazzling benignity, weeping the tears of a martyr rather than a frightened young girl. (Unfortunately, when required to deliver a rallying declaration of war, she sounds as if she’s speaking in tongues after a heavy hit on the crack pipe.) It’s slightly uncomfortable to be asked, alongside a grieving, drunken huntsman (The Avengers’ Chris Hemsworth), a handful of dwarfs (including Ian McShane and Toby Jones), and the kingdom’s other suffering citizenry, to fall worshipfully in line behind such a creature. But first-time director Rupert Sanders’s film keeps pace with its lovely heroine visually, constructing a gorgeous world in which armies of black glass shatter on battlefields, white stags dissolve into hosts of butterflies, and a fairy sanctuary within the blighted kingdom is an eye-popping fantasia verging on the hysterical. Theron’s Ravenna, equipped in modernist fashion with a backstory for her sociopathic tendencies, is credible and captivating as an unhinged slayer of men, thief of youth, destroyer of kingdoms, and consumer of the hearts of tiny birds. (2:07) Metreon, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport) *

Little runaways

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arts@sfbg.com

FILM It’s hard to make any grand pronouncements about Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Does the Boy King of Quirk’s new film mark a live-action return to form after 2007’s disappointingly wan Darjeeling Limited? More or less. Does it tick all the Andersonian style and content boxes? Indubitably.

In the most obvious deviation Anderson has taken with Moonrise, aside from a new font for the title sequence (Futura, we hardly knew ye), he gives us his first period piece. The tale is set in 1965, when New Penzance Island (entirely fictional, but ostensibly off the New England coast) is populated by children who would rather listen to educational records about British composer Benjamin Britten on their portable turntables than the latest Stones album — ironically, this is perhaps Anderson’s only film not to feature any ’60s British Invasion pop. (There is, however, plenty of Hank Williams on the soundtrack to lend some low-fi kitsch.)

After a chance encounter at a church play (Noye’s Fludde, Britten’s operatic version of Noah and the ark), pre-teen Khaki Scout Sam (newcomer Jared Gilman) instantly falls for the raven-suited, sable-haired Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward, ditto). It’s not hard to understand why — Hayward’s sad doe eyes and petulant mouth bring to mind a mini-version of the prototypical Godard femme fatale; she’s Anna Karina in a training bra. The two become pen pals, and quickly bond over the shared misery of being misunderstood by both authority figures and fellow kids.

The bespectacled, corncob pipe–smoking Sam is an orphan, ostracized by his foster parents and scout troop (much to the dismay of its straight-arrow leader Edward Norton). Suzy despises her clueless attorney parents, played with gusto by Bill Murray and Frances McDormand in some of the film’s funniest and best scenes (they both call each other “counselor” when arguing). Suzy’s mother has cuckolded her dad by having an affair with island cop Bruce Willis (in full middle-age-man mode, looking a bit like a decrepit Tintin), who takes an interest in the troubled Sam.

But that interest can’t stop the two kids from running off together into the woods to play Blue Lagoon. It’s hard to blame them. “Does it concern you that your daughter’s just run away from home?” Mrs. Bishop asks her husband. “That’s a loaded question,” he responds after a significant beat. The whole thing begins to resemble a kind of tween version of Godard’s 1965 lovers-on the-lam fantasia Pierrot le Fou. (Suzy even stabs a boy with scissors in a pivotal scene.) But like most of Anderson’s stuff, it has a gauzy sentimentality more akin to Truffaut than Godard.

Imagine if the sequence in 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums where Margot and Richie run away to the Museum of Natural History had been given the feature treatment. It’s a simple yet inspired idea. And it becomes a charming little tale of the perils of growing up and selling out the fantasy. It’s also very funny — any movie that features Tilda Swinton, bedecked in navy cape and jaunty hat, as a soulless bureaucrat who refers to herself exclusively as “Social Services,” can’t be all wrong.

Still, something is missing. Much of Anderson’s wit and charm stems from a postmodern out-of-time quality, a sense of existence just this side of real. But that ironic detachment seems to be methodically sapping his ability to make a different kind of love connection: the one between his onscreen romance and his audience’s collective heart. Yes, it’s beautiful, exotic, lovely, and romantic (in both the lower-case and upper-case “R” senses). But it doesn’t feel remotely risky. And so it doesn’t seem real. In a word, it’s simply too damn tame.

Even when Hurricane Maybelline descends on the island, there is never any sense of mortal danger, emotional or otherwise. At one point Sam gets cold-cocked by a bolt of lightning, quickly rises as his head still smokes, and announces, “I’m okay.” I don’t think anyone in the audience was surprised. Even the possibility of the Great Flood itself washing everything away seems a bit of a skin game.

As his characters do, Wes likes his toys. I like his toys as well. But I wonder if it might be time for him, like Sam and Suzy, to grow up a little and put away some childish things. He can feel free to hold onto the portable turntable, though — especially if he puts on some old Stones records.

 

MOONRISE KINGDOM opens Fri/1 in San Francisco.

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

*Crazy Horse Does the documentary genre need an injection of sex appeal? Leave it to ground-breaking documentarian Frederick Wiseman to do just that, with this hilarious, keenly-observed look into Paris’s rightfully legendary Crazy Horse Paris cabaret. For 10 weeks, the filmmaker immersed himself in all aspects of preparation going into a new show, Désirs, by choreographer Philippe Decouflé, and uncovers the guts, discipline, organizational entanglements, and genuine artistry that ensues backstage to produce the at-times laugh-out-loud OTT (e.g., the many routines in which the perky, planet-like posterior is highlighted), at-times truly remarkable numbers (the girl-on-girl spaceship fantasia; the subtle, surreal number that bounces peek-a-boo body parts off a mirrored surface) onstage — moments that should inspire burlesque performers and dance aficionados alike with the sheer imaginative possibilities of dancing in the buff, with a side of brain-teasing titillation, of course. Always silently commenting on the action, Wiseman pokes quiet fun (at the dancer vigorously brushing the horse-hair tail attached to her rear, the obsessed art director, and the sound guy who’s a ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Boogie Nights nebbish) while patiently paying respect to the mechanics behind the magic (Decouflé, among others, arguing with management for more time to improve the show, despite the beyond-rigorous seven-days-a-week, twice- to thrice-daily schedule). Crazy Horse provides marvelous proof that the battle of seduction begins with the brain. (2:08) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Chun)
Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax Dr. Seuss’ environmental fable comes to (3D, CG-animated) life, with Danny DeVito voicing the iconic title creature. (1:26) Balboa, Presidio, Shattuck.

Project X Nope, not a remake of the 1987 Matthew-Broderick-befriends-a-chimp flick. This one’s a comedy about a chaotic high school party. (1:28) California.

*Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie See Trash. (1:32) Lumiere, Shattuck.

Undefeated Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who previously teamed up on a 2008 doc about beer pong, have a more serious subject for their latest tale: the unlikely heroics of an inner-city Memphis, Tenn. high school football team. The title refers more to the collective spirit rather than the (still pretty damn good) record of the Manassas Tigers, a team comprised of youths challenged by less-than-ideal home lives and anti-authority attitude problems that stem from troubles running deeper than typical teenage rebellion. Into an environment seemingly tailored to assure the kids’ failure steps coach Bill Courtney. He’s white, they’re all African American; he’s fairly well-off, while most of them live below the poverty line. Still, he’s able to instill confidence in them, both on and off the field, with focus on three players in particular: the athletically-gifted, academically-challenged O.C., who gets a Blind Side-style boost from one of Courtney’s assistant coaches; sensitive brain Money, sidelined by a devastating injury; and hot-tempered wild card Chavis, who eventually learns the importance of teamwork. With the heavy-hitting endorsement of celebrity exec producer Sean Combs, Undefeated is a high-quality entry into the "inspiring sports doc" genre: it offers an undeniably uplifting story and sleek production values. But it’s a little too familiar to be called the best documentary of the year, despite its recent anointing at the Oscars. If it was gonna be a sports flick, why not the superior, far more complex (yet not even nominated) Senna? (1:53) SF Center. (Eddy)

*We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s inevitable — whenever a seemingly preventable tragedy occurs, there’s public outcry to the tune of "How could this happen?" But after the school shooting in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the more apt question is "How could this not happen?" Lynne Ramsay (2002’s Morvern Callar) — directing from the script she co-adapted from Lionel Shriver’s novel — uses near-subliminal techniques to stir up atmospheric unease from the very start, with layered sound design and a significant, symbolic use of the color red. While other Columbine-inspired films, including Elephant and Zero Day (both 2003), have focused on their adolescent characters, Kevin revolves almost entirely around Eva Khatchadourian (a potent Tilda Swinton) — grief-stricken, guilt-riddled mother of a very bad seed. The film slides back and forth in time, allowing the tension to build even though we know how the story will end, since it’s where the movie starts: with Eva, alone in a crappy little house, working a crappy little job, moving through life with the knowledge that just about everyone in the world hates her guts. Kevin is very nearly a full-blown horror movie, and the demon-seed stuff does get a bit excessive. But it’s hard to determine if those scenes are "real life" or simply the way Eva remembers them, since Kevin is so tightly aligned with Eva’s point of view. Though she’s miserable in the flashbacks, the post-tragedy scenes are even thicker with terror; the film’s most unsettling sequence unfolds on Halloween, horror’s favorite holiday; Eva drives past a mob of costumed trick-or-treaters as Buddy Holly’s "Everyday" (one of several inspired music choices) chimes on the soundtrack. Masked faces are turn to stare — accusingly? Coincidentally? Do they even know she’s Kevin’s mother? — with nightmarish intensity heightened by slow motion. And indeed, "Everyday" Eva deals with accepting her fate; the film is sympathetic to her even while suggesting that she may actually be responsible. For a longer review of this film, and an interview with director Ramsay, visit www.sfbg.com/pixel_vision. (1:52) (Eddy)

ONGOING

Act of Valor (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki.

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — "he" has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor "transform," and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Opera Plaza, Presidio. (Harvey)

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, "I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist," and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) Balboa, California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much "Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue" — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Opera Plaza, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma ("hubris" is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max "son of John" Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s "self-shot" structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the "common people" when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Bridge. (Harvey)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed "not enough" for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Four Star, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (1:36) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center.

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The meeting of Stieg Larsson’s first "Millennium" book and David Fincher promised fireworks, as he’s a director who can be equally vivid and exacting with just the elements key to the series: procedural detail, obsession, violence, tweaked genre conventions, mind games, haunted protagonists, and expansive story arcs. But perhaps because this possible franchise launch had to be rushed into production to ride the Larsson wave, what should have been a terrific matchup turns out to be just a good one — superior in some stylistic departments (notably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing score), but overall neither an improvement nor a disappointment in comparison to the uninspired but effective 2009 Swedish film version. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the muckraking Stockholm journalist whose public disgrace after a failed expose of a suspect corporate tycoon makes him the perfect candidate for an unexpected assignment: staying sequestered in the wealthy, warring Vanger clan’s island home to secretly investigate a teenage girl’s disappearance and presumed murder 40 years ago. His testy helpmate is the singular Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), antisocial hacker, researcher, and ex-mental patient par excellence. Nearly three hours long, the compressed, slightly altered (get over it) storyline nonetheless feels rushed at times; Fincher manages the rare feat of making mostly internet research exciting in filmic terms, yet oddly the book’s more shocking episodes of sex and/or mayhem don’t have the memorable impact one might expect from him. The leads are fine, as is the big support cast of recognizable faces (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, etc.) But the knockout suspense, atmosphere, and urgency one hoped for isn’t present in this intelligent, not entirely satisfying treatment. On the other hand, maybe those who’ve already read the books and seen the prior films have already had so much exposure to this material that a revelatory experience is no longer possible. (2:38) Castro. (Harvey)

Gone Still-shaky if now highly self-defensive Jill (Amanda Seyfried) was abducted from her bed a year ago, thrown into a deep hole in a forest outside Portland, Ore., and escaped death only by overcoming her barely-glimpsed captor. Or so she insists — the police never found any corroborating evidence, and given Jill’s history of mental instability, wrote off her whole purported adventure as delusional. When sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) goes inexplicably missing the morning of an important exam, however, Jill is convinced the serial kidnapper-killer has struck again, going off on a frantic manhunt of her own with no help from the authorities. There is nothing spectacularly wrong with Gone, but nothing right, either — to justify the ponying up of cash money at a theater these days you have to offer something a little more than the routine execution of a derivative, uninspired script with little suspense but plenty of plot holes. That sort of thing is best experienced at a sleepless 2 a.m. on cable, for free. (1:34) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Four Star, Presidio, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*In Darkness Agnieszka Holland is that kind of filmmaker who can become a well known, respectable veteran without anyone being quite sure what those decades have added up to. Her mentor was Andrzej Wadja, the last half-century’s leading Polish director (among those who never left). He helped shape a penchant for heavy historical drama and a sometimes clunky style not far from his own. She commenced her international career with 1985’s Angry Harvest, about the amorous relationship between a Polish man and the Austrian, a Jewish woman, he hides during Nazi occupation. Her one indispensable feature is 1990’s Europa, Europa, an ideal vehicle for her favored mix of the grotesque, sober, and factual — following a Jewish boy who passed as Aryan German. The new In Darkness is her best since then, and it can’t be chance that this too dramatizes a notably bizarre case of real-life peril and survival under the Nazis. Its protagonist is Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), an ordinary family man in Lvov (Poland then, Ukraine now) who’s not above exploiting the disarray of occupation and war to make ends meet. A sewer inspector, he uses his knowledge of underground tunnels to hide Jews who can pay enough when even the fenced-off ghetto is no longer safe. For such a long, oppressive, and literally dark film, this one passes quickly, maintaining tension as well as a palpable physical discomfort that doubtlessly suggests just a fraction what the refugees actually suffered. In Darkness isn’t quite a great movie, but it’s a powerful experience. At the end it’s impossible to be unmoved, not least because the director’s resistance toward Spielbergian exaltation insists on the banal and everyday, even in human triumph. (2:25) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s "gumption" as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the "real England." That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, Marina, Vogue. (Harvey)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is "well-rounded" in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and "magical" Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Clay, Four Star, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Four Star. (Eddy)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and a certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David "Date Rape" Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*Roadie Michael Cuesta’s first film as both director and writer (again co-authoring with brother Gerald) since 2001’s startling debut feature L.I.E. is also his best work since then. After nearly a quarter-centurty spent schlepping equipment for Blue Oyster Cult — the arty metal band ("Don’t Fear the Reaper," i.e. "more cowbell!") that was already sliding from the spotlight when he signed on — Jimmy Testergross (Ron Eldard) is fired, the reasons unknown to us. With nowhere else to go, he lands on the doorstep of his childhood home in Queens, where he hasn’t been seen in at least 20 years. Mom (Lois Smith) is going senile, though somehow her disapproval comes through with perfect clarity (and hasn’t changed in all that time). Seeking a liquid solace at a bar, our hero instead runs into Randy (Bobby Cannavale), who bullied him mercilessly way back when — and is now married to "Jimmy Testicle’s" still-hot former girlfriend Nikki (Jill Hennessey), who has rock-star aspirations of her own. Taking place over less than 24 hours’ span, Roadie is a very small character study, but a well-observed one. "Developmentally stunted by rock ‘n’ roll," as one character puts it (when it emerges 40-something Jimmy has never learned to make coffee for himself), its protagonist is the kind of likable boy-man loser usually found in Fountains of Wayne songs, an aging lifelong air guitarist pining over good old days that probably weren’t even that good. His nostalgia is as touchingly hapless as his dubious future. (1:35) SF Film Society Cinema. (Harvey)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — "Bourne" there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from "bad guy" Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but the sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, there are details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the characters’ speech rhythms, down to the "sou ka" affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) California, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the "movie stars who can also act" variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D (2:16) SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

*Straight Outta Hunters Point 2 In 2001, filmmaker Kevin Epps turned a camera on his own neighborhood: Bayview-Hunters Point, the southeastern San Francisco community best-known by outsiders for Candlestick Park, toxic pollution, and gang violence. Straight Outta Hunters Point was an eye-opener not just locally but internationally, as its runaway success opened doors for Epps to travel with the film and establish his career. These days, Epps is no longer an emerging talent — he’s a full-time independent filmmaker with multiple credits (including The Black Rock, a documentary about Alcatraz’s African American inmates, and hip-hop film Rap Dreams), collaborations (with Current TV and others), and an artist fellowship at the de Young Museum under his belt. For his newest project, he returns to the scene of his first work. He no longer resides in Bayview-Hunters Point, but he still lives close by, and he’s never lost touch with the community that inspired the first film and encouraged him to make its follow-up. Described by Epps as a "continuation of the conversation" launched by the first film, SOHP 2 investigates the community as it stands today, with both external (redevelopment) and internal (violence) pressures shaping the lives of those who live there. It’s a raw, real story that unspools with urgency and the unvarnished perspective of an embedded eyewitness. (1:20) Roxie. (Eddy)

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at "the Circus" to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds (1:51) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck.

"2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated" Lumiere, Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and "weird" hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

*Wanderlust When committed Manhattanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston) find themselves in over their heads after George loses his job, the two set off to regroup in Atlanta, with the reluctantly accepted help of George’s repellent brother Rick (Ken Marino). Along the way, they stumble upon Elysium, a patchouli-clouded commune out in the Georgia backcountry whose members include original communard Carvin (Alan Alda), a nudist novelist-winemaker named Wayne (Joe Lo Truglio), a glowingly pregnant hippie chick named Almond (Lauren Ambrose), and smarmy, sanctimonious, charismatic leader Seth (Justin Theroux). After a short, violent struggle to adapt to life under Rick’s roof, the couple find themselves returning to Elysium to give life in an intentional community a shot, a decision that George starts rethinking when Seth makes a play for his wife. Blissed-out alfresco yoga practice, revelatory ayahuasca tea-induced hallucinations, and lectures about the liberating effects of polyamory notwithstanding, the road to enlightenment proves to be paved with sexual jealousy, alienation, placenta-soup-eating rituals, and group bowel movements. Writer-director David Wain (2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, 2008’s Role Models) — who shares writing credits with Marino — embraces the hybrid genre of horror comedy in which audience laughter is laced with agonized embarrassment, and his cast gamely partake in the group hug, particularly Theroux and Rudd, who tackles a terrifyingly lengthy scene of personal debasement with admirable gusto. (1:38) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

W.E. Madonna’s first directorial feature, 2008’s Filth and Wisdom, was so atrocious, and the early word on this second effort so vitriolic, that there’s a temptation to give W.E. too much credit simply for not being a disgrace. Co-written by Madge and Alek Keshishian, it’s about two women in gilded cages. One is Wallis Simpson (the impressive Andrea Riseborough), a married American socialite who scandalized the world by divorcing her husband and running about with Edward, Prince of Wales (James D’Arcy), who had to abdicate the English throne in order to marry her in 1936. The other is fictive Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a childless Manhattan socialite in the late 1990s who’s neglected by her probably-unfaithful husband (Richard Coyle). Over-eagerly intertwined despite their trite-at-best overlaps (the main one being Wally’s obsession with Wallis), these two strands hold attention for a while. But eventually they grow turgid. We’re presumably meant to be carried away by their True Love, but the film doesn’t succeed in making Wallis and Edward seem more than two petulant, shallow snobs who were fortunate to find each other, but didn’t necessarily make one another better or more interesting people. (It also alternately denies and glosses over the couple’s fascist-friendly politics, which became an embarrassment as England fought Germany in World War II.) Meanwhile, Wally is a mopey blank too easily belittled by her spouse, and too handily rescued by a Prince Charming, or rather "Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard" (Oscar Isaac) working at Sotheby’s during an auction of the late royal couple’s estate. As is so often the case with Madonna, she seems to be saying something here, but precisely what is murky and probably not worth sussing
out. Likewise, the attention to showy surface aesthetics — in particular Arianne Phillips’ justifiably Oscar-nominated costumes — is fastidious, revealing, and to an extent satisfying in itself. Somewhat ambitious and in several ways quite well crafted, the handsomely appointed W.E. isn’t bad (surely it wouldn’t have attracted such hostility if directed by anyone else), but the flaws that finally suffocate it reach right down to its conceptual gist. There is, however, one lovely moment toward the end: Riseborough’s Wallis, a well-preserved septuagenarian, dancing an incongruous yet supremely self-assured twist on request for her bedridden husband. (1:59) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

The Woman in Black Daniel Radcliffe (a.k.a. Harry Potter) plays a grieving young widower in an old-fashioned ghost story, set in the era of spirit hands and other visitations from beyond the veil. But while Victorian séances were generally aimed at the dearly departed, the titular visitant (Liz White), who haunts the isolated estate of Eel Marsh House and its environs, is a vindictive, mean-spirited creature, avenging the long-ago loss of her child by wreaking havoc and heartbreak among the families of the nearby village, among them a local landowner (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer). Radcliffe’s character, a lawyer named Arthur Kipps, has been tasked with settling the affairs of the mansion’s recently deceased owner, an assignment that requires sifting through mounds of dusty, crumpled ephemera in one of the creakiest, squeakiest buildings ever constructed. Set at the end of a narrow spit of land that disappears into the surrounding wetlands when the tide is high, Eel Marsh House is a charming place to be marooned after dark. But no amount of horrified screams from the audience will keep Kipps from his duties, though it’s hard to make much headway amid the unrelenting creepiness. Nearly every moment brings a fresh inexplicable thumping noise from an upper floor; a new room full of dead-eyed dolls that Kipps has no business wandering into; another freakishly screaming face next to his as he gazes out the window. The house is a richly textured set piece; the horror is of the sort that makes you jump and then laugh, both at the filmmakers, for springing the same tricks on you over and over, and at yourself, for falling prey to them every time. (1:36) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

INDIEFEST

The 14th San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs through Feb 23 at the Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St, SF. For tickets (most films $11) and schedule info, visit www.sfindie.com.

OPENING

*Chico and Rita This Spain-U.K. production is at heart a very old-fashioned musical romance lent novelty by its packaging as a feature cartoon. Chico (voiced by Eman Xor Oña) is a struggling pianist-composer in pre-Castro Havana who’s instantly smitten by the sight and sound of Rita (Limara Meneses, with Idania Valdés providing vocals), a chanteuse similarly ripe for a big break. Their stormy relationship eventually sprawls, along with their careers, to Manhattan, Hollywood, Paris, Las Vegas, and Havana again, spanning decades as well as a few large bodies of water. This perpetually hot, cold, hot, cold love story isn’t very complicated or interesting — it’s pretty much "Boy meets girl, generic complications ensue" — nor is the film’s simple graphics style (reminiscent of 1970s Ralph Bakshi, minus the sleaze) all that arresting, despite the established visual expertise of Fernando Trueba’s two co directors Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando. When a dream sequence briefly pays specific homage to the modernist animation of the ’50s-early ’60s, Chico and Rita delights the eye as it should throughout. Still, it’s pleasant enough to the eye, and considerably more than that to the ear — there’s new music in a retro mode from Bebo Valdes, and plenty of the genuine period article from Monk, Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo and more. If you’ve ever jones’d for a jazzbo’s adult Hanna Barbera feature (complete with full-frontal cartoon nudity — female only, of course), your dream has come true. (1:34) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Nicolas Cage returns as the flaming-skull’d, motorcycle-riding anti-hero. This time in 3D! (1:36) Shattuck.

*Granito: How to Nail a Dictator Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is acclaimed documentarian Pamela Yates’ follow-up to her 1983 doc about the Guatemalan civil war, When the Mountains Tremble. "How does each of us weave our responsibilities into the fabric of history?" Yates wonders in her introspective voice-over. When a human-rights lawyer working to charge Guatemalan military leaders with genocide asks Yates for her Mountains outtakes, the filmmaker scours her archives, digging for evidence and eventually becoming deeply involved in the case. Granito is a legal thriller, but it’s also a personal journey, for Yates and, most potently, survivors still traumatized by Guatemala’s years of repression and violence. San Francisco lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, featured in the film as the lead lawyer in the 2006 genocide case when it was presented to the Spanish National Court, will be in attendance at this screening. (1:43) Balboa. (Eddy)

Love Billed as "the ultimate romantic comedy," this import — starring Shu Qi and a host of other Chinese and Taiwanese megastars — proves Valentine’s Day isn’t merely a stateside obsession. (2:07) Metreon.

Margaret Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is an Upper West Side teen living with her successful actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron, wife to writer-director Kenneth Lonergan) — dad (Lonergan) lives in Santa Monica with his new spouse — and going through normal teenage stuff. Her propensity for drama, however, is kicked into high gear when she witnesses (and inadvertently causes) the traffic death of a stranger. Initially fibbing a bit to protect both herself and the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) involved, she later has second thoughts, increasingly pursuing a path toward "justice" that variably affects others including the dead woman’s friend (Jeannie Berlin), mom’s new suitor (Jean Reno), teachers at Lisa’s private school Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), etc. Lonergan is a fine playwright and uneven sometime scenarist who made a terrific screen directorial debut with 2000’s You Can Count On Me (which also featured Ruffalo, Broderick and Smith-Cameron). He appears to have intended Margaret as a pulse-taking of privileged Manhattanites’ comingled rage, panic, confusion, and guilt after 9-11. But if that’s the case, then this convoluted story provides a garbled metaphor at best. It might best be taken as a messy, intermittently potent study of how someone might become the kind of person who’ll spend the rest of their lives barging into other people’s affairs, creating a mess, assuming the moral high ground in a stubborn attempt to "fix" it, then making everything worse while denying any personal responsibility. Certainly that’s the person Lisa appears to be turning into, though it’s unclear whether Lonergan intends her to be seen that way. Indeed, despite some sharply written confrontations and good performances, it’s unclear what Lonergan intended here at all — and since he’s been famously fiddling with Margaret‘s (still-problematic) editing since late 2005, one might guess he never really figured that out himself. (2:30) SF Film Society Cinema. (Harvey)

Rampart Fans of Dexter and certain dark knight will empathize with this final holdout for rogue law enforcement, LAPD-style, in the waning days of the last century. And Woody Harrelson makes it easy for everyone else to summon a little sympathy for this devil in a blue uniform: he slips so completely behind the sun- and booze-burnt face of David "Date Rape" Brown, an LAPD cop who ridicules young female cops with the same scary, bullying certainty that he applies to interrogations with bad guys. The picture is complicated, however, by the constellation of women that Date Rape has sheltered himself with. Always cruising for other lonely hearts like lawyer Linda (Robin Wright), he still lives with the two sisters he once married (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and their daughters, including the rebellious Helen (Brie Larson), who seems to see her father for who he is — a flawed, flailing anti-hero suffering from severe testosterone poisoning and given to acting out. Harrelson does an Oscar-worthy job of humanizing that everyday monster, as director Oren Moverman (2009’s The Messenger), who cowrote the screenplay with James Ellroy, takes his time to blur out any residual judgement with bokeh-ish points of light while Brown — a flip, legit side of Travis Bickle — just keeps driving, unable to see his way out of the darkness. (1:48) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*The Secret World of Arrietty It’s been far too long between 2008’s Ponyo, the last offering from Studio Ghibli, and this feature-length adaptation of Mary Norton’s children’s classic, The Borrowers, but sheer beauty of the studio’s hand-drawn animation and the effortless wonder of its tale more than make up for the wait. This U.S. release, under the very apropos auspices of Walt Disney Pictures, comes with an American voice cast (in contrast with the U.K. version), and the transition appears to be seamless — though, of course, the background is subtly emblazoned with kanji, details like the dinnertime chopsticks, and the speech rhythms, down to the "sou ka" affirmative that peppers all Japanese dialogue. Here in this down-low, hybridized realm, the fearless, four-inches-tall Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler) has grown up imaginative yet lonely, believing her petite family is the last of their kind: they’re Borrowers, a race of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of full-sized human’s dwellings and take what they need to survive. Despite the worries of her mother Homily (Amy Poehler), Arrietty begins to embark on borrowing expeditions with her father Pod (Will Arnett) — there are crimps in her plans, however: their house’s new resident, a sickly boy named Shawn (David Henrie), catches a glimpse of Arrietty in the garden, and caretaker Hara (Carol Burnett) has a bit of an ulterior motive when it comes to rooting out the wee folk. Arrietty might not be for everyone — some kids might churn in their seats with ADD-style impatience at this graceful, gentle throwback to a pre-digital animation age — but in the care of first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote co-wrote the screenplay, Arrietty will transfix other youngsters (and animation fans of all ages) with the glorious detail of its natural world, all beautifully amplified and suffused with everyday magic when viewed through the eyes of a pocket-sized adventurer. (1:35) California, Presidio. (Chun)

Thin Ice One of Greg Kinnear’s specialties is the lovable loser — the guy who’s clearly an absolute scoundrel, but you can’t outright hate him, because you sense that he used to be a decent fellow once upon a time. In Thin Ice, his insurance-agent character, Mickey, is very much in this vein: visibly weary, yet still handsome; not entirely soulless, but also not above exploiting an old man for financial gain. In some ways, Thin Ice recalls last year’s Win Win in its suggestion that crime is an increasingly tempting path out of sagging middle-class desperation. One suspects that Thin Ice director and co-writer Jill Sprecher also wouldn’t mind comparisons to 1996’s Fargo, another quirky noir set in the snowy Midwest. But Thin Ice is no Fargo, or even as good as Win Win, despite showy supporting turns by Alan Arkin, Bob Balaban, and Billy Crudup. Its undoing is an abrupt final act that thinks it’s far more clever than it actually is. (1:54) Shattuck. (Eddy)

This Means War McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies, 2009’s Terminator Salvation) stretches our understanding of the term "romantic comedy" in this tale of two grounded CIA agents (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) who use their downtime to compete for the love of a perky, workaholic consumer-products tester (Reese Witherspoon). Broadening the usage of "comedy" are scenes in which best bros and partners FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy) spend large portions of their agency’s budget on covert surveillance ops targeting the joint object of their affection, Lauren (Witherspoon). Expanding our notions of the romantic impulse, This Means War jettisons chocolate, roses, final-act sprints through airports, and other such trite gestures in favor of B&E, micro-camera installations, and wiretapping — the PATRIOT Act–style violation of privacy as feverish expression of amour. Without letting slip any spoilers about the eventual lucky winner of the competition, let it simply be said that at no point is the prize afforded the opportunity to comment on the two men’s überstalkery style of courtship, though the movie has to end rather abruptly to accomplish that feat. But hey, in the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, who’s feeling nitpicky? And besides, the real relationship at stake in this unabashedly bromantic film is the love that dare not speak its name, existing as it does between two secret agents. Chelsea Handler supplies the raunch and, as Lauren’s closest (only?) friend, manages to drag her through the dirt a few times. Being played by Witherspoon, however, she climbs out looking like she’s been sprayed down and scrubbed with one of her focus-grouped all-purpose cleansers. (2:00) Presidio. (Rapoport)

*The Viral Factor Dreamy Taiwanese megastar Jay Chou — last seen playing second banana (as if) to Seth Rogen in 2011’s The Green Hornet — reclaims center stage in Hong Kong director Dante Lam’s latest blockbuster action flick. Chou plays Jon, a supercop tasked with protecting a scientist in possession of a new and deadly smallpox strain, highly sought-after by villains who lust after its possibilities as a chemical weapon. Unbeknownst to Jon, his long-lost older brother, Yeung (dreamy HK megastar Nicholas Tse) is up to his neck on the wrong side of the law; when clean-cut bro meets hipster-mullet-and-tattoo’d bro, screeching car chases and epic fist- and gunfights soon melt away in favor of begrudging family bonding. That doesn’t mean all of the other bad guys (corrupt cops, Jon’s evil ex-partner, an arms dealer, etc.) go soft, of course — The Viral Factor very seldom stops for a breath during its chockablock two hours, what with all the bullets, grenades, and rocket launchers busting up half the globe (Kuala Lumpur gets the worst of it). The fact that Jon has one of those only-in-the-movies ticking-clock head injuries (two weeks to live! Better make it count!) ups The Viral Factor‘s already sky-high stakes; big-name salaries aside, it’s pretty clear most of the film’s $200 million budget went into special effects of the go-boom variety. Can’t argue with that. After a brief SF run a few weeks back, the film returns as a double-feature with Donnie Yen, Louis Koo, Sandra Ng, Kelly Chen, and Raymond Wong ensemble rom-com All’s Well, Ends Well 2012. (2:00) Four Star. (Eddy)

ONGOING

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — "he" has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor "transform," and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, "I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist," and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Big Miracle Three gray whales trapped beneath the Beaufort Sea ice near the tiny town of Barrow, Alaska become an international cause célèbre through the uneasily combined efforts of an Anchorage reporter (John Krasinski), a Greenpeace activist (Drew Barrymore), a group of chainsaw-toting Inupiaq fishermen, a Greenpeace-hating oilman (Ted Danson), a Reagan-administration aide (Vinessa Shaw), a U.S. Army colonel (Dermot Mulroney), a pair of Minnesotan entrepreneurs (James LeGros and Rob Riggle) with a homemade deicing machine, and the crew of a Soviet icebreaking ship. The magical pixie dust of Hollywood has been sprinkled liberally over events that did indeed take place in 1988, but the media frenzy that blossoms out of one little local newscast is entirely believable. Everyone loves a good whale story, and this one is a tearjerker — though the kind that parents can bring their kids to without worrying overly much about subsequent weeks of deep-sea-set nightmares and having to explain terms like "critically endangered Western North Pacific gray whale" if they don’t want to. The film makes clear that the weak-on-the-environment Reagan administration and Danson’s oilman stand to gain some powerfully good PR from this feat, with potentially devastating ecological results down the line, and Barrymore’s character gets to recite a quick litany of impending oceanic catastrophes. But this kind of talk is characterized as less useful than a nice, quick, visceral pull on the heartstrings, and while offering us the pleasurable sight of whales breaching in open water, the film avoids panning out too much farther, which may be why the miracle looks so big. (2:03) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Carnage Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) have arrived in the apartment of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) to discuss proper follow-up to a playground incident in which one of their children went ballistic on another. But this grownup discussion about conduct between children quickly degenerates into a four-way living room sandbox melee, as the couples reveal snobbish disdain toward one another’s presumed values and the cracks in each marriage are duly bared. Roman Polanski’s unnecessary screen translation of Yasmina Reza’s play remains awkwardly rooted to the stage, where its contrivances would have seemed less obvious, or at least apt for the medium. There’s some fun to be had watching these actors play variously self-involved, accusatory Manhattanites who enact a very lite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? amid way too much single-malt Scotch ingestion. But the text gets crudely farcical after a while, and its critiques of the characters’ shallow materialism, bad parenting, knee-jerk liberal empathy, privileged class indifference, etc. would resonate more if those faults weren’t so cartoonishly drawn. In the end, Carnage‘s high-profile talent obliterates rather than illuminates the material — it’s like aiming a bazooka at a napkin. (1:20) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Chronicle A misfit (Dane DeHaan) with an abusive father and an ever-present video camera, his affable cousin (Matt Garretty), and a popular jock (Michael B. Jordan) discover a strange, glowing object in the woods; before long, the boys realize they are newly telekinetic. At first, it’s all a lark, pulling pranks and — in the movie’s most exhilarating scene — learning to fly, but the fun ends when the one with the anger problem (guess which) starts abusing the ol’ with-great-power-comes-great-responsibilities creed. Chronicle is a pleasant surprise in a time when it’s better not to expect much from films aimed at teens; it grounds the superhero story in a (mostly) believable high-school setting, gently intellectualizes the boys’ dilemma ("hubris" is discussed), and also understands how satisfying it is to see superpowers used in the service of pure silliness — like, say, pretending you just happen to be really, really, really, good at magic tricks. First-time feature director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max "son of John" Landis also find creative ways, some more successful than others, to work with the film’s "self-shot" structure. The technique (curse you, Blair Witch) is long past feeling innovative, but Chronicle amply justifies its use in telling its story. (1:23) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the "common people" when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

A Dangerous Method Cool and chatty (unsurprisingly, given its subject matter and the fact that it’s based on a play and a novel), David Cronenberg’s latest begins in 1904 Zurich as a shrieking patient (Keira Knightley) is escorted into the care of psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Dr. Jung, an admirer of Sigmund Freud, tests the "talking cure" on the woman, who turns out to be the fiercely intelligent and conveniently beautiful Sabina Spielrein. An attraction, both intellectual and sexual, soon develops, no matter that Jung is Sabina’s doctor, or that he happens to be married to a prim wife whose family wealth keeps him in boats and lake houses. Meanwhile, Jung and Freud (an excellent Viggo Mortensen) begin corresponding, eventually meeting and forming a friendship that’s tested first when Sabina comes between them, and later when Jung expresses a growing interest in fringe pursuits like parapsychology. The scenes between Freud and Jung are A Dangerous Method‘s most intriguing — save those brief few involving Vincent Cassel as a doctor-turned-patient who advises Jung to "never repress anything" — but the film is mostly concerned with Jung’s various Sabina-related dramas. Pity that this is a tightly-wound Fassbender’s least dynamic performance of the year, and that Knightley, way over the top in Sabina’s hysterical scenes, telegraphs "casting mistake" from the get-go. (1:39) Lumiere. (Eddy)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed "not enough" for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) California, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The meeting of Stieg Larsson’s first "Millennium" book and David Fincher promised fireworks, as he’s a director who can be equally vivid and exacting with just the elements key to the series: procedural detail, obsession, violence, tweaked genre conventions, mind games, haunted protagonists, and expansive story arcs. But perhaps because this possible franchise launch had to be rushed into production to ride the Larsson wave, what should have been a terrific matchup turns out to be just a good one — superior in some stylistic departments (notably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing score), but overall neither an improvement nor a disappointment in comparison to the uninspired but effective 2009 Swedish film version. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the muckraking Stockholm journalist whose public disgrace after a failed expose of a suspect corporate tycoon makes him the perfect candidate for an unexpected assignment: staying sequestered in the wealthy, warring Vanger clan’s island home to secretly investigate a teenage girl’s disappearance and presumed murder 40 years ago. His testy helpmate is the singular Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), antisocial hacker, researcher, and ex-mental patient par excellence. Nearly three hours long, the compressed, slightly altered (get over it) storyline nonetheless feels rushed at times; Fincher manages the rare feat of making mostly internet research exciting in filmic terms, yet oddly the book’s more shocking episodes of sex and/or mayhem don’t have the memorable impact one might expect from him. The leads are fine, as is the big support cast of recognizable faces (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, etc.) But the knockout suspense, atmosphere, and urgency one hoped for isn’t present in this intelligent, not entirely satisfying treatment. On the other hand, maybe those who’ve already read the books and seen the prior films have already had so much exposure to this material that a revelatory experience is no longer possible. (2:38) Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Grey Suicidally depressed after losing his spouse, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has to get pro-active about living in a hurry when his plane crashes en route to a oil company site in remotest Alaska. One of a handful of survivors, Ottway is the only one with an idea of the survival skills needed to survive in this subzero wilderness, including knowledge of wolf behavior — which is fortunate, given that the (rapidly dwindling) group of eight men has landed smack in the middle of a pack’s den. Less fortunate is that these hairy, humongous predators are pretty fearless about attacking perceived intruders on their chosen terrain. Director and co-writer Joe Carnahan (2010’s The A-Team, 2006’s Smokin’ Aces) labors to give this thriller some depth via quiet character-based scenes for Neeson and the other actors (including Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts and Dermot Mulroney) in addition to the expected bloodshed. The intended gravitas doesn’t quite take, leaving The Grey and its imposing widescreen scenery (actually British Columbia) in a competent but unmemorable middle ground between serious, primal, life-or-death drama and a monster movie in wolf’s clothing. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Harvey)

*Haywire Female empowerment gets its kung-fu-grip thighs around the beet-red throat of all the old action-heroes. Despite a deflated second half — and director Steven Soderbergh’s determinedly cool-headed yet ultimately exciting-quelling approach to Bourne-free action scenes — Haywire is fully capable of seizing and demanding everyone’s attention, particularly that of the feminists in the darkened theater who have given up looking for an action star that might best Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft. Former pro mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, who plays it as studiedly intense and charismatic as crossover grapplers Lee, Norris, and Seagal before her, is that woman, with convincingly formidable neck and shoulder muscles to distract from her curves. Her Mallory Kane is one of the few women in Haywire‘s pared-down, stylized mise-en-scene — the lone female in a world of men out to get her, starting with the opening diner scene of a watchful Mallory confronted by a man (Channing Tatum) playing at being her boyfriend, fed up with her shit, and preparing to pack her into the car — a scenario that doubtless many rebel girls can relate to until it explodes into an ultraviolent, floor-thrashing fight scene. Turns out Mallory is an ex-Marine and Blackwater-style mercenary, ready to get out of the firm and out of a relationship with her boss, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), when she learns, the bruising way, that she’s been set up. The diner scene sets the tone for rest of Haywire, an otherwise straightforward (albeit flashback-loaded) feminist whodunit of sorts, limned with subtextual currents of sexualized violence and unfolding over a series of encounters with men who could be suitors — or killers. (1:45) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart-of-gold). (2:17) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Four Star, Shattuck. (Chun)

*I Am Bruce Lee Not to be confused with Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000), this Spike TV co-production is nonetheless a similarly praise-filled portrait of the groundbreaking, charismatic action star. Warrior’s Journey‘s main coup was revealing long-thought-lost footage from 1978’s The Game of Death, one of only five feature films starring Lee (two of which were posthumous, including 1973 smash Enter the Dragon). I Am Bruce Lee tilts more toward exploring Lee’s lasting legacy — an extended debate over whether or not he invented what we now call "mixed martial arts" definitely plays to the doc’s Spike TV interests — but also contains the expected biography, with an emphasis on Lee’s unique approaches to martial arts and philosophy, as well as input from suspects usual (Lee’s widow and daughter, top Lee student Dan Inosanto, etc.), understandable (boxer Manny Pacquiao, martial arts champ Cung Lee), and fanboy (Mickey Rourke, Ed O’Neill). Screening in a very limited run, I Am Bruce Lee is a flashy, entertaining primer for beginning students of Lee (lesson one: he was basically the coolest guy who ever lived); longtime fans may not learn anything new, but will no doubt find much to enjoy anyway. (1:34) Four Star. (Eddy)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s "gumption" as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the "real England." That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (1:34) 1000 Van Ness.

Man on a Ledge Sam Worthington plays escaped convict Nick Cassidy, a former cop wrongly accused of stealing a very big diamond from a ruthless real estate mogul (Ed Harris) against the backdrop of 2008’s financial disasters. Having cleared the penitentiary walls, many a man might have headed for the nearest border, but Nick’s fervent desire to prove his innocence leads him to climb out the window of a 21st-floor Manhattan hotel room and spend most of the rest of the movie pacing a tiny strip of concrete and chatting with hung over NYPD crisis negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), who’s also nursing some PTSD after a suicide negotiation gone bad. After a while, the establishing shots panning up 21 floors or across the city grid to Nick’s exterior perch begin to feel extraneous — we know there’s a man on a ledge; it says so on our ticket stub. More involving is the balancing act Nick performs while he’s up there — keeping the eyes of the city glued on him while guiding the suspensefully amateur efforts of his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to pull off an unidentified caper in a nearby high-rise. Ed Burns, Anthony Mackie, and Kyra Sedgwick costar. (1:42) 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed "Hollywood hack" visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol No world landmark (the Kremlin, the Burj Khalifia) is too iconic and/or freaking tall for uber-adrenalized Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon "Comic Relief" Pegg) to infiltrate, climb, assume false identities in, use as a home base for unleashing futuristic spy technology that seems almost plausible (with the help of lots of iPads), race a BMW through, etc. One kind of gets the sense that Cruise and company sat down with a piece of paper and were like, "What stunts haven’t we done before, and how many of them can I do with my shirt off?" Celebrated animation director Brad Bird (2004’s The Incredibles) is right at home with Ghost Protocol as his first live-action effort — the film’s plot (set in the present day, it involves a positively vintage blend of Russians and nukes) and even its unmemorable villain take a back seat to Cruise’s secret-agent shenanigans, most of which take the form of a crazy plan that must be altered at the last minute, resulting in an even crazier plan, which must be implemented despite the sudden appearance of yet another ludicrously daunting obstacle, like, say, a howling sandstorm. For maximum big dumb fun, make sure you catch the IMAX version. A warning, though: any time the movie screeches to a halt to explore emotions or attempt characterization … zzz. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is "well-rounded" in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and "magical" Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Clay, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s deconstructed Turkish police procedural offers little action but plenty of atmosphere. The search for a corpse by a group of men — a prosecutor, a commissar, a doctor, and their two main suspects— through the desolate, wind-scoured hills of rural Anatolia, is in fact something of a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Ceylan’s real investigation is philosophical, zeroing in on the way in which each of these men constructs his own truth out of the re-telling and mis-telling of past events. And the drudgery of this protracted investigation, much of it depicted in real-time, provides plenty of opportunities for all of the players to tell their stories or to simply ruminate, often bitterly, about their own lives. There is palpable loneliness that courses through all the chatter, formally mirrored by Ceylan’s penchant long-takes of isolated figures swallowed by the countryside or the darkness of night. But despite the endless landscape that surrounds them, there is no exit for these small men. (2:37) SF Film Society Cinema. (Sussman)

*Pariah A teenage girl stands stock-still in a dark nightclub, gazing with desire and fear at the half-naked female dancers on the stage. Later, riding home on the bus, she slowly removes the layers of butch that held her together in the club, stripping down to some version of the person her parents need to see when she walks in the door. Nearly wordlessly, the opening scenes of Dee Rees’s Pariah poignantly depict the embattled internal life of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old African American girl living in Brooklyn with her family and struggling both to be seen as she is and to determine what that might look like. The battles are being waged externally, too, between Alike’s adoring father (Charles Parnell), living in willful ignorance, and angry, rigid mother (Kim Wayans), desperately enforcing a feminine dress code and steering Alike away from openly butch friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Rees’ script beautifully conveys a household of landmines and chasms, which widen as husband and wife and daughter struggle and fail to communicate, asking the wrong questions, fearfully skirting the truth about Alike’s sexuality and her parents’ crumbling marriage. And the world outside proves full of romantic pitfalls and the tensions of longtime friendship and peer pressure. The poems in which the talented Alike takes solace and makes her way toward a more truthful existence are beautiful, but at a certain point the lyricism overtakes the film, forcing an ending that is tidy but less than satisfying. (1:26) Lumiere. (Rapoport)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Safe House Frankly, Denzel Washington watchers are starved for another movie in which he’s playing the smartest guy in the room. Despite being hampered by a determinedly murky opening, Safe House should mostly satisfy. Washington’s Tobin Frost is well-used to dwelling into a grayed-out borderland of black ops and flipped alliances — a onetime CIA star, he now trades secrets while perpetually on the run. Fleeing from killers of indeterminate origin, Tobin collides headlong with eager young agent Matt (Ryan Reynolds), who’s stuck maintaining a safe house in Cape Town, South Africa. Tasked with holding onto Tobin’s high-level player by his boss (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss’s boss (Sam Shepard), Matt is determined to prove himself, retain and by extension protect Tobin (even when the ex-superspy is throttling him from behind amid a full-speed car chase), and resist the magnetic pull of those many hazardous gray zones. Surrounded by an array of actorly heavies, including Vera Farmiga, who collectively ratchet up and invest this possibly not-very-interesting narrative — "Bourne" there; done that — with heart-pumping intensity, Washington is magnetic and utterly convincing as the jaded mouse-then-cat-then-mouse toying with and playing off Reynolds go-getter innocent. Safe House‘s narrative doesn’t quite fill in the gaps in Tobin Frost’s whys and wherefores, and the occasional ludicrous breakthroughs aren’t always convincing, but the film’s overall, familiar effect should fly, even when it’s playing it safe (or overly upstanding, especially when it comes to one crucial, climactic scrap of dialogue from "bad guy" Washington, which rings extremely politically incorrect and tone-deaf). (2:00) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Chun)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Albany, Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the "movie stars who can also act" variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 3D (2:16) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki.

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at "the Circus" to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Piedmont, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

"2011 Oscar-Nominated Short Films, Live Action and Animated" Lumiere, Opera Plaza, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.

The Vow A rear-ender on a snowy Chicago night tests the nuptial declarations of a recently and blissfully married couple, recording studio owner Leo (Channing Tatum) and accomplished sculptor Paige (Rachel McAdams). When the latter wakes up from a medically induced coma, she has no memory of her husband, their friends, their life together, or anything else from the important developmental stage in which she dropped out of law school, became estranged from her regressively WASP-y family, stopped frosting her hair and wearing sweater sets, and broke off her engagement to preppy power-douchebag Jeremy (Scott Speedman). Watching Paige malign her own wardrobe and "weird" hair and rediscover the healing powers of a high-end shopping spree is disturbing; she reenters her old life nearly seamlessly, and the warm spark of her attraction to Leo, which we witness in a series of gooey flashbacks, feels utterly extinguished. And, despite the slurry monotone of Tatum’s line delivery, one can empathize with a sense of loss that’s not mortal but feels like a kind of death — as when Paige gazes at Leo with an expression blending perplexity, anxiety, irritation, and noninvestment. But The Vow wants to pluck on our heartstrings and inspire a glowing, love-story-for-the-ages sort of mood, and the film struggles to make good on the latter promise. Its vague evocations of romantic destiny mostly spark a sense of inevitability, and Leo’s endeavors to walk his wife through retakes of scenes from their courtship are a little more creepy and a little less Notebook-y than you might imagine. (1:44) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Rapoport)

W.E. Madonna’s first directorial feature, 2008’s Filth and Wisdom, was so atrocious, and the early word on this second effort so vitriolic, that there’s a temptation to give W.E. too much credit simply for not being a disgrace. Co-written by Madge and Alek Keshishian, it’s about two women in gilded cages. One is Wallis Simpson (the impressive Andrea Riseborough), a married American socialite who scandalized the world by divorcing her husband and running about with Edward, Prince of Wales (James D’Arcy), who had to abdicate the English throne in order to marry her in 1936. The other is fictive Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a childless Manhattan socialite in the late 1990s who’s neglected by her probably-unfaithful husband (Richard Coyle). Over-eagerly intertwined despite their trite-at-best overlaps (the main one being Wally’s obsession with Wallis), these two strands hold attention for a while. But eventually they grow turgid. We’re presumably meant to be carried away by their True Love, but the film doesn’t succeed in making Wallis and Edward seem more than two petulant, shallow snobs who were fortunate to find each other, but didn’t necessarily make one another better or more interesting people. (It also alternately denies and glosses over the couple’s fascist-friendly politics, which became an embarrassment as England fought Germany in World War II.) Meanwhile, Wally is a mopey blank too easily belittled by her spouse, and too handily rescued by a Prince Charming, or rather "Russian intellectual slumming as a security guard" (Oscar Isaac) working at Sotheby’s during an auction of the late royal couple’s estate. As is so often the case with Madonna, she seems to be saying something here, but precisely what is murky and probably not worth sussing
out. Likewise, the attention to showy surface aesthetics — in particular Arianne Phillips’ justifiably Oscar-nominated costumes — is fastidious, revealing, and to an extent satisfying in itself. Somewhat ambitious and in several ways quite well crafted, the handsomely appointed W.E. isn’t bad (surely it wouldn’t have attracted such hostility if directed by anyone else), but the flaws that finally suffocate it reach right down to its conceptual gist. There is, however, one lovely moment toward the end: Riseborough’s Wallis, a well-preserved septuagenarian, dancing an incongruous yet supremely self-assured twist on request for her bedridden husband. (1:59) Bridge. (Harvey)

The Woman in Black Daniel Radcliffe (a.k.a. Harry Potter) plays a grieving young widower in an old-fashioned ghost story, set in the era of spirit hands and other visitations from beyond the veil. But while Victorian séances were generally aimed at the dearly departed, the titular visitant (Liz White), who haunts the isolated estate of Eel Marsh House and its environs, is a vindictive, mean-spirited creature, avenging the long-ago loss of her child by wreaking havoc and heartbreak among the families of the nearby village, among them a local landowner (Ciarán Hinds) and his wife (Janet McTeer). Radcliffe’s character, a lawyer named Arthur Kipps, has been tasked with settling the affairs of the mansion’s recently deceased owner, an assignment that requires sifting through mounds of dusty, crumpled ephemera in one of the creakiest, squeakiest buildings ever constructed. Set at the end of a narrow spit of land that disappears into the surrounding wetlands when the tide is high, Eel Marsh House is a charming place to be marooned after dark. But no amount of horrified screams from the audience will keep Kipps from his duties, though it’s hard to make much headway amid the unrelenting creepiness. Nearly every moment brings a fresh inexplicable thumping noise from an upper floor; a new room full of dead-eyed dolls that Kipps has no business wandering into; another freakishly screaming face next to his as he gazes out the window. The house is a richly textured set piece; the horror is of the sort that makes you jump and then laugh, both at the filmmakers, for springing the same tricks on you over and over, and at yourself, for falling prey to them every time. (1:36) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Rapoport)

Film Listings

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Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Big Miracle Three gray whales trapped beneath the Beaufort Sea ice near the tiny town of Barrow, Alaska become an international cause célèbre through the uneasily combined efforts of an Anchorage reporter (John Krasinski), a Greenpeace activist (Drew Barrymore), a group of chainsaw-toting Inupiaq fishermen, a Greenpeace-hating oilman (Ted Danson), a Reagan-administration aide (Vinessa Shaw), a U.S. Army colonel (Dermot Mulroney), a pair of Minnesotan entrepreneurs (James LeGros and Rob Riggle) with a homemade deicing machine, and the crew of a Soviet icebreaking ship. The magical pixie dust of Hollywood has been sprinkled liberally over events that did indeed take place in 1988, but the media frenzy that blossoms out of one little local newscast is entirely believable. Everyone loves a good whale story, and this one is a tearjerker — though the kind that parents can bring their kids to without worrying overly much about subsequent weeks of deep-sea-set nightmares and having to explain terms like “critically endangered Western North Pacific gray whale” if they don’t want to. The film makes clear that the weak-on-the-environment Reagan administration and Danson’s oilman stand to gain some powerfully good PR from this feat, with potentially devastating ecological results down the line, and Barrymore’s character gets to recite a quick litany of impending oceanic catastrophes. But this kind of talk is characterized as less useful than a nice, quick, visceral pull on the heartstrings, and while offering us the pleasurable sight of whales breaching in open water, the film avoids panning out too much farther, which may be why the miracle looks so big. (2:03) (Rapoport)

*Carol Channing: Larger Than Life See “Hello, Carol!” (1:27) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Chronicle A group of teens develop superpowers — fun times, until one of them turns to the dark side — in this sci-fi film shot in the ever-popular “found footage” style. (1:23)

*Come Back, Africa See “On the Township.” (1:24) Roxie.

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Domain This moody French drama about the co-dependent relationship between a middle-aged-yet-still-glamorous alcoholic (Béatrice Dalle) and her just-coming-out teenage nephew, Pierre (Isaïe Sultan), had the distinction of topping John Waters’ list of favorite movies in 2010 (Enter the Void was number two; Jackass 3D was number six). It’s unclear if the Bordeaux-set Domain (released in 2009) would be hitting theaters now without Waters as its champion, but first-time feature director Patric Chiha — who wrote the screenplay especially for Dalle, a cult favorite for her role as a mentally disturbed beauty in 1986’s Betty Blue — keeps the melodrama to a minimum, instead relying on subtle hints that cool, sophisticated Aunt Nadia’s life is slowly disappearing into a bottle of white wine. Sultan is a little one-note, but Dalle proves heartbreaking as a good-time gal who doesn’t quite have the strength to face her illness. (1:48) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

*The Innkeepers Horror fans who haven’t yet discovered writer-director Ti West (2009’s The House of the Devil) best get on it — this is a guy with an offbeat sense of humor who recognizes that formulaic stories and crappy CG are not necessary scary-movie ingredients. His latest concerns a rambling, Victorian-relic hotel about to shut its doors after one last weekend in business. Staffers Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are soon to be jobless, but they’re more concerned with compiling evidence that the inn is haunted — as suggested by local legend and Luke’s paranormal-themed website. Though there are some familiar tropes here (why is there always a creepy basement, and why won’t scary-movie characters stay the hell out of it?), The Innkeepers does deliver a handful of genuine frights. Its main pleasure, though, is its tone, which is neither too jokey nor trying to take itself too seriously. Alongside the slacker duo played by Paxton and Healy are Kelly McGillis (last seen fighting zombies in 2010’s Stake Land), who lends gravitas as a cranky psychic; and indie darling Lena Dunham (2010’s Tiny Furniture), who has a brief but funny cameo as a neurotic barista. (1:42) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The New Metropolis Andrea Torrice’s pair of half-hour docs explore an important yet oft-overlooked topic: America’s “first suburbs,” communities that sprang up just outside large cities in response to the post-war baby boom. Now that these towns are aging, and in need of infrastructure repair, they’re finding that states would rather fund brand-new “inner rim suburbs” — where homebuyers reap the tax benefits of government-subsidized roads, for example, while enjoying their pre-fab McMansions. Both parts of the made-for-PBS doc offer hopeful solutions, particularly part two, The New Neighbors, which studies a multi-racial New Jersey community that is working together to insure “stable integration” in its neighborhoods. The results are remarkable, and inspiring. Both docs screen as part of a free event, “The New Metropolis: Building a Sustainable and Healthy Bay Area in the Age of Global Warming,” featuring a post-film dialogue that frames issues raised by the films in a local context. Panelists include filmmaker Torrice; El Cerrito Councilmember Janet Aelson, a transit policy expert; regional design specialist Carl Anthony; and other community leaders. For more info and to register, visit el-cerrito.org/eqc/newmetropolis. (:54) Cerrito. (Eddy)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Right to Love: An American Family This earnest doc springboards off the YouTube fame of the adorable, Star Wars-obsessed Leffew family, who started beaming videos from their Santa Rosa home (channel name: “Gay Family Values”) as a response to attacks on marriage equality. Director Cassie Jaye wisely uses quite a bit of Bryan and Jay’s own footage, which depicts a loving family going about their business under normal (family dinners) and special-occasion (excitedly plotting to leave tooth fairy loot under their young daughter’s pillow) circumstances. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, with the ugly reality of Prop 8 and, most troublingly, Bryan’s own family members, staunchly set in their disapproval of same-sex marriage despite the highly functional example in their midst. This world-premiere Castro screening features in-person appearances by The Right to Love‘s director and subjects; visit www.R2Lmovie.com for additional information on the event. (1:30) Castro. (Eddy)

The Woman in Black Daniel Radcliffe plays a lawyer turned ghost buster in this Hammer Films thriller, adapted from Susan Hill’s best-selling (and previously-adapted for stage and screen) novel. (1:36) Shattuck.

ONGOING

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — “he” has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor “transform,” and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Shattuck. (Harvey)

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Beauty and the Beast 3D (1:24) 1000 Van Ness..

Carnage Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) have arrived in the apartment of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) to discuss proper follow-up to a playground incident in which one of their children went ballistic on another. But this grownup discussion about conduct between children quickly degenerates into a four-way living room sandbox melee, as the couples reveal snobbish disdain toward one another’s presumed values and the cracks in each marriage are duly bared. Roman Polanski’s unnecessary screen translation of Yasmina Reza’s play remains awkwardly rooted to the stage, where its contrivances would have seemed less obvious, or at least apt for the medium. There’s some fun to be had watching these actors play variously self-involved, accusatory Manhattanites who enact a very lite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? amid way too much single-malt Scotch ingestion. But the text gets crudely farcical after a while, and its critiques of the characters’ shallow materialism, bad parenting, knee-jerk liberal empathy, privileged class indifference, etc. would resonate more if those faults weren’t so cartoonishly drawn. In the end, Carnage‘s high-profile talent obliterates rather than illuminates the material — it’s like aiming a bazooka at a napkin. (1:20) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Contraband A relative gem among the dross of January film releases, Contraband works best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and flounders when it does. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the man behind much of Iceland’s popular filmography (2006’s Jar City, 2002’s The Sea, 2000’s 101 Reykjavik), this no-frills genre picture stars Mark Wahlberg as Chris Farraday, an ex-smuggler-turned-family-man who must give the life of crime another go-round when his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) find themselves in thrall to a nasty, drug-addicted criminal (an especially methy-looking Giovanni Ribisi). If you’ve seen any of these One Last Heist movies, you won’t be surprised that Chris’ operation goes completely awry — in Panama, on a cargo captained by J.K. Simmons, no less. Ribisi is as simpering and gleefully evil a caricature as they come, and as Chris’ best friend, brooding Ben Foster’s unexpected about-face in the film’s last third is pretty watchable. I’m not exactly saying you should go and see it, but I’m not stopping you, either. (1:49) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Ryan Lattanzio)

A Dangerous Method Cool and chatty (unsurprisingly, given its subject matter and the fact that it’s based on a play and a novel), David Cronenberg’s latest begins in 1904 Zurich as a shrieking patient (Keira Knightley) is escorted into the care of psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Dr. Jung, an admirer of Sigmund Freud, tests the “talking cure” on the woman, who turns out to be the fiercely intelligent and conveniently beautiful Sabina Spielrein. An attraction, both intellectual and sexual, soon develops, no matter that Jung is Sabina’s doctor, or that he happens to be married to a prim wife whose family wealth keeps him in boats and lake houses. Meanwhile, Jung and Freud (an excellent Viggo Mortensen) begin corresponding, eventually meeting and forming a friendship that’s tested first when Sabina comes between them, and later when Jung expresses a growing interest in fringe pursuits like parapsychology. The scenes between Freud and Jung are A Dangerous Method‘s most intriguing — save those brief few involving Vincent Cassel as a doctor-turned-patient who advises Jung to “never repress anything” — but the film is mostly concerned with Jung’s various Sabina-related dramas. Pity that this is a tightly-wound Fassbender’s least dynamic performance of the year, and that Knightley, way over the top in Sabina’s hysterical scenes, telegraphs “casting mistake” from the get-go. (1:39) Albany, Shattuck. (Eddy)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) Balboa, California, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone This doc offers a lively, revealing look at SoCal ska-punk rockers Fishbone, a band that formed circa 1979 in a San Fernando Valley junior high newly filled with bussed-in South Central kids. In its heyday, Fishbone enjoyed cult success with hits like “Party at Ground Zero” and the tune that gives the film its title; Everyday Sunshine speaks to Fishbone’s broad appeal, as famous faces chime in to reminisce (and longtime fan Laurence Fishburne narrates), but it also illuminates some of the reasons its members never became megastars. Codirectors Chris Metzler (a San Francisco resident best-known for 2004’s Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea) and Lev Anderson spent months on the road with the band, capturing the infectious energy of its live shows in addition to behind-the-scenes tension. Past members add their voices, but the main protagonists are bassist-vocalist Norwood Fisher and lead vocalist-saxophone player Angelo Moore. Their intertwining stories offer a poignant portrait of creative soulmates who’ve weathered many storms (personality conflicts, legal and money troubles, an industry that didn’t know how to categorize them) without once giving up on their music. In addition to its compelling story, the film’s quirkier stylistic choices, including animation, lift Everyday Sunshine above the crowded field of traditional music docs. (1:47) Smith Rafael. (Eddy)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Director Stephen Daldry is no stranger to guiding actors to Oscars; his previous two films, 2008’s The Reader and 2002’s The Hours, both earned Best Actress statuettes for their stars. So it’s no surprise that Sandra Bullock’s performance is the best thing about this big-screen take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, which is otherwise hamstrung by twee, melodramatic elements that (presumably) translated poorly from page to screen. One year after 9/11, a Manhattan mother (Bullock) and her nine-year-old son Oskar (newcomer Thomas Horn, a youth Jeopardy! champ) are, unsurprisingly, still mourning their beloved husband and father (Tom Hanks), who was killed on “the worst day.” But therapy be damned — Oskar takes to the streets, knocking on the doors of strangers, searching for the lock that will fit a mysterious key his dad left behind. Carrying a tambourine. Later befriending an elderly man (Max von Sydow) whose true identity is immediately obvious, despite the fact that he writes pithy notes instead of speaking. In its attempts to explore grief through the eyes of a borderline-autistic kid (“tests were inconclusive,” according to Oskar), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is so forced-quirky it makes the works of Wes Anderson look like minimalist manifestos; that it bounces its maudlin, cliché-baiting plot off the biggest tragedy in recent American history is borderline offensive. Actually offensive, however, is the fact that Daldry — who also knows from young thespians, having helmed 2000’s Billy Elliot — positions the green Horn (ahem) in such a complex role. The character of Oskar is, as written, nauseatingly precocious; adding shrill and stridently unsympathetic to the mix renders the entire shebang nigh-unwatchable, despite the best efforts of supporting players like Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright. (2:09) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Flowers of War Based on the novel The 13 Women of Nanjing by Geling Yan (Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl), Flowers of War sees director Zhang Yimou probing the still-painful wounds of the Nanjing Massacre. Here, he gets to pull out his customary sensuous fascinations — jewel-tone colors that pop unexpectedly amid gray wartime rubble, reams of floating textiles, and girls, girls, girls — to intriguing if patchy effect. The touch-and-go quality of the production is understandable considering the clash of acting styles generated by our players: crass good-old-boy American-in-China mortician John (Method-ically played by Christian Bale), and the clutch of look-alike Catholic school girls and cadre of call girls, the latter headed up by slyly Veronica Lake-ish vamp Yu Mo (Ni Ni). John has been called to bury a priest at the Nanjing cathedral, smack in the middle of the Japanese invasion, and despite the corpses littering the street, all he seems to care about is getting paid and running off. Somehow the sweet little helpless schoolgirls convert him into a believer, enough to make him don the priest’s garb and try to protect them from crazed Japanese soldiers intent on literally carrying out the Rape of Nanjing. Meanwhile the ladies of the evening, hiding out in the basement against everyone’s wishes, work their wiles to get him to help them escape. Armed with a budget that makes this the most expensive film in Chinese history, Zhang embraces this collision of soldiers, cultures, contemporary Western war movies, and popular Chinese entertainments in the stylized mode of a archetypal Chinese melodrama. Though it’s far from his best work, Flowers still draws you in while imparting the horrors of an ugly war that pulled the most innocent — and beautifully decadent — civilians into its wake. (2:21) Four Star. (Chun)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The meeting of Stieg Larsson’s first “Millennium” book and David Fincher promised fireworks, as he’s a director who can be equally vivid and exacting with just the elements key to the series: procedural detail, obsession, violence, tweaked genre conventions, mind games, haunted protagonists, and expansive story arcs. But perhaps because this possible franchise launch had to be rushed into production to ride the Larsson wave, what should have been a terrific matchup turns out to be just a good one — superior in some stylistic departments (notably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing score), but overall neither an improvement nor a disappointment in comparison to the uninspired but effective 2009 Swedish film version. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the muckraking Stockholm journalist whose public disgrace after a failed expose of a suspect corporate tycoon makes him the perfect candidate for an unexpected assignment: staying sequestered in the wealthy, warring Vanger clan’s island home to secretly investigate a teenage girl’s disappearance and presumed murder 40 years ago. His testy helpmate is the singular Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), antisocial hacker, researcher, and ex-mental patient par excellence. Nearly three hours long, the compressed, slightly altered (get over it) storyline nonetheless feels rushed at times; Fincher manages the rare feat of making mostly internet research exciting in filmic terms, yet oddly the book’s more shocking episodes of sex and/or mayhem don’t have the memorable impact one might expect from him. The leads are fine, as is the big support cast of recognizable faces (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, etc.) But the knockout suspense, atmosphere, and urgency one hoped for isn’t present in this intelligent, not entirely satisfying treatment. On the other hand, maybe those who’ve already read the books and seen the prior films have already had so much exposure to this material that a revelatory experience is no longer possible. (2:38) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Grey Suicidally depressed after losing his spouse, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has to get pro-active about living in a hurry when his plane crashes en route to a oil company site in remotest Alaska. One of a handful of survivors, Ottway is the only one with an idea of the survival skills needed to survive in this subzero wilderness, including knowledge of wolf behavior — which is fortunate, given that the (rapidly dwindling) group of eight men has landed smack in the middle of a pack’s den. Less fortunate is that these hairy, humongous predators are pretty fearless about attacking perceived intruders on their chosen terrain. Director and co-writer Joe Carnahan (2010’s The A-Team, 2006’s Smokin’ Aces) labors to give this thriller some depth via quiet character-based scenes for Neeson and the other actors (including Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts and Dermot Mulroney) in addition to the expected bloodshed. The intended gravitas doesn’t quite take, leaving The Grey and its imposing widescreen scenery (actually British Columbia) in a competent but unmemorable middle ground between serious, primal, life-or-death drama and a monster movie in wolf’s clothing. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*Haywire Female empowerment gets its kung-fu-grip thighs around the beet-red throat of all the old action-heroes. Despite a deflated second half — and director Steven Soderbergh’s determinedly cool-headed yet ultimately exciting-quelling approach to Bourne-free action scenes — Haywire is fully capable of seizing and demanding everyone’s attention, particularly that of the feminists in the darkened theater who have given up looking for an action star that might best Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft. Former pro mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, who plays it as studiedly intense and charismatic as crossover grapplers Lee, Norris, and Seagal before her, is that woman, with convincingly formidable neck and shoulder muscles to distract from her curves. Her Mallory Kane is one of the few women in Haywire‘s pared-down, stylized mise-en-scene — the lone female in a world of men out to get her, starting with the opening diner scene of a watchful Mallory confronted by a man (Channing Tatum) playing at being her boyfriend, fed up with her shit, and preparing to pack her into the car — a scenario that doubtless many rebel girls can relate to until it explodes into an ultraviolent, floor-thrashing fight scene. Turns out Mallory is an ex-Marine and Blackwater-style mercenary, ready to get out of the firm and out of a relationship with her boss, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), when she learns, the bruising way, that she’s been set up. The diner scene sets the tone for rest of Haywire, an otherwise straightforward (albeit flashback-loaded) feminist whodunit of sorts, limned with subtextual currents of sexualized violence and unfolding over a series of encounters with men who could be suitors — or killers. (1:45) California, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) Shattuck. (Chun)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Man on a Ledge Sam Worthington plays escaped convict Nick Cassidy, a former cop wrongly accused of stealing a very big diamond from a ruthless real estate mogul (Ed Harris) against the backdrop of 2008’s financial disasters. Having cleared the penitentiary walls, many a man might have headed for the nearest border, but Nick’s fervent desire to prove his innocence leads him to climb out the window of a 21st-floor Manhattan hotel room and spend most of the rest of the movie pacing a tiny strip of concrete and chatting with hung over NYPD crisis negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), who’s also nursing some PTSD after a suicide negotiation gone bad. After a while, the establishing shots panning up 21 floors or across the city grid to Nick’s exterior perch begin to feel extraneous — we know there’s a man on a ledge; it says so on our ticket stub. More involving is the balancing act Nick performs while he’s up there — keeping the eyes of the city glued on him while guiding the suspensefully amateur efforts of his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to pull off an unidentified caper in a nearby high-rise. Ed Burns, Anthony Mackie, and Kyra Sedgwick costar. (1:42) Balboa, 1000 Van Ness. (Rapoport)

Miss Bala You want to look away, but aided and abetted by director-cowriter Gerardo Naranjo’s sober, elegant perspective on the ugly way that innocents get pulled into the Mexican drug wars, you must see it through. That’s the case with Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive Tijuana beauty contestant who signs up for the Miss Baja pageant with a friend, who almost immediately decides to game the system by partying with the police and DEA agents who could possibly help their chances of winning. Laura instantly falls into the hands of Lino (Noe Hernandez), a mafia boss in the process of crashing the party, and with his gang, killing all assembled. Desperately trying to find her friend, Laura takes a wrong turn that lands her back in the arms of Lino, who vows to help the would-be beauty queen and entangles her in his increasingly closed-in criminal world. Naranjo’s cool-headed, almost stately compositions come as almost blessed relief as he pans slowly from the shadows, where you really don’t want to know what’s going on, to a girl, almost completely out of the frame, desperately wedging herself out a second floor window. His detachment undercuts the horror, while angel-faced, perpetually anguished-looking lead actress Sigman simultaneously compels and frustrates with her fatal errors in judgement as she grows more complicit and is literally caught in the crossfire between the rough gangsters who terrorize her and the government soldiers unafraid mete out punishment. The toughest part is watching Sigman’s infuriatingly passive protagonist be used like a sexual puppet, but this raw and refined film — loosely based on the story of 2008’s Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zuniga — doesn’t pull many punches in indicting the pageant machine and the corrupt system that supports it. (1:53) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol No world landmark (the Kremlin, the Burj Khalifia) is too iconic and/or freaking tall for uber-adrenalized Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon “Comic Relief” Pegg) to infiltrate, climb, assume false identities in, use as a home base for unleashing futuristic spy technology that seems almost plausible (with the help of lots of iPads), race a BMW through, etc. One kind of gets the sense that Cruise and company sat down with a piece of paper and were like, “What stunts haven’t we done before, and how many of them can I do with my shirt off?” Celebrated animation director Brad Bird (2004’s The Incredibles) is right at home with Ghost Protocol as his first live-action effort — the film’s plot (set in the present day, it involves a positively vintage blend of Russians and nukes) and even its unmemorable villain take a back seat to Cruise’s secret-agent shenanigans, most of which take the form of a crazy plan that must be altered at the last minute, resulting in an even crazier plan, which must be implemented despite the sudden appearance of yet another ludicrously daunting obstacle, like, say, a howling sandstorm. For maximum big dumb fun, make sure you catch the IMAX version. A warning, though: any time the movie screeches to a halt to explore emotions or attempt characterization … zzz. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Presidio, Shattuck. (Harvey)

One for the Money (1:46) 1000 Van Ness.

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Red Tails History (and the highly-acclaimed 1995 TV film, The Tuskeegee Airmen) tells us that during World War II, African American fighter pilots skillfully dispatched Nazi foes — while battling discrimination within the U.S. military every step of the way. From this inspiring true tale springs Red Tails, an overly earnest and awkwardly broad film which matches lavish special effects (thank you, producer George Lucas) with a flawed script stuffed with trite dialogue (thank you, “story by” George Lucas?), an overabundance of characters, and too many subplots (including a romance and a detour into Hogan’s Heroes). The movie would’ve been much stronger had it streamlined to focus on the friendship between the brash Lightning (David Oyelowo) and the not-as-perfect-as-he-seems Easy (Nate Parker); the head-butting between these two supplies the film’s only genuine moments of tension. Otherwise, there’s not much depth, just surface-to-air heroics. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Four Star, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Maybe Guy Ritchie should’ve quit while he was ahead. Thanks to strong performances from Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, the British director’s first Holmes flick proved surprisingly fun. Two years later, it’s clear that Ritchie’s well of creatitivity has run dry. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is cliched and overlong, burying a few good ideas under an avalanche of tired action movie stalwarts gone steampunk. To be fair, the set design and art direction are still sumptuous, creating a hyperbolic, detailed vision of Victorian Europe. New cast additions Jared Harris (as Moriarty, maliciously polite) and Stephen Fry (as Mycroft, eccentric and nude) do well with limited material. Noomi Rapace, playing a helpful gypsy, is superfluous. Downey Jr. and Law are still game for some amusing PG-13 homoeroticism, but it’s the former’s disinterested performance that ensures the movie’s downfall. Forced to make do without witty quips or interesting deductions, the Holmes of A Game of Shadows is part bruiser, part buffoon. The game’s a flop, Watson. (2:09) SF Center. (Ben Richardson)

Sing Your Song It’s easy to be cynical about do-gooding celebrities. Like, does superstar X really care about that charity or cause, or is he or she merely doing a public-image polish? This is not a concern with Harry Belafonte, who — when not charming audiences with tunes like “The Banana Boat Song” — has spent most of his 84 years personally battling injustice. If he wasn’t such an American treasure (World War II veteran, courageous challenger of Hollywood racism, vocally pro-labor union amid anti-Commie hysteria, etc.), Sing Your Song might feel as if it were progressing in an almost comedically heroic manner: Harry befriends Martin Luther King, Jr; Harry teaches JFK and RFK about civil rights; Harry champions Nelson Mandela; Harry protests the Vietnam War; Harry devotes himself to Africa (cue “We Are the World”). But it all really happened (with historical footage and photographs to prove it), and most of it at a time when his views were seen as radical by mainstream America. Belafonte’s accomplishments are undeniable, and Sing Your Song is, perhaps unavoidably, a textbook hagiography — even as his children from multiple marriages, one of whom co-produced the film, make vague yet forgiving references to Belafonte’s frequent absentee-dad status. Otherwise, Sing Your Song is solely concerned with singing Belafonte’s praises — admirable, but kinda one-note. (1:44) Roxie. (Eddy)

Sleeping Beauty Australian novelist turned director Julia Leigh’s first feature arrives affixed with a stamp of approval from no less than Jane Campion; though Sleeping Beauty treads in Campion-style edgy feminism, its ideas are not quite fully formed, rendering a film that’s not entirely satisfying. It is gorgeously shot, however, with long (occasionally overly so) shots that coolly observe the life of Lucy (pillow-lipped Emily Browning, star of 2011’s Sucker Punch), a college student struggling to make ends meet with an array of minimum-wage gigs. Her housemates hate her; the only friend she has is a shut-in drug addict. She gets her kicks picking up random men at yuppie bars — until she’s offered a gig working for an exclusive purveyor of kink to elderly clients, first as a lingerie-clad serving girl, and later as a “sleeping beauty:” she’s given knockout drugs and handed over to customers (“no penetration” is the only rule, but yes, it’s still creepy). Sleeping Beauty is too chilly to be titillating, and while Browning is lovely, Lucy is affectless to the point of being, well, pretty boring, even with her clothes off. I read one review that suggested watching the film as if it were intended to be a comedy; lines like “Match your lipstick to the color of your labia” certainly support this thesis. (1:44) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) Four Star, Piedmont, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Underworld Awakening (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

*War Horse If the idea of watching heroic horses getting slaughtered amid the brutal trench warfare of World War I fills your heart with disgust, then you might want to applaud Steven Spielberg and his relatively sensitive touch with that material in the heartrending War Horse. The PG-13 rating also gives you some idea that the director will be hewing to the movie’s origins as a children’s book. Spielberg paints this tale about loss of innocence, be it in the fields of the farm or the battle, in broad strokes, but here, you might feel a bit less manipulated by his prowess as a crowd-pleasing storyteller, less conscious about the legacy he draws on, and more immersed in a story that stays as close as it can to its animal protagonist’s point of view, short of pulling a Mr. Ed. War Horse opens with Joey’s birth and follows him as he’s sold to a struggling English farm run by traumatized war veteran Ted (Peter Mullan), his spunky wife Rose (Emily Watson), and his animal-loving son Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Circumstance — and an unyielding landlord (David Thewlis) — sends Joey off to the so-called Great War, first into the care of an honorable captain (Tom Hiddleston), later a French girl (Celine Buckens), and worst, into the arms of the German enemy, where he toils as a disposable beast of burden charged with hauling the literal machines of war uphill. Spielberg shields viewers both young and old from the more explicit horrors, though gracefully imparts war’s terrors, sending fresh chills through a viewer when, for instance, a child riding a horse disappears over a ridge and fails to return. No one’s immune from tears, and you have to wonder how much healing is actually possible at War Horse‘s conclusion, despite its stylized, symbolism-laden beauty. Nonetheless cinephiles will glean a certain pleasure from images that clearly nod to the blood-red skies of Gone With the Wind (1939), the ominous deep focus of Orson Wells, and the too-bright Technicolor clarity-slash-artifice of National Velvet (1944). (2:26) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

 

Film Listings

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock. For complete film listings, see www.sfbg.com.

OPENING

Big Miracle Three gray whales trapped beneath the Beaufort Sea ice near the tiny town of Barrow, Alaska become an international cause célèbre through the uneasily combined efforts of an Anchorage reporter (John Krasinski), a Greenpeace activist (Drew Barrymore), a group of chainsaw-toting Inupiaq fishermen, a Greenpeace-hating oilman (Ted Danson), a Reagan-administration aide (Vinessa Shaw), a U.S. Army colonel (Dermot Mulroney), a pair of Minnesotan entrepreneurs (James LeGros and Rob Riggle) with a homemade deicing machine, and the crew of a Soviet icebreaking ship. The magical pixie dust of Hollywood has been sprinkled liberally over events that did indeed take place in 1988, but the media frenzy that blossoms out of one little local newscast is entirely believable. Everyone loves a good whale story, and this one is a tearjerker — though the kind that parents can bring their kids to without worrying overly much about subsequent weeks of deep-sea-set nightmares and having to explain terms like “critically endangered Western North Pacific gray whale” if they don’t want to. The film makes clear that the weak-on-the-environment Reagan administration and Danson’s oilman stand to gain some powerfully good PR from this feat, with potentially devastating ecological results down the line, and Barrymore’s character gets to recite a quick litany of impending oceanic catastrophes. But this kind of talk is characterized as less useful than a nice, quick, visceral pull on the heartstrings, and while offering us the pleasurable sight of whales breaching in open water, the film avoids panning out too much farther, which may be why the miracle looks so big. (2:03) (Rapoport)

*Carol Channing: Larger Than Life See “Hello, Carol!” (1:27) Opera Plaza, Shattuck.

Chronicle A group of teens develop superpowers — fun times, until one of them turns to the dark side — in this sci-fi film shot in the ever-popular “found footage” style. (1:23)

*Come Back, Africa See “On the Township.” (1:24) Roxie.

*Coriolanus For his film directing debut, Ralph Fiennes has chosen some pretty strong material: a military drama that is among Shakespeare’s least popular works, not that adapting the Bard to the screen has ever been easy. (Look how many times Kenneth Branagh, an even more fabled Shakespearean Brit on stage than Ralph, has managed to fumble that task.) The titular war hero, raised to glory in battle and little else, is undone by political backstabbers and his own contempt for the “common people” when appointed to a governmental role requiring some diplomatic finesse. This turn of events puts him right back in the role he was born for: that of ruthless, furious avenger, no matter that now he aims to conquer the Rome he’d hitherto pledged to defend. The setting of a modern city in crisis (threadbare protesting masses vs. oppressive police state) works just fine, Elizabethan language and all, as does Fiennes’ choice of a gritty contemporary action feel (using cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of 2006’s United 93 and 2008’s The Hurt Locker). He’s got a strong supporting cast — particularly Vanessa Redgrave as Coriolanus’ hawkish mother Volumnia — and an excellent lead in one Ralph Fiennes, who here becomes so warped by bloodthirst he seems to mutate into Lord Voldemort before our eyes, without need of any prosthetics. His crazy eyes under a razored bald pate are a special effect quite alarmingly inhuman enough. (2:03) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

Domain This moody French drama about the co-dependent relationship between a middle-aged-yet-still-glamorous alcoholic (Béatrice Dalle) and her just-coming-out teenage nephew, Pierre (Isaïe Sultan), had the distinction of topping John Waters’ list of favorite movies in 2010 (Enter the Void was number two; Jackass 3D was number six). It’s unclear if the Bordeaux-set Domain (released in 2009) would be hitting theaters now without Waters as its champion, but first-time feature director Patric Chiha — who wrote the screenplay especially for Dalle, a cult favorite for her role as a mentally disturbed beauty in 1986’s Betty Blue — keeps the melodrama to a minimum, instead relying on subtle hints that cool, sophisticated Aunt Nadia’s life is slowly disappearing into a bottle of white wine. Sultan is a little one-note, but Dalle proves heartbreaking as a good-time gal who doesn’t quite have the strength to face her illness. (1:48) SF Film Society Cinema. (Eddy)

*The Innkeepers Horror fans who haven’t yet discovered writer-director Ti West (2009’s The House of the Devil) best get on it — this is a guy with an offbeat sense of humor who recognizes that formulaic stories and crappy CG are not necessary scary-movie ingredients. His latest concerns a rambling, Victorian-relic hotel about to shut its doors after one last weekend in business. Staffers Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are soon to be jobless, but they’re more concerned with compiling evidence that the inn is haunted — as suggested by local legend and Luke’s paranormal-themed website. Though there are some familiar tropes here (why is there always a creepy basement, and why won’t scary-movie characters stay the hell out of it?), The Innkeepers does deliver a handful of genuine frights. Its main pleasure, though, is its tone, which is neither too jokey nor trying to take itself too seriously. Alongside the slacker duo played by Paxton and Healy are Kelly McGillis (last seen fighting zombies in 2010’s Stake Land), who lends gravitas as a cranky psychic; and indie darling Lena Dunham (2010’s Tiny Furniture), who has a brief but funny cameo as a neurotic barista. (1:42) Lumiere. (Eddy)

The New Metropolis Andrea Torrice’s pair of half-hour docs explore an important yet oft-overlooked topic: America’s “first suburbs,” communities that sprang up just outside large cities in response to the post-war baby boom. Now that these towns are aging, and in need of infrastructure repair, they’re finding that states would rather fund brand-new “inner rim suburbs” — where homebuyers reap the tax benefits of government-subsidized roads, for example, while enjoying their pre-fab McMansions. Both parts of the made-for-PBS doc offer hopeful solutions, particularly part two, The New Neighbors, which studies a multi-racial New Jersey community that is working together to insure “stable integration” in its neighborhoods. The results are remarkable, and inspiring. Both docs screen as part of a free event, “The New Metropolis: Building a Sustainable and Healthy Bay Area in the Age of Global Warming,” featuring a post-film dialogue that frames issues raised by the films in a local context. Panelists include filmmaker Torrice; El Cerrito Councilmember Janet Aelson, a transit policy expert; regional design specialist Carl Anthony; and other community leaders. For more info and to register, visit el-cerrito.org/eqc/newmetropolis. (:54) Cerrito. (Eddy)

Norwegian Wood Haruki Murakami’s global best-seller — a melancholic, late-1960s love story — hits the big screen thanks to Tran Anh Hung (1993’s The Scent of the Green Papaya). Kenichi Matsuyama (2011’s Gantz, 2005’s Linda Linda Linda) and Rinko Kikuchi (2006’s Babel) play Watanabe and Naoko, a young couple who reconnect in Tokyo after the suicide of his best friend, who was also her childhood sweetheart. There’s love between them, but Naoko is mentally fragile; she flees town suddenly after they sleep together for the first time. Meanwhile, Watanabe meets the vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) — who is also already involved, though not quite so deeply as he — and they spark, though he’s devoted to Naoko, and visits her at the rural hospital where she’s (sort of) working through her emotional issues. Tran is an elegant filmmaker, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood contributes an appropriately moody score. But amid all the breathless encounters, the uber-emo Norwegian Wood drags a bit at over two hours, and the film never quite crystallizes what it was about Murakami’s book that inspired such international rapture. (2:13) Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Right to Love: An American Family This earnest doc springboards off the YouTube fame of the adorable, Star Wars-obsessed Leffew family, who started beaming videos from their Santa Rosa home (channel name: “Gay Family Values”) as a response to attacks on marriage equality. Director Cassie Jaye wisely uses quite a bit of Bryan and Jay’s own footage, which depicts a loving family going about their business under normal (family dinners) and special-occasion (excitedly plotting to leave tooth fairy loot under their young daughter’s pillow) circumstances. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, with the ugly reality of Prop 8 and, most troublingly, Bryan’s own family members, staunchly set in their disapproval of same-sex marriage despite the highly functional example in their midst. This world-premiere Castro screening features in-person appearances by The Right to Love‘s director and subjects; visit www.R2Lmovie.com for additional information on the event. (1:30) Castro. (Eddy)

The Woman in Black Daniel Radcliffe plays a lawyer turned ghost buster in this Hammer Films thriller, adapted from Susan Hill’s best-selling (and previously-adapted for stage and screen) novel. (1:36) Shattuck.

ONGOING

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — “he” has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor “transform,” and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Shattuck. (Harvey)

The Grey Suicidally depressed after losing his spouse, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has to get pro-active about living in a hurry when his plane crashes en route to a oil company site in remotest Alaska. One of a handful of survivors, Ottway is the only one with an idea of the survival skills needed to survive in this subzero wilderness, including knowledge of wolf behavior — which is fortunate, given that the (rapidly dwindling) group of eight men has landed smack in the middle of a pack’s den. Less fortunate is that these hairy, humongous predators are pretty fearless about attacking perceived intruders on their chosen terrain. Director and co-writer Joe Carnahan (2010’s The A-Team, 2006’s Smokin’ Aces) labors to give this thriller some depth via quiet character-based scenes for Neeson and the other actors (including Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts and Dermot Mulroney) in addition to the expected bloodshed. The intended gravitas doesn’t quite take, leaving The Grey and its imposing widescreen scenery (actually British Columbia) in a competent but unmemorable middle ground between serious, primal, life-or-death drama and a monster movie in wolf’s clothing. (1:57) 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Miss Bala You want to look away, but aided and abetted by director-cowriter Gerardo Naranjo’s sober, elegant perspective on the ugly way that innocents get pulled into the Mexican drug wars, you must see it through. That’s the case with Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive Tijuana beauty contestant who signs up for the Miss Baja pageant with a friend, who almost immediately decides to game the system by partying with the police and DEA agents who could possibly help their chances of winning. Laura instantly falls into the hands of Lino (Noe Hernandez), a mafia boss in the process of crashing the party, and with his gang, killing all assembled. Desperately trying to find her friend, Laura takes a wrong turn that lands her back in the arms of Lino, who vows to help the would-be beauty queen and entangles her in his increasingly closed-in criminal world. Naranjo’s cool-headed, almost stately compositions come as almost blessed relief as he pans slowly from the shadows, where you really don’t want to know what’s going on, to a girl, almost completely out of the frame, desperately wedging herself out a second floor window. His detachment undercuts the horror, while angel-faced, perpetually anguished-looking lead actress Sigman simultaneously compels and frustrates with her fatal errors in judgement as she grows more complicit and is literally caught in the crossfire between the rough gangsters who terrorize her and the government soldiers unafraid mete out punishment. The toughest part is watching Sigman’s infuriatingly passive protagonist be used like a sexual puppet, but this raw and refined film — loosely based on the story of 2008’s Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zuniga — doesn’t pull many punches in indicting the pageant machine and the corrupt system that supports it. (1:53) Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Film Listings

0

Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Lynn Rapoport, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.

OPENING

Albert Nobbs The titular character in Rodrigo Garcia’s film is a butler of ideal bone-stiff propriety and subservience in a Dublin hotel whose well-to-do clients expect no less from the hired help. Even his fellow workers know almost nothing about middle aged Albert, and he’s so dully harmless they don’t even notice that lack. Yet Albert has a big secret: he is a she, played by Glenn Close, having decided this cross dressing disguise was the only way out of a Victorian pauper’s life many years ago. Chance crosses Albert’s path with housepainter Hubert (Janet McTeer), who turns out to be harboring precisely the same secret, albeit more merrily — “he” has even found happy domesticity with an understanding wife. Albert dreams of finding the same with a comely young housemaid (Mia Wasikowska), though she’s already lost her silly head over a loutish but handsome handyman (Aaron Johnson) much closer to her age. This period piece is more interesting in concept rather than in execution, as the characters stay all too true to mostly one-dimensional types, and the story of minor intrigues and muffled tragedies springs very few surprises. It’s an honorable but not especially rewarding affair that clearly exists mostly as a setting for Close’s impeccable performance — and she knows it, having written the screenplay and produced; she’s also played this part on stage before. Yet even that accomplishment has an airless feel; you never forget you’re watching an actor “transform,” and for all his luckless pathos, Albert is actually a pretty tedious fellow. (1:53) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Declaration of War See “The Best Medicine.” (1:40) Lumiere, Shattuck.

The Flowers of War Based on the novel The 13 Women of Nanjing by Geling Yan (Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl), Flowers of War sees director Zhang Yimou probing the still-painful wounds of the Nanjing Massacre. Here, he gets to pull out his customary sensuous fascinations — jewel-tone colors that pop unexpectedly amid gray wartime rubble, reams of floating textiles, and girls, girls, girls — to intriguing if patchy effect. The touch-and-go quality of the production is understandable considering the clash of acting styles generated by our players: crass good-old-boy American-in-China mortician John (Method-ically played by Christian Bale), and the clutch of look-alike Catholic school girls and cadre of call girls, the latter headed up by slyly Veronica Lake-ish vamp Yu Mo (Ni Ni). John has been called to bury a priest at the Nanjing cathedral, smack in the middle of the Japanese invasion, and despite the corpses littering the street, all he seems to care about is getting paid and running off. Somehow the sweet little helpless schoolgirls convert him into a believer, enough to make him don the priest’s garb and try to protect them from crazed Japanese soldiers intent on literally carrying out the Rape of Nanjing. Meanwhile the ladies of the evening, hiding out in the basement against everyone’s wishes, work their wiles to get him to help them escape. Armed with a budget that makes this the most expensive film in Chinese history, Zhang embraces this collision of soldiers, cultures, contemporary Western war movies, and popular Chinese entertainments in the stylized mode of a archetypal Chinese melodrama. Though it’s far from his best work, Flowers still draws you in while imparting the horrors of an ugly war that pulled the most innocent — and beautifully decadent — civilians into its wake. (2:21) Smith Rafael. (Chun)

The Grey Suicidally depressed after losing his spouse, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has to get pro-active about living in a hurry when his plane crashes en route to a oil company site in remotest Alaska. One of a handful of survivors, Ottway is the only one with an idea of the survival skills needed to survive in this subzero wilderness, including knowledge of wolf behavior — which is fortunate, given that the (rapidly dwindling) group of eight men has landed smack in the middle of a pack’s den. Less fortunate is that these hairy, humongous predators are pretty fearless about attacking perceived intruders on their chosen terrain. Director and co-writer Joe Carnahan (2010’s The A-Team, 2006’s Smokin’ Aces) labors to give this thriller some depth via quiet character-based scenes for Neeson and the other actors (including Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts and Dermot Mulroney) in addition to the expected bloodshed. The intended gravitas doesn’t quite take, leaving The Grey and its imposing widescreen scenery (actually British Columbia) in a competent but unmemorable middle ground between serious, primal, life-or-death drama and a monster movie in wolf’s clothing. (1:57) (Harvey)

Man on a Ledge Sam Worthington plays escaped convict Nick Cassidy, a former cop wrongly accused of stealing a very big diamond from a ruthless real estate mogul (Ed Harris) against the backdrop of 2008’s financial disasters. Having cleared the penitentiary walls, many a man might have headed for the nearest border, but Nick’s fervent desire to prove his innocence leads him to climb out the window of a 21st-floor Manhattan hotel room and spend most of the rest of the movie pacing a tiny strip of concrete and chatting with hung over NYPD crisis negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), who’s also nursing some PTSD after a suicide negotiation gone bad. After a while, the establishing shots panning up 21 floors or across the city grid to Nick’s exterior perch begin to feel extraneous — we know there’s a man on a ledge; it says so on our ticket stub. More involving is the balancing act Nick performs while he’s up there — keeping the eyes of the city glued on him while guiding the suspensefully amateur efforts of his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) to pull off an unidentified caper in a nearby high-rise. Ed Burns, Anthony Mackie, and Kyra Sedgwick costar. (1:42) (Rapoport)

*Miss Bala You want to look away, but aided and abetted by director-cowriter Gerardo Naranjo’s sober, elegant perspective on the ugly way that innocents get pulled into the Mexican drug wars, you must see it through. That’s the case with Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), a naive Tijuana beauty contestant who signs up for the Miss Baja pageant with a friend, who almost immediately decides to game the system by partying with the police and DEA agents who could possibly help their chances of winning. Laura instantly falls into the hands of Lino (Noe Hernandez), a mafia boss in the process of crashing the party, and with his gang, killing all assembled. Desperately trying to find her friend, Laura takes a wrong turn that lands her back in the arms of Lino, who vows to help the would-be beauty queen and entangles her in his increasingly closed-in criminal world. Naranjo’s cool-headed, almost stately compositions come as almost blessed relief as he pans slowly from the shadows, where you really don’t want to know what’s going on, to a girl, almost completely out of the frame, desperately wedging herself out a second floor window. His detachment undercuts the horror, while angel-faced, perpetually anguished-looking lead actress Sigman simultaneously compels and frustrates with her fatal errors in judgement as she grows more complicit and is literally caught in the crossfire between the rough gangsters who terrorize her and the government soldiers unafraid mete out punishment. The toughest part is watching Sigman’s infuriatingly passive protagonist be used like a sexual puppet, but this raw and yet refined film — loosely based on the story of 2008’s Miss Sinaloa, Laura Zuniga — doesn’t pull many punches in indicting the pageant machine and the corrupt system that supports it. (1:53) (Chun)

One for the Money Katherine Heigl stars as bounty hunter Stephanie Plum in this adaptation of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling mystery novel. (1:46)

Sing Your Song It’s easy to be cynical about do-gooding celebrities. Like, does superstar X really care about that charity or cause, or is he or she merely doing a public-image polish? This is not a concern with Harry Belafonte, who — when not charming audiences with tunes like “The Banana Boat Song” — has spent most of his 84 years personally battling injustice. If he wasn’t such an American treasure (World War II veteran, courageous challenger of Hollywood racism, vocally pro-labor union amid anti-Commie hysteria, etc.), Sing Your Song might feel as if it were progressing in an almost comedically heroic manner: Harry befriends Martin Luther King, Jr; Harry teaches JFK and RFK about civil rights; Harry champions Nelson Mandela; Harry protests the Vietnam War; Harry devotes himself to Africa (cue “We Are the World”). But it all really happened (with historical footage and photographs to prove it), and most of it at a time when his views were seen as radical by mainstream America. Belafonte’s accomplishments are undeniable, and Sing Your Song is, perhaps unavoidably, a textbook hagiography — even as his children from multiple marriages, one of whom co-produced the film, make vague yet forgiving references to Belafonte’s frequent absentee-dad status. Otherwise, Sing Your Song is solely concerned with singing Belafonte’s praises — admirable, but kinda one-note. (1:44) Roxie. (Eddy)

Sleeping Beauty Australian novelist turned director Julia Leigh’s first feature arrives affixed with a stamp of approval from no less than Jane Campion; though Sleeping Beauty treads in Campion-style edgy feminism, its ideas are not quite fully formed, rendering a film that’s not entirely satisfying. It is gorgeously shot, however, with long (occasionally overly so) shots that coolly observe the life of Lucy (pillow-lipped Emily Browning, star of 2011’s Sucker Punch), a college student struggling to make ends meet with an array of minimum-wage gigs. Her housemates hate her; the only friend she has is a shut-in drug addict. She gets her kicks picking up random men at yuppie bars — until she’s offered a gig working for an exclusive purveyor of kink to elderly clients, first as a lingerie-clad serving girl, and later as a “sleeping beauty:” she’s given knockout drugs and handed over to customers (“no penetration” is the only rule, but yes, it’s still creepy). Sleeping Beauty is too chilly to be titillating, and while Browning is lovely, Lucy is affectless to the point of being, well, pretty boring, even with her clothes off. I read one review that suggested watching the film as if it were intended to be a comedy; lines like “Match your lipstick to the color of your labia” certainly support this thesis. (1:44) SFFS New People Cinema. (Eddy)

Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts The Roxie screens Patrick Meaney’s latest loving portrait of a comics innovator, following in the footsteps of his 2010 effort, Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods. The film captures Warren Ellis’ career as a writer of tenacious and idiosyncratic futurist sci-fi, but it also tries to get a grasp on his outsized internet persona. Other comics professionals, bloggers, and assorted celebrity friends reflect on his effect on their lives in genial if typically worshipful interviews. Ellis, a self-styled curmudgeon, is painted as the “sweetest person in the world” — the love his friends and followers have for him is genuine. Perhaps not a fitting starting point for anyone completely unfamiliar with his writing (you’d be better off picking up a collection of Planetary or Transmetropolitan), but Captured Ghosts makes a solid case for the Brit’s creative legacy, and looks to his future with optimism, tempered by Ellis’ self-critical humility. (1:30) Roxie. (Sam Stander)

ONGOING

*The Artist With the charisma-oozing agility of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way past opponents and the supreme confidence of Rudolph Valentino leaning, mid-swoon, into a maiden, French director-writer Michel Hazanavicius hits a sweet spot, or beauty mark of sorts, with his radiant new film The Artist. In a feat worthy of Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, Hazanavicius juggles a marvelously layered love story between a man and a woman, tensions between the silents and the talkies, and a movie buff’s appreciation of the power of film — embodied in particular by early Hollywood’s union of European artistry and American commerce. Dashing silent film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin, who channels Fairbanks, Flynn, and William Powell — and won this year’s Cannes best actor prize) is at the height of his career, adorable Jack Russell by his side, until the talkies threaten to relegate him to yesterday’s news. The talent nurtured in the thick of the studio system yearns for real power, telling the newspapers, “I’m not a puppet anymore — I’m an artist,” and finances and directs his own melodrama, while his youthful protégé Peppy Miller (Bérénice Béjo) becomes a yakky flapper age’s new It Girl. Both a crowd-pleasing entertainment and a loving précis on early film history, The Artist never checks its brains at the door, remaining self-aware of its own conceit and its forebears, yet unashamed to touch the audience, without an ounce of cynicism. (1:40) California, Embarcadero, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Beauty and the Beast 3D (1:24) 1000 Van Ness..

Carnage Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) have arrived in the apartment of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) to discuss proper follow-up to a playground incident in which one of their children went ballistic on another. But this grownup discussion about conduct between children quickly degenerates into a four-way living room sandbox melee, as the couples reveal snobbish disdain toward one another’s presumed values and the cracks in each marriage are duly bared. Roman Polanski’s unnecessary screen translation of Yasmina Reza’s play remains awkwardly rooted to the stage, where its contrivances would have seemed less obvious, or at least apt for the medium. There’s some fun to be had watching these actors play variously self-involved, accusatory Manhattanites who enact a very lite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? amid way too much single-malt Scotch ingestion. But the text gets crudely farcical after a while, and its critiques of the characters’ shallow materialism, bad parenting, knee-jerk liberal empathy, privileged class indifference, etc. would resonate more if those faults weren’t so cartoonishly drawn. In the end, Carnage‘s high-profile talent obliterates rather than illuminates the material — it’s like aiming a bazooka at a napkin. (1:20) Bridge, Shattuck. (Harvey)

Contraband A relative gem among the dross of January film releases, Contraband works best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and flounders when it does. Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the man behind much of Iceland’s popular filmography (2006’s Jar City, 2002’s The Sea, 2000’s 101 Reykjavik), this no-frills genre picture stars Mark Wahlberg as Chris Farraday, an ex-smuggler-turned-family-man who must give the life of crime another go-round when his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and brother-in-law (Caleb Landry Jones) find themselves in thrall to a nasty, drug-addicted criminal (an especially methy-looking Giovanni Ribisi). If you’ve seen any of these One Last Heist movies, you won’t be surprised that Chris’ operation goes completely awry — in Panama, on a cargo captained by J.K. Simmons, no less. Ribisi is as simpering and gleefully evil a caricature as they come, and as Chris’ best friend, brooding Ben Foster’s unexpected about-face in the film’s last third is pretty watchable. I’m not exactly saying you should go and see it, but I’m not stopping you, either. (1:49) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Ryan Lattanzio)

A Dangerous Method Cool and chatty (unsurprisingly, given its subject matter and the fact that it’s based on a play and a novel), David Cronenberg’s latest begins in 1904 Zurich as a shrieking patient (Keira Knightley) is escorted into the care of psychiatrist Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Dr. Jung, an admirer of Sigmund Freud, tests the “talking cure” on the woman, who turns out to be the fiercely intelligent and conveniently beautiful Sabina Spielrein. An attraction, both intellectual and sexual, soon develops, no matter that Jung is Sabina’s doctor, or that he happens to be married to a prim wife whose family wealth keeps him in boats and lake houses. Meanwhile, Jung and Freud (an excellent Viggo Mortensen) begin corresponding, eventually meeting and forming a friendship that’s tested first when Sabina comes between them, and later when Jung expresses a growing interest in fringe pursuits like parapsychology. The scenes between Freud and Jung are A Dangerous Method‘s most intriguing — save those brief few involving Vincent Cassel as a doctor-turned-patient who advises Jung to “never repress anything” — but the film is mostly concerned with Jung’s various Sabina-related dramas. Pity that this is a tightly-wound Fassbender’s least dynamic performance of the year, and that Knightley, way over the top in Sabina’s hysterical scenes, telegraphs “casting mistake” from the get-go. (1:39) Albany, Lumiere. (Eddy)

*The Descendants Like all of Alexander Payne’s films save 1996 debut Citizen Ruth, The Descendants is an adaptation, this time from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ excellent 2007 novel. Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu lawyer burdened by various things, mostly a) being a haole (i.e. white) person nonetheless descended from Hawaiian royalty, rich in real estate most natives figure his kind stole from them; and b) being father to two children by a wife who’s been in a coma since a boating accident three weeks ago. Already having a hard time transitioning from workaholic to hands-on dad, Matt soon finds out this new role is permanent, like it or not — spouse Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, just briefly seen animate) will not wake up. The Descendants covers the few days in which Matt has to share this news with Elizabeth’s loved ones, mostly notably Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller as disparately rebellious teen and 10-year-old daughters. Plus there’s the unpleasant discovery that the glam, sporty, demanding wife he’d increasingly seemed “not enough” for had indeed been looking elsewhere. When has George Clooney suggested insecurity enough to play a man afraid he’s too small in character for a larger-than-life spouse? But dressed here in oversized shorts and Hawaiian shirts, the usually suave performer looks shrunken and paunchy; his hooded eyes convey the stung joke’s-on-me viewpoint of someone who figures acknowledging depression would be an undeserved indulgence. Payne’s film can’t translate all the book’s rueful hilarity, fit in much marital backstory, or quite get across the evolving weirdness of Miller’s Scottie — though the young actors are all fine — but the film’s reined-in observations of odd yet relatable adult and family lives are all the more satisfying for lack of grandiose ambition. (1:55) California, Piedmont, Presidio, SF Center. (Harvey)

*Drive Such a lovely way to Drive, drunk on the sensual depths of a lush, saturated jewel tone palette and a dreamlike, almost luxurious pacing that gives off the steamy hothouse pop romanticism of ’80s-era Michael Mann and David Lynch — with the bracing, impactful flecks of threat and ultraviolence that might accompany a car chase, a moody noir, or both, as filtered through a first-wave music video. Drive comes dressed in the klassic komforts — from the Steve McQueen-esque stances and perfectly cut jackets of Ryan Gosling as the Driver Who Shall Remain Nameless to the foreboding lingering in the shadows and the wittily static, statuesque strippers that decorate the background. Gosling’s Driver is in line with Mann’s other upstanding working men who hew to an old-school moral code and are excellent at what they do, regardless of what side of the law they’re working: he likes to keep it clear and simple — his services as a wheelman boil down to five minutes, in and out — but matters get messy when he falls for sweet-faced neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), who lives down the hall with her small son, and her ex-con husband (Oscar Isaac) is dragged back into the game. Populated by pungent side players like Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, and Christina Hendricks, and scattered with readily embeddable moments like a life-changing elevator kiss that goes bloodily wrong-right, Drive turns into a real coming-out affair for both Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (2008’s Bronson), who rises above any crisis of influence or confluence of genre to pick up the po-mo baton that Lynch left behind, and 2011’s MVP Ryan Gosling, who gets to flex his leading-man muscles in a truly cinematic role, an anti-hero and under-the-hood psychopath looking for the real hero within. (1:40) Opera Plaza. (Chun)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Director Stephen Daldry is no stranger to guiding actors to Oscars; his previous two films, 2008’s The Reader and 2002’s The Hours, both earned Best Actress statuettes for their stars. So it’s no surprise that Sandra Bullock’s performance is the best thing about this big-screen take on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, which is otherwise hamstrung by twee, melodramatic elements that (presumably) translated poorly from page to screen. One year after 9/11, a Manhattan mother (Bullock) and her nine-year-old son Oskar (newcomer Thomas Horn, a youth Jeopardy! champ) are, unsurprisingly, still mourning their beloved husband and father (Tom Hanks), who was killed on “the worst day.” But therapy be damned — Oskar takes to the streets, knocking on the doors of strangers, searching for the lock that will fit a mysterious key his dad left behind. Carrying a tambourine. Later befriending an elderly man (Max von Sydow) whose true identity is immediately obvious, despite the fact that he writes pithy notes instead of speaking. In its attempts to explore grief through the eyes of a borderline-autistic kid (“tests were inconclusive,” according to Oskar), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is so forced-quirky it makes the works of Wes Anderson look like minimalist manifestos; that it bounces its maudlin, cliché-baiting plot off the biggest tragedy in recent American history is borderline offensive. Actually offensive, however, is the fact that Daldry — who also knows from young thespians, having helmed 2000’s Billy Elliot — positions the green Horn (ahem) in such a complex role. The character of Oskar is, as written, nauseatingly precocious; adding shrill and stridently unsympathetic to the mix renders the entire shebang nigh-unwatchable, despite the best efforts of supporting players like Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright. Congrats, Kodi Smit-McPhee, child actor who single-handedly dismantled 2009’s The Road — you now have some company at the kid’s table in the literary-adaptation hall of shame. (2:09) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos There’s probably no reason to venture out to see Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos unless you’re already a fan of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga (and/or its many offshoots, including an anime series that’s aired stateside on the Cartoon Network). That’s not to say Milos is a crappy movie; it just depends an awful lot on foreknowledge about its mythical world and main characters, a pair of young brothers named Ed and Al. Their mastery of “alchemy” (a.k.a. Harry Potter-style zapping skills) has earned them government status but also cost them various body parts — Al, whose voice suggests he’s a pre-teen, exists only as a robot-like metal suit attached to the boy’s human soul. Their adventures in steampunk mischief lead them to a country called Milos that’s been repressed by the world’s superpowers; there, they meet a young girl who’s determined to restore her homeland to grandeur using what’s alternately called “the star of fresh blood,” “the stone of immortality,” or “the philosopher’s stone” to either “open the doorway of truth” or “use the alchemy of the holy land.” Or something. Mumbo-jumbo-y plot points aside, Milos is more or less a fast-paced triumph-of-the-underdog story, with pants-wearing giant wolves and other magic-with-a-k flourishes. Fun if you’re into that kind of thing. (1:50) SFFS New People Cinema. (Eddy)

*The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The meeting of Stieg Larsson’s first “Millennium” book and David Fincher promised fireworks, as he’s a director who can be equally vivid and exacting with just the elements key to the series: procedural detail, obsession, violence, tweaked genre conventions, mind games, haunted protagonists, and expansive story arcs. But perhaps because this possible franchise launch had to be rushed into production to ride the Larsson wave, what should have been a terrific matchup turns out to be just a good one — superior in some stylistic departments (notably Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pulsing score), but overall neither an improvement nor a disappointment in comparison to the uninspired but effective 2009 Swedish film version. Daniel Craig plays Mikael Blomkvist, the muckraking Stockholm journalist whose public disgrace after a failed expose of a suspect corporate tycoon makes him the perfect candidate for an unexpected assignment: staying sequestered in the wealthy, warring Vanger clan’s island home to secretly investigate a teenage girl’s disappearance and presumed murder 40 years ago. His testy helpmate is the singular Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), antisocial hacker, researcher, and ex-mental patient par excellence. Nearly three hours long, the compressed, slightly altered (get over it) storyline nonetheless feels rushed at times; Fincher manages the rare feat of making mostly internet research exciting in filmic terms, yet oddly the book’s more shocking episodes of sex and/or mayhem don’t have the memorable impact one might expect from him. The leads are fine, as is the big support cast of recognizable faces (Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, etc.) But the knockout suspense, atmosphere, and urgency one hoped for isn’t present in this intelligent, not entirely satisfying treatment. On the other hand, maybe those who’ve already read the books and seen the prior films have already had so much exposure to this material that a revelatory experience is no longer possible. (2:38) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Le Havre Aki Kaurismäki’s second French-language film (following 1992’s La Vie de Boheme) offers commentary on modern immigration issues wrapped in the gauze of a feel good fairy tale and cozy French provincialism a la Marcel Pagnol. Worried about the health of his hospitalized wife (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen), veteran layabout and sometime shoe shiner Marcel (Andre Wilms) gets some welcome distraction in coming to the aid of Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young African illegally trying to make way to his mother in London while eluding the gendarmes. Marcel’s whole neighborhood of port-town busybodies and industrious émigrés eventually join in the cause, turning Le Havre into a sort of old-folks caper comedy with an incongruously sunny take on a rising European multiculturalism in which there are no real racist xenophobes, just grumps deserving comeuppance. Incongruous because Kaurismäki is, of course, the king of sardonically funny Finnish miserabilism — and while it’s charmed many on the festival circuit, this combination of his usual poker-faced style and feel-good storytelling formula may strike others as an oil-and-water mismatch. (1:43) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

*Haywire Female empowerment gets its kung-fu-grip thighs around the beet-red throat of all the old action-heroes. Despite a deflated second half — and director Steven Soderbergh’s determinedly cool-headed yet ultimately exciting-quelling approach to Bourne-free action scenes — Haywire is fully capable of seizing and demanding everyone’s attention, particularly that of the feminists in the darkened theater who have given up looking for an action star that might best Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft. Former pro mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, who plays it as studiedly intense and charismatic as crossover grapplers Lee, Norris, and Seagal before her, is that woman, with convincingly formidable neck and shoulder muscles to distract from her curves. Her Mallory Kane is one of the few women in Haywire‘s pared-down, stylized mise-en-scene — the lone female in a world of men out to get her, starting with the opening diner scene of a watchful Mallory confronted by a man (Channing Tatum) playing at being her boyfriend, fed up with her shit, and preparing to pack her into the car — a scenario that doubtless many rebel girls can relate to until it explodes into an ultraviolent, floor-thrashing fight scene. Turns out Mallory is an ex-Marine and Blackwater-style mercenary, ready to get out of the firm and out of a relationship with her boss, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), when she learns, the bruising way, that she’s been set up. The diner scene sets the tone for rest of Haywire, an otherwise straightforward (albeit flashback-loaded) feminist whodunit of sorts, limned with subtextual currents of sexualized violence and unfolding over a series of encounters with men who could be suitors — or killers. (1:45) California, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness. (Chun)

The Iron Lady Curiously like Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd and scenarist Abi Morgan takes on a political life of length, breadth and controversy — yet it mostly skims over the politics in favor of a generally admiring take on a famous narrow-minded megalomaniac’s “gumption” as an underdog who drove herself to the top. Looking back on her career from a senile old age spent in the illusory company of dead spouse Denis (Jim Broadbent), Meryl Streep’s ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher steamrolls past hurdles of class and gender while ironically re-enforcing the fustiest Tory values. She’s essentially a spluttering Lord in skirts, absolutist in her belief that money and power rule because they ought to, and any protesting rabble don’t represent the “real England.” That’s a mindset that might well have been explored more fruitfully via less flatly literal-minded portraiture, though Lloyd does make a few late, lame efforts at sub-Ken Russell hallucinatory style. Likely to satisfy no one — anywhere on the ideological scale — seriously interested in the motivations and consequences of a major political life, this skin-deep Lady will mostly appeal to those who just want to see another bravura impersonation added to La Streep’s gallery. Yes, it’s a technically impressive performance, but unlikely to be remembered as one of her more depthed ones, let alone among her better vehicles. (1:45) Albany, Four Star, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

Hugo Hugo turns on an obviously genius conceit: Martin Scorsese, working with 3D, CGI, and a host of other gimmicky effects, creates a children’s fable that ultimately concerns one of early film’s pioneering special-effects fantasists. That enthusiasm for moviemaking magic, transferred across more than a century of film history, was catching, judging from Scorsese’s fizzy, exhilarating, almost-nauseating vault through an oh-so-faux Parisian train station and his carefully layered vortex of picture planes as Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), an intrepid engineering genius of an urchin, scrambles across catwalk above a buzzing station and a hotheaded station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen). Despite the special effects fireworks going off all around him, Hugo has it rough: after the passing of his beloved father (Jude Law), he has been stuck with an nasty drunk of a caretaker uncle (Ray Winstone), who leaves his duties of clock upkeep at a Paris train station to his charge. Hugo must steal croissants to survive and mechanical toy parts to work on the elaborate, enigmatic automaton he was repairing with his father, until he’s caught by the fierce toy seller (Ben Kingsley) with a mysterious lousy mood and a cute, bright ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz). Although the surprisingly dark-ish Hugo gives Scorsese a chance to dabble a new technological toolbox — and the chance to wax pedantically, if passionately, about the importance of film archival studies — the effort never quite despite transcends its self-conscious dazzle, lagging pacing, diffuse narrative, and simplistic screenplay by John Logan, based on Brian Selznick’s book. Even the actorly heavy lifting provided by assets like Kingsley and Moretz and the backloaded love for the fantastic proponents at the dawn of filmmaking fail to help matters. Scorsese attempts to steal a little of the latters’ zeal, but one can only imagine what those wizards would do with motion-capture animation or a blockbuster-sized server farm. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Joyful Noise As heartfelt and anodyne as the singing underdogs at its center, Joyful Noise offers a spirited if ultimately hamstrung spin on a familiar set-up (anyone seen 1993’s Sister Act 2?). Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton (returning to the screen after a two decade hiatus) do most of the heavy lifting as working-class single mother Vi Rose Hill and flashy widow G.G. Sparrow, respectively, who find themselves locking horns as they strategize how to take the small-town Georgia church choir they both sing in to the big-time Gospel competition that gives the film its title. There’s also the matter of G.G.’s city-slicked grandson’s aggressive courting of Vi Rose’s precocious teenage daughter, who, it turns out, like many of the supporting players here, can out-belt most American Idol finalists. Writer-director Todd Graff’s script works in some genial digs at Parton’s fabulous artifice (“Who cares if I’ve had a few little nips and tucks? God didn’t make plastic surgeons so they could starve!” she proudly declares), but Parton’s singing often provides the emotional expressiveness that her face now has trouble conveying. Latifah’s performance is the biggest surprise in a movie that seems all but hatched from a Disney channel writers meeting: Vi Rose radiates both light and heat, tempering Joyful Noise’s steady stream of homespun treacle with some much-needed righteousness and fury. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness. (Sussman)

*Melancholia Lars von Trier is a filmmaker so fond of courting controversy it’s like he does it in spite of himself — his rambling comments about Hitler (“I’m a Nazi”) were enough to get him banned from the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, where Melancholia had its debut (and star Kirsten Dunst won Best Actress). Oops. Maybe after the (here’s that word again) controversy that accompanied 2009’s Antichrist, von Trier felt like he needed a shocking context for his more mellow latest. Pity that, for Melancholia is one of his strongest, most thoughtful works to date. Split into two parts, the film follows first the opulent, disastrous, never-ending wedding reception of Justine (Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard), held at a lavish estate owned by John (Kiefer Sutherland), the tweedy husband of Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Amid the turmoil of arguments (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling as Justine and Claire’s divorced parents), pushy guests (Stellan Skarsgard as Justine’s boss), livid wedding planner (Udo Kier, amazing), and hurt feelings (Michael is the least-wanted groom since Kris Humphries), it’s clear that something is wrong with Justine beyond just marital jitters. The film’s second half begins an unspecified amount of time later, as Claire talks her severely depressed, near-catatonic sister into moving into John’s mansion. As Justine mopes, it’s revealed that a small planet, Melancholia — glimpsed in Melancholia‘s Wagner-scored opening overture — is set to pass perilously close to Earth. John, an amateur astronomer, is thrilled; Claire, fearful for her young son’s future and goaded into high anxiety by internet doomsayers, is convinced the planets will collide, no matter what John says. Since Justine (apparently von Trier’s stand-in for himself) is convinced that the world’s an irredeemably evil place, she takes the news with a shrug. Von Trier’s vision of the apocalypse is somber and surprisingly poetic; Dunst and Gainsbourg do outstanding work as polar-opposite sisters whose very different reactions to impending disaster are equally extreme. (2:15) Lumiere. (Eddy)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Opera Plaza. (Harvey)

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol No world landmark (the Kremlin, the Burj Khalifia) is too iconic and/or freaking tall for uber-adrenalized Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton, Simon “Comic Relief” Pegg) to infiltrate, climb, assume false identities in, use as a home base for unleashing futuristic spy technology that seems almost plausible (with the help of lots of iPads), race a BMW through, etc. One kind of gets the sense that Cruise and company sat down with a piece of paper and were like, “What stunts haven’t we done before, and how many of them can I do with my shirt off?” Celebrated animation director Brad Bird (2004’s The Incredibles) is right at home with Ghost Protocol as his first live-action effort — the film’s plot (set in the present day, it involves a positively vintage blend of Russians and nukes) and even its unmemorable villain take a back seat to Cruise’s secret-agent shenanigans, most of which take the form of a crazy plan that must be altered at the last minute, resulting in an even crazier plan, which must be implemented despite the sudden appearance of yet another ludicrously daunting obstacle, like, say, a howling sandstorm. For maximum big dumb fun, make sure you catch the IMAX version. A warning, though: any time the movie screeches to a halt to explore emotions or attempt characterization … zzz. (2:13) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

My Week With Marilyn Statuette-clutching odds are high for Michelle Williams, as her impersonation of a famous dead celebrity is “well-rounded” in the sense that we get to see her drunk, disorderly, depressed, and so forth. Her Marilyn Monroe is a conscientious performance. But when the movie isn’t rolling in the expected pathos, it’s having other characters point out how instinctive and “magical” Monroe is onscreen — and Williams doesn’t have that in her. Who could? Williams is remarkable playing figures so ordinary you might look right through them on the street, in Wendy and Lucy (2008), Blue Valentine (2010), etc. But as Monroe, all she can do is play the little-lost girl behind the sizzle. Without the sizzle. Which is, admittedly, exactly what My Week — based on a dubious true story — asks of her. It is true that in 1956 the Hollywood icon traveled to England to co-star with director Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in a fluff romance, The Prince and the Showgirl; and that she drove him crazy with her tardiness, mood swings, and crises. It’s debatable whether she really got so chummy with young production gofer Colin Clark, our wistful guide down memory lane. He’s played with simpering wide-eyed adoration by Eddie Redmayne, and his suitably same-aged secondary romantic interest (Emma Watson) is even duller. This conceit could have made for a sly semi-factual comedy of egos, neurosis, and miscommunication. But in a rare big-screen foray, U.K. TV staples director Simon Curtis and scenarist Adrian Hodges play it all with formulaic earnestness — Marilyn is the wounded angel who turns a starstruck boy into a brokenhearted but wiser man as the inevitable atrocious score orders our eyes to mist over. (1:36) Clay, Presidio, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Pariah A teenage girl stands stock-still in a dark nightclub, gazing with desire and fear at the half-naked female dancers on the stage. Later, riding home on the bus, she slowly removes the layers of butch that held her together in the club, stripping down to some version of the person her parents need to see when she walks in the door. Nearly wordlessly, the opening scenes of Dee Rees’s Pariah poignantly depict the embattled internal life of Alike (Adepero Oduye), a 17-year-old African American girl living in Brooklyn with her family and struggling both to be seen as she is and to determine what that might look like. The battles are being waged externally, too, between Alike’s adoring father (Charles Parnell), living in willful ignorance, and angry, rigid mother (Kim Wayans), desperately enforcing a feminine dress code and steering Alike away from openly butch friend Laura (Pernell Walker). Rees’ script beautifully conveys a household of landmines and chasms, which widen as husband and wife and daughter struggle and fail to communicate, asking the wrong questions, fearfully skirting the truth about Alike’s sexuality and her parents’ crumbling marriage. And the world outside proves full of romantic pitfalls and the tensions of longtime friendship and peer pressure. The poems in which the talented Alike takes solace and makes her way toward a more truthful existence are beautiful, but at a certain point the lyricism overtakes the film, forcing an ending that is tidy but less than satisfying. (1:26) Embarcadero. (Rapoport)

*Pina Watching Pina Bausch’s choreography on film should not have been as absorbing and deeply affecting of an experience as it was. Dance on film tends to disappoint — the camera flattens the body and distorts perspective, and you either see too many or not enough details. However, improved 3D technology gave Wim Wenders (1999’s Buena Vista Social Club; 1987’s Wings of Desire) the additional tools he needed to accomplish what he and fellow German Bausch had talked about for 20 years: collaborating on a documentary about her work. Instead of making a film about the rebel dance maker, Wenders made it for Bausch, who died in June 2009, two days before the start of filming. Pina is an eloquent tribute to a tiny, soft-spoken, mousy-looking artist who turned the conventions of theatrical dance upside down. She was a great artist and true innovator. Wenders’ biggest accomplishment in this beautifully paced and edited document is its ability to elucidate Bausch’s work in a way that words probably cannot. While it’s good to see dance’s physicality and its multi dimensionality on screen, it’s even better that the camera goes inside the dances to touch tiny details and essential qualities in the performers’ every gesture. No proscenium theater can offer that kind of intimacy. Appropriately, intimacy (the eternal desire for it) and loneliness (an existential state of being) were the two contradictory forces that Bausch kept exploring over and over. And by taking fragments of the dances into the environment — both natural and artificial — of Wuppertal, Germany, Wenders places them inside the emotional lives of ordinary people, subjects of all of Bausch’s work. (1:43) Shattuck, Smith Rafael, Sundance Kabuki. (Rita Felciano)

Red Tails History (and the highly-acclaimed 1995 TV film, The Tuskeegee Airmen) tells us that during World War II, African American fighter pilots skillfully dispatched Nazi foes — while battling discrimination within the U.S. military every step of the way. From this inspiring true tale springs Red Tails, an overly earnest and awkwardly broad film which matches lavish special effects (thank you, producer George Lucas) with a flawed script stuffed with trite dialogue (thank you, “story by” George Lucas?), an overabundance of characters, and too many subplots (including a romance and a detour into Hogan’s Heroes). The movie would’ve been much stronger had it streamlined to focus on the friendship between the brash Lightning (David Oyelowo) and the not-as-perfect-as-he-seems Easy (Nate Parker); the head-butting between these two supplies the film’s only genuine moments of tension. Otherwise, there’s not much depth, just surface-to-air heroics. (2:00) 1000 Van Ness. (Eddy)

*A Separation Iran’s first movie to win Berlin’s Golden Bear (as well as all its acting awards), this domestic drama reflecting a larger socio-political backdrop is subtly well-crafted on all levels, but most of all demonstrates the unbeatable virtue of having an intricately balanced, reality-grounded screenplay — director Asghar Farhadi’s own — as bedrock. A sort of confrontational impartiality is introduced immediately, as our protagonists Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) face the camera — or rather the court magistrate — to plead their separate cases in her filing for divorce, which he opposes. We gradually learn that their 14-year wedlock isn’t really irreparable, the feelings between them not entirely hostile. The roadblock is that Simin has finally gotten permission to move abroad, a chance she thinks she must seize for the sake of their daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). But Nader doesn’t want to leave the country, and is not about to let his only child go without him. Farhadi worked in theater before moving into films a decade ago. His close attention to character and performance (developed over several weeks’ pre-production rehearsal) has the acuity sported by contemporary playwrights like Kenneth Lonergan and Theresa Rebeck, fitted to a distinctly cinematic urgency of pace and image. There are moments that risk pushing plot mechanizations too far, by A Separation pulls off something very intricate with deceptive simplicity, offering a sort of integrated Rashomon (1950) in which every participant’s viewpoint as the wronged party is right — yet in conflict with every other. (2:03) Embarcadero. (Harvey)

*Shame It’s been a big 2011 for Michael Fassbender, with Jane Eyre, X-Men: First Class, Shame, and A Dangerous Method raising his profile from art-house standout to legit movie star (of the “movie stars who can also act” variety). Shame may only reach one-zillionth of X-Men‘s audience due to its NC-17 rating, but this re-teaming with Hunger (2008) director Steve McQueen is Fassbender’s highest achievement to date. He plays Brandon, a New Yorker whose life is tightly calibrated to enable a raging sex addiction within an otherwise sterile existence, including an undefined corporate job and a spartan (yet expensive-looking) apartment. When brash, needy, messy younger sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan, speaking of actors having banner years) shows up, yakking her life all over his, chaos results. Shame is a movie that unfolds in subtle details and oversized actions, with artful direction despite its oft-salacious content. If scattered moments seem forced (loopy Cissy’s sudden transformation, for one scene, into a classy jazz singer), the emotions — particularly the titular one — never feel less than real and raw. (1:39) Embarcadero, Shattuck. (Eddy)

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Maybe Guy Ritchie should’ve quit while he was ahead. Thanks to strong performances from Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, the British director’s first Holmes flick proved surprisingly fun. Two years later, it’s clear that Ritchie’s well of creatitivity has run dry. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is cliched and overlong, burying a few good ideas under an avalanche of tired action movie stalwarts gone steampunk. To be fair, the set design and art direction are still sumptuous, creating a hyperbolic, detailed vision of Victorian Europe. New cast additions Jared Harris (as Moriarty, maliciously polite) and Stephen Fry (as Mycroft, eccentric and nude) do well with limited material. Noomi Rapace, playing a helpful gypsy, is superfluous. Downey Jr. and Law are still game for some amusing PG-13 homoeroticism, but it’s the former’s disinterested performance that ensures the movie’s downfall. Forced to make do without witty quips or interesting deductions, the Holmes of A Game of Shadows is part bruiser, part buffoon. The game’s a flop, Watson. (2:09) 1000 Van Ness, SF Center. (Ben Richardson)

The Skin I Live In I’d like to think that Pedro Almodóvar is too far along in his frequently-celebrated career to be having a midlife crisis, but all the classic signs are on display in his flashy, disjointed new thriller. Still mourning the death of his burn victim wife and removed from his psychologically disturbed daughter, brilliant-but-ethically compromised plastic surgeon Robert (played with smoldering creepiness by former Almodóvar heartthrob Antonio Banderas) throws himself into developing a new injury-resistant form of prosthetic skin, testing it on his mysterious live-in guinea pig, Vera (the gorgeous Elena Anaya, whose every curve is on view thanks to an après-ski-ready body suit). Eventually, all hell breaks loose, as does Vera, whose back story, as we find out, owes equally to 1960’s Eyes Without a Face and perhaps one of the Saw films. And that’s not even the half of it — to fully recount every sharp turn, digression, and MacGuffin thrown at us would take the entirety of this review. That’s not news for Almodóvar, though. Much like Rainer Werner Fassbinder before him, Almodóvar’s métier is melodrama, as refracted through a gay cinephile’s recuperative affections. His strength as a filmmaker is to keep us emotionally tethered to the story he’s telling, amidst all the allusions, sex changes and plot twists torn straight from a telenovela. The real shame of The Skin I Live In is that so much happens that you don’t actually have time to care much about any of it. Although its many surfaces are beautiful to behold (thanks largely to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine), The Skin I Live In ultimately lacks a key muscle: a heart. (1:57) Opera Plaza. (Sussman)

*Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Tomas Alfredson (2008’s Let the Right One In) directs from Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s sterling adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy vs. spy tale, with Gary Oldman making the role of George Smiley (famously embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 miniseries) completely his own. Your complete attention is demanded, and deserved, by this tale of a Cold War-era, recently retired MI6 agent (Oldman) pressed back into service at “the Circus” to ferret out a Soviet mole. Building off Oldman’s masterful, understated performance, Alfredson layers intrigue and an attention to weird details (a fly buzzing around a car, the sound of toast being scraped with butter) that heighten the film’s deceptively beige 1970s palette. With espionage-movie trappings galore (safe houses, code machines), a returned-to flashback to a surreal office Christmas party, and bang-on supporting performances by John Hurt, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, Tinker Tailor epitomizes rule one of filmmaking: show me, don’t tell me. A movie that assumes its audience isn’t completely brain-dead is cause for celebration and multiple viewings — not to mention a place among the year’s best. (2:07) 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

Underworld Awakening (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

*War Horse If the idea of watching heroic horses getting slaughtered amid the brutal trench warfare of World War I fills your heart with disgust, then you might want to applaud Steven Spielberg and his relatively sensitive touch with that material in the heartrending War Horse. The PG-13 rating also gives you some idea that the director will be hewing to the movie’s origins as a children’s book. Spielberg paints this tale about loss of innocence, be it in the fields of the farm or the battle, in broad strokes, but here, you might feel a bit less manipulated by his prowess as a crowd-pleasing storyteller, less conscious about the legacy he draws on, and more immersed in a story that stays as close as it can to its animal protagonist’s point of view, short of pulling a Mr. Ed. War Horse opens with Joey’s birth and follows him as he’s sold to a struggling English farm run by traumatized war veteran Ted (Peter Mullan), his spunky wife Rose (Emily Watson), and his animal-loving son Albert (Jeremy Irvine). Circumstance — and an unyielding landlord (David Thewlis) — sends Joey off to the so-called Great War, first into the care of an honorable captain (Tom Hiddleston), later a French girl (Celine Buckens), and worst, into the arms of the German enemy, where he toils as a disposable beast of burden charged with hauling the literal machines of war uphill. Spielberg shields viewers both young and old from the more explicit horrors, though gracefully imparts war’s terrors, sending fresh chills through a viewer when, for instance, a child riding a horse disappears over a ridge and fails to return. No one’s immune from tears, and you have to wonder how much healing is actually possible at War Horse‘s conclusion, despite its stylized, symbolism-laden beauty. Nonetheless cinephiles will glean a certain pleasure from images that clearly nod to the blood-red skies of Gone With the Wind (1939), the ominous deep focus of Orson Wells, and the too-bright Technicolor clarity-slash-artifice of National Velvet (1944). (2:26) Shattuck. (Chun)

*Young Adult We first meet Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) passed out next to last night’s bar pickup, whose name she won’t remember upon waking. You get the feeling this scenario happens a lot to Mavis — she’s the aging Manhattan model who seems like a trophy until the guy realizes she’s an even bigger asshole than he is. Plus, she’s in Minneapolis, on a house-grade scotch budget, where the denizens of the Midwestern home town she’s long abandoned assume she’s living a relatively glittering existence as swinging single and published author (albeit ghost author, of a petering-out tween fiction franchise). But no, her life is empty. Save your sympathy, however — Mavis might feel she’s missing something, but her consumerist values and incredible selfishness aren’t going to be sacrificed in finding it. After getting a courtesy baby announcement from old boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson), she makes a determination as arbitrary as it is adamant: they were always meant to be together, and she needs to reclaim him so they can re-live their glory as King Jock and Queen Bitch of high school. Never mind that Buddy is quite happy where he is — let alone that new baby, and a wife (Elizabeth Reaser) less glam but cooler than Mavis will ever be. Acting as her confidant on this kamikaze mission is ex-classmate Matt (Patton Oswalt), who wants to reverse time about two decades for very different reasons. This reunion for the Juno (2007) duo of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody puts the latter’s facile wit to more complex, mature, organic use — though this ruthless yet quiet black character comedy is no uptempo crowd-pleaser. Rather, it’s an insidious, incisive commentary on such entertainments, as well as on juvie fiction like Sweet Valley High, whose adaptation is what Cody was developing before this tangent trumped it. It’s a surprisingly nervy movie, more like a 20-years-later sequel to Heathers (1988) than to Juno. (1:34) Shattuck. (Harvey)

Period Piece: Palou Avenue

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Guardian history writer Lucy Schiller is exploring the city street-by-street in the slow week inter-holiday weekends. Today, learn about Junipero Serra’s right-hand man who now has a Bayview street named after him. Click here for yesterday’s installment on Laguna and McAllister Streets.

 

Palou Avenue

Named for Fray Francisco Palou, Franciscan padre, explorer, biographer

Francisco Palou (1723-1789) was an agent of Spanish colonialism and the right-hand man of Junipero Serra, another San Francisco street namesake. At one point, Palou singlehandedly controlled the operations of all the Baja California missions. After a few years he moved northward with his teacher and mentor Serra. Palou was also responsible for baptizing the first Ohlone Indian, founding Mission Dolores, and establishing the Presidio. His recounting of the Franciscans’ travels throughout California is regarded as a crucial primary source. The street named for Palou runs from Hunter’s Point to the Western reaches of Bayview. 

 

Period Piece: Laguna and McAllister Streets sense

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Guardian history writer Lucy Schiller is exploring the city street-by-street in the slow week inter-holiday weekends. Today, learn about the laundry pool of Laguna Street and the bravery of Matthew Hall McAllister. Click here for yesterday’s installment on Green and Gilbert Streets.

 

Laguna Street

Named for Washerwoman’s Lagoon

A little south of Fort Mason a big old body of water once lay where San Franciscans took their (likely filthy) laundry once and a while. Enterprising citizens soaked and scrubbed their long johns, underthings, and the like ’til they resembled clean clothing, then laid them out to dry. The whole thing sounds rather idyllic -– yet an 1879 Chronicle article refers to the place as “that horribly-smelling and disease-producing pool,” a description that likely had some basis in reality. Our modern day Laguna Street stems from the site of the old quagmire. 


McAllister Street

Named for Matthew Hall McAllister, lawyer, judge

Southern lawyer Matthew Hall McAllister (1800-1865) first began practicing law at the sprightly age of 20 and ended up tackling a fearsome foe: the Hounds, a militantly nativist band of civilians bent on wreaking havoc throughout San Francisco. The Hounds peaked in 1849, robbing, murdering, and terrorizing Hispanic citizens in broad daylight. McAllister prosecuted 19 Hounds successfully, though no official sentences seem to have been enforced (several Hounds were later hung by a mob of angry miners). Fittingly, McAllister Street helps border the Civic Center; it stretches from Arguello to Market Streets. 

 

Period Piece: Green and Gilbert Streets sense

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Guardian history writer Lucy Schiller is exploring the city street-by-street in the slow week inter-holiday weekends. Today, learn about a newspaper editor that died in a duel and a ghost from Philadelphia. Click here for yesterday’s installment on Brannan Street and Geary Boulevard.

Gilbert Street

Named for Edward Gilbert, newspaper editor, congressman

Like many a valiant man before him, Edward Gilbert died in a duel. The newspaperman exercised editorial control over The Alta California, which in 1848 was San Francisco’s only newspaper, and he made his positions on political matters clear as day. He served a single term in the U.S. Congress before returning to his post at the Alta and attacking General James Denver for mismanaging supplies meant for stranded, West-moving immigrants. Gilbert was 33 at the time of his death by Denver’s hand in a duel near Sacramento. His incongruously tiny street runs a block between Sixth and Seventh Streets in SoMa. 

 

Green Street

Named for Talbot Green, fraudulent businessman

Like any early pioneer to San Francisco, businessman Talbot Green left a lot behind back east. In his case, though, it was an entire identity along with a family and some pretty massive debt. No one in San Francisco knew of his checkered past and Green rose to prominence as a successful civic leader, which ultimately got him recognized by a ghost from his previous Pennsylvanian life. Green denied the serious charges – that he was operating under a fake name, that he had abandoned his family, that he embezzled large amounts of money. But he disappeared the day after accusations were made and his reputation never recovered, though he attempted to return to San Francisco years later. A major artery in North Beach, Green Street runs from the Presidio to the Embarcadero.

 

Period Piece: Brannan Street sense (and Geary Boulevard, too)

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Guardian history writer Lucy Schiller is exploring the city street-by-street in the slow week inter-holiday weekends. Today, learn about Samuel Brannan’s shipment of Mormons to San Francisco and John Geary side jobs (which include governor of Philadelphia). Click here for yesterday’s installment on Baker Street.

Brannan Street 

Named for Samuel Brannan, Mormon, ex-Mormon, journalist, Gold Rush instigator

Samuel Brannan (1819-1889) brought 240 Mormons to San Francisco on a ship along with a printing press, effectively tripling the tiny town’s population. And though he himself steered clear of panning for gold, Brannan was the first man to capitalize on the Gold Rush. And capitalize he did, publishing news of California’s gleaming bounty in his newspaper The California Star, while simultaneously selling mining supplies out of a well-placed general store. Brannan quickly became a millionaire, and with his notoriety, his character displayed itself. After being expelled from the church for some pretty questionable tithe diversions, Brannan became an integral member of San Francisco’s notorious citizen police force, the Vigilance Committee. Brannan Street runs in a fittingly prominent path parallel to Market.

Geary Boulevard

Named for John Geary, postmaster, mayor, governor

Just like the street named in his honor, John Geary (1819-1873) was a bustling behemoth, standing around six and a half feet tall and holding the dubious honor of more than 10 war wounds. He also managed to hold an impressive array of titles throughout his violent life, working as San Francisco’s first postmaster, last alcade (premier authority during Mexican rule), first mayor, military general, governor of Kansas, and governor of Pennsylvania. Geary levied the first taxes on San Franciscans, established the first jail (a stinking, unsanitary mess on the ship Euphemia), and ensured that both Washington Square and Union Square remain public spaces.  

 

Period Piece: Baker Street sense

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Guardian history writer Lucy A. Schiller is examining SF’s history corner by corner this week — in this piece, the murder in Baker Street’s torrid past

It should come as no surprise that many of San Francisco’s streets are named for old white men. After all, many financially successful California pioneers were just that (occasionally minus the “old”). But the figures referenced by San Franciscan alleys, thoroughfares, boulevards, and avenues do hold some insight into the city’s past. The picture of 19th century San Francisco painted by its street names is a wildly weird one. Common themes: lawlessness, violence, sometimes ugly individualism, and the occasional progressive value.

Baker Street

Named for Edward Dickinson Baker, orator, senator, friend of Abe Lincoln

Edward D. Baker (1811-1861) holds a distinct honor in American history as the only sitting senator to have been killed in the Civil War. The British-born, Free Soil politician traveled in his youth throughout the Midwest (including a stint at a cotton mill in a failed utopian community) before moving to San Francisco and quickly making his mark as a lawyer and public speaker. A sort of Californian Abraham Lincoln (the President was a close friend and named his second son after Baker), the senator was renowned for his oratorical skills. Attorney general George Williams later called Baker “the most eloquent man I ever heard speak.” Baker was killed in Virginia at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. The silvertongued politician’s eponymous street stretches from Buena Vista Park to the Marina. 

 

Period Piece: A walk in the (man-made) woods

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It’s easy to get a little romantic standing in a beam of filtered sunlight inside Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve. The 61-acre expanse of ivy and eucalyptus feels like a remnant of an earlier, wilder San Francisco. 

But the densely tangled forest backing UCSF’s medical campus is actually man-made. It harkens back to the heyday of good old Adolph Sutro, bathman, silver magnate, and forest enthusiast. Sutro covered the mountain on his sandy property with many of the trees standing today.

Hoofing the Historic Trail, a mild romp of an urban hike, is a little bizarre. The behemoth mass of the UCSF Medical Center glints steadily through the trees, and yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re deep in a damp cloud forest.

Today’s eucalyptus trees obscure a view that Craig Dawson, founder of the Mt. Sutro Stewards, says was once one of the best around. “Imagine roaming here on horseback and seeing these vistas,” said Dawson. “You could see both Angel Island and Alcatraz.” 

A 1950s aerial view of Mt. Sutro. Photo courtesy San Francisco Public Library

Nowadays, you have to be willing to brave major poison oak and a steep off-trail grade if it’s an unfettered view you’re hankering for. 

Dawson and his crew of volunteer trailworkers accidently uncovered the trail in 2006, and Dawson’s best guess is that it served joyfully meandering equestrians in the 1880s. 

Now, the narrow footpath stretches from an unassuming Cole Valley gate to the lofty summit of Mount Sutro, where, strangely enough, the Cold War managed to make its mark. Rotary Meadow, the ending point of the Historic Trail, housed a Nike radar site – a high vantage point from which it was possible to order the launch of deadly anti-aircraft missiles a few miles away. 

To access the Historic Trail, most people start in Cole Valley, on the west side of Stanyan where it meets 17th Street. A green sign on a small gate indicates the trailhead. The hike will gradually climb up through Woodland Canyon before reaching Medical Center Way, the large thoroughfare cutting through and around Mt. Sutro. The trail continues directly across the road and is marked with with two orange flags. For maps, check out www.sutrostewards.org

 

Period Piece: The saga of the California turkey

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“The wild turkey…is a finer representative of America than the eagle,” boldly stated the Chronicle in a 1909 five-paragraph ode to the noble fowl. Maybe for the rest of the country, but not for California, where wild turkeys were introduced from – get this – Mexico in 1877. 

So is it really our bird if it’s not native to the state? An ex-judge in Illinois had a lot to say on the matter.

John Dean Caton, who penned such classics as The Origin of a Small Race of Turkeys actually sent live young turkeys to California, turkeys he had raised himself from eggs found in his rural Illinois backyard.

It was an enterprise that now seems part scientific, part recreational, and part gastronomical. These were not truly wild turkeys. They, and the turkeys from Mexico, were carefully cared for and bred before being released into the wilds of California, all with one purpose in mind: to be hunted by lovers of white and dark meat.

Caton was a character. He described turkey farmers as “not writing men, though frequently good observers.” He compulsively checked in on the state of his Illinoisan turkey brood, sequestered on Santa Clara Island under the care of a similarly-obsessed acquaintance. Reports came back: they were inbred, severely underdeveloped, and kept dying. Not exactly the best hunting challenge, or the finest looking trophies after the fact.

Rio Grande wild turkeys, a hardier variety than those originally imported to California, are now everywhere. Map via National Wild Turkey Federation

The Department of Fish and Game got on board the turkey train in 1908, transplanting more Mexican specimens throughout California and keeping a breeding pool big enough to produce a thousand birds in a five-year period.

But the fowl just wouldn’t take flight here in the Golden State. The California hybrid turkey – a mix of Mexican and Eastern U.S. stock – wasn’t wild enough. Placed anywhere outside of the farm that it was raised on, it couldn’t survive, however feral its genes. 

So where were all the tough turkeys? The rough-and-tumble birds used to evading gun-toting hunters? Perhaps a little obviously, they were in Texas. Most of California’s wild turkeys today descend from a Rio Grande variety first imported in 1959. 

Chances are the turkey you feast upon on Thursday won’t be a wild one (or even free of a chicken-stuffed duck in its gullet). But on a day where gorging is de rigueur, remember that the sacred Butterball has a wild cousin lurking out there, one that deserves at least a toast for keeping it real. 

 

Period Piece: A fight we won

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As steadfast Occupiers confront growing police and official opposition comparisons to historical protest movements are cropping up. 

San Francisco, of course, has been home to more than a few spirited speeches, many of which have resulted in real protest-driven change. Local protests here have long been loci of larger nationwide movements. One cool example: the freeway revolt movement, a national pushback against the autofication of cities in the 1960s and ’70s which reached its peak in San Francisco in the fight against the Western Freeway.

Many of the 1955 organizers who battled the freeway that would have connected 101’s march up Octavia Boulevard all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge hadn’t protested anything before. They included pastors and churchgoers, housewives, concerned parents, World War II veterans, middle-class San Franciscans working and living in the path of a projected freeway.

The proposed Western Freeway would have included a major interchange around 7th and Irving Streets before heading into Golden Gate Park. Image courtesy San Francisco Public Library

The last addition to a city-wide highway plan, the double-decker Western Freeway would have snaked through West Portal, the Sunset District, and the Richmond (with, of course, a little jog through Golden Gate Park, devouring the Rose Garden and the Hall of Flowers). Three huge arteries would have tangled and clogged where Irving and Seventh Streets now intersect in a tree-lined corner. 

Obviously, the protesters who assembled to challenge the Board of Supervisors at Lincoln High School in December of 1955 weren’t just speaking out against the views and noise that were to accompany the proposed concrete ribbon. They were challenging the disruption of a settled post-war life, the bisection of their parishes by eight lanes of concrete, the impossibility of getting their kids to previously accessible neighborhood schools. Thousands of homes were to be demolished, and businesses to be relocated. 

“The turnout was enormous, and the angry crowd unanimous in opposing the freeway plan. The politicians were stunned,” writes Frank Dunnigan in a recollection of the 1955 meeting.

The struggle against the freeway lasted four years and was replicated, again and again, and with growing momentum by neighborhood groups across the entire city. Resolution 45-59, which passed in 1959, squashed plans for the Western Highway as well similar nasty proposals. It was the direct result of efforts by ordinary people with full-time jobs, families, and livelihoods that threatened by the powers that were. And they won.

 

Period Piece: Duels to death on the shores of Lake Merced

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Leaving aside the wanton killing, there was something charming about olden-style justice. Back in the day, a political figure could draft a nasty note that ended with  “your obedient servant,” pass it off to some friends to deliver to a sworn enemy, and wait for his duel to the death to be scheduled. 

It’s probably good those days are over. Bay Area pacifists have two men to thank for the cessation of formalized murder: Senator David Broderick and Judge David Terry – who were probably not the original frenemies, but certainly early bearers of the standard. The two ensured the end of legal dueling with their fatal 1859 clash on the banks of Lake Merced.

San Franciscans of the 19th century already knew both Broderick and Terry to be firebrands. “Dave” Broderick worked as a barkeeper before making his way into a California Senate seat, a vocal working-class Democrat. In his first-ever speech to colleagues, Broderick stood up and criticized President Buchanan on the issue of slavery to a room of aghast murmurs.

(A) is for Assasination. Site of the 1859 Broderick-Terry duel.

Terry, a Democrat from the South and California Supreme Court judge, had stabbed an opponent in the neck a few years before the Lake Merced incident came to fruition. His victim survived, and Terry narrowly escaped hanging. 

The Lecompton Constitution, attempting to install slavery in the new state of Kansas, met turmoil within the Democratic Party. Broderick took a cutting abolitionist stance and Terry a bloated pro-slavery one.

“A miserable remnant of a faction, sailing under false colors, trying to obtain votes under false pretenses,” Terry said of Broderick’s supporters in a speech that later compared Broderick (unfavorably) to Frederick Douglass. 

Broderick perturbedly read the speech at breakfast a few days later. A friend of Terry’s sat nearby.

“I have said I considered him the only honest man on the Supreme bench, but now I take it all back,” remarked Broderick.

Letters were delivered between the two. Honors began to be questioned. 

“I…require of you a retraction of those remarks,” wrote Terry, angrily.

“I have to desire you to state what were the remarks that you designate…as offensive,” Broderick obliquely replied.

Terry, frustrated, quoted his opponent, ending the note with an invocation of his honor as “an officer or a gentleman.” But Broderick seemed determined to cause Terry irritation.

“You are the best judge as to whether this language affords good ground of offence,” he wrote back, retraction not included.

Poked into a fury, Terry demanded a duel at “Laguna Merced,” and Broderick accepted. 

Those present at the duel later pegged Terry as the more practiced marksman. Broderick, it was said, seemed unprepared and awkward from the get-go. He carelessly chose an unfamiliar hairtrigger pistol, which fired early and off-mark. Terry took careful aim an instant later and struck Broderick in the breast. 

Broderick was to die within a few days. Anti-dueling legislation was enacted shortly afterwards. But Terry escaped legal retribution and joined up with Confederate forces at the start of the Civil War. For all the talk of glory and honor, he was shot and killed after slapping a U.S. Supreme Court judge in the face (an old friend of Broderick’s, the judge had jailed Terry for contempt during a hearing relating to Mrs. Terry).

“Slavery is old, decrepit and consumptive; freedom is young, strong and vigorous,” spoke Broderick early in his senatorial career. After his galvanizing death, much of California agreed, pushing pro-slavery Democrats out of office in favor of Republican ones. 

Today, the shady spot hosts two stone markers that indicate where the duelers faced off. 

Period piece: The San Francisco prostitute march of 1917

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One morning in January 1917, 300 prostitutes marched into the church of their biggest detractor, Reverend Paul J. Smith. They were ready to show the anti-vice crusader what they were made of. The women were organizing in the face of what had become a decades-long dwindling of their rights, spearheaded by the reverend himself.

The world’s oldest profession flourished in brothels all over the city during the Gold Rush, thanks to all those lonely 49ers. But sex work has never been uncontroversial — and the local practice quickly accumulated its own critics.

Officials began cracking down on city brothels in the 1850s, slowly pushing them into tinier and tinier spaces. By 1909, sex work had been ghettoized in the Chinatown neighborhood and in 1911, to an even tinier strip of city known as the Barbary Coast. 

The 300 prostitutes had some community support, even a municipal clinic supposed to cater to their needs. But weekly checkups were mandatory. Anyone who refused could be arrested.

Reverend Smith took a hard line against what he saw as the heart of San Francisco’s vice. With friends, he gathered data on nightly wanderings through houses of ill repute (next time you find yourself in a gallivanting bachelor party, just use the “collecting evidence” excuse). Smith aggressively proposed a “state farm” – olden speak for rehab – for the sex workers, insisting he had their moral wellbeing at heart. 

The Reverend stepped on a few toes on the way, accusing police and politicians of having their hands in the pockets and up the skirts of brothels. An obviously annoyed Mayor James Rolph published an open letter in the San Francisco Chronicle lampooning Smith’s idea for a state farm. “I fail to see how it is proposed to reform the women by putting them on a farm. Is it your idea to make them milkmaids?”

But Smith’s most compelling challengers were the prostitutes themselves, who crowded into the reverend’s church the day of their march asking what, exactly, his intentions were for his campaign of persecution. 

“Are you trying to reform us or are you trying to reform social conditions?” asked one woman. Smith proposed that the sex workers turn to alternate professions where they would earn the minimum wage – $10 a week, half of what the prostitutes estimated they made through sex work. His suggestion was met with laughter.

“What ship are you going to send us away on?” challenged another. Smith brought up the possibility of doing housework, presumably while being financially dependent on a husband (numerous men, in fact, had written the reverend looking to be fixed up with a good-looking fallen woman). 

“What woman wants to work in a kitchen?” a member of the crowd shouted. 

Citing his “impassioned critics,” the reverend adjourned the meeting. By Valentine’s Day, the anti-vice movement forced a roundup of more than a thousand working women from city brothels and dance halls. 

But for a brief moment, sex workers native and foreign, young, old, and middle-aged, had made their voices heard in a city mostly hostile to their existence. At the time, the Chronicle characterized the march as “one of the strangest gatherings that ever took place in San Francisco.” 

Yeah right. In any case, “strange” isn’t the right word.

 

Period Piece: A Carnegie library reopens in the Marina

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Period Piece is Lucy Schiller’s recurring feature on the hidden histories of San Francisco. Give her a shout at culture@sfbg.com if you know of some hot dirt on olden times in the city

About a hundred years ago, Andrew Carnegie was giving away most of the money he had amassed from a gargantuan steel empire. Eight libraries in San Francisco directly resulted from Carnegie’s efforts, including the Marina’s Golden Gate Valley branch – the recipient of a much needed facelift that concluded last week.

The library was the eighth branch to open in San Francisco. It was born in 1918 to a city less than thrilled about accepting money from a man with a terrible labor rights record. Various arguments at City Hall had already played out over whether to accept the dirty money or refuse it, dedicate most of the funds to a main library or allocate more to several branches, elect trustees or keep the wealthy, elite ones around. 

After years of stalling, it was decided. Half of Carnegie’s grant went to the Main Library, the other half to seven branches. Last week, the Golden Gate Valley branch reopened after an extensive renovation thanks to B.L.I.P. (the inauspicious acronym for the Branch Library Improvement Project).

You can sense the money that went into this place’s initial construction. Shaped like a big wedge of cake, the Golden Gate Valley branch nestles into the corner of Octavia and Green and is decked out with stately columns, heavy copper doors, and high ceilings. 

Libraries have come a long way from their original intended purpose of providing literature to the masses. There are books here, of course — lots and lots of them. But the Golden Gate Valley branch also holds features for kids who can’t even read yet, digital signage in the teens’ area, a program room for community events, and of course, rows of computers for what is perhaps the library’s most salient role in today’s society: free Internet access. 

“Part of the mission of the library is to be a family destination,” says Mindy Linetzky, bond program administrator for BLIP. “We really want teens to come, for example.” With the library’s plans to hold occasional Wii gaming days, you can be sure they will, in droves.

B.L.I.P. has seen marked increase in community engagement since the start of the renovations. According to Michelle Jeffers, public relations officer at SFPL, the Visitation Valley branch’s recent renovation was met with a 406 percent increase in library card registration. 

BLIP’s job is almost done now with twenty-two refurbished libraries under its belt and only two more on the docket. Safer (with seismic bracing), greener (with solar panels), and more accessible (with elevators), our new libraries hold a lot of their former glory but also some fancy new swag.

Golden Gate Valley Public Library
 1801 Green, SF
(415) 355-5666

 

Period Piece: Life and death at the Columbarium

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“This place scared the crap out of me,” says Emmitt Watson, caretaker, historian, and tour guide at the San Francisco Columbarium, the only nondenominational spot in San Francisco to be laid to rest. “When I opened the doors, the first thing I saw were two raccoons.”

The Columbarium is a remnant of an earlier era in San Francisco, an era when everything west of Laurel Heights was pretty much a huge graveyard. Built in 1898, the building with a stone rotunda was a landmark in a sea of headstones. 

As San Francisco expanded in physical size and population, the Western cemeteries became a contentious issue. Smell, crime, homeless encampments, and something referred to vaguely as the “putrefactive germ” in newspaper articles were all reasons that were cited to move the dead elsewhere and make room for the living.

So elsewhere it was. Colma, home to 16 cemeteries, became the destination for many a deceased San Franciscan. 

The large-scale digging-up and hauling-out took place over the course of the 1930s. Headstones were refashioned into Buena Vista Park’s gutters and a sea wall at Ocean Beach. Remains not claimed and paid for by family members were reburied in mass graves. No new cemeteries could be built within city limits, and in the midst of the literal upheaval, the Columbarium housed the cremated remains that were to stay. 

The building is endowed with a cathedral’s glory – all gleaming copper, huge archways, and light filtering down from a domed top. But the Columbarium spent almost half a century in utter neglect and abandonment before 1979. That’s when Watson’s employer, the Neptune Society (a cremation and funeral planning company), bought the property. Watson, responsible for this gleaming cache of human remains, struggled with cobwebs as big as his arm, broken stained glass windows, and feral animals. Now, the place is spotless, and smells faintly like a florist’s refrigerated stockroom.

The building sits abruptly at the end of a residential cul-de-sac. Emmitt Watson lives right next door. In a sense, his neighbors include Harvey Milk and Chet Helms, as well as at least 30,000 others (many stashed in the same urn). 

“Evidently it was meant for me,” says Watson of the Columbarium, and many San Franciscans apparently feel the same way. Glass cases along all three floors of the building display yellow “Reserved” signs. “Your niche in history,” reads a Neptune Society brochure. 

 

 

San Francisco Columbarium

Mon.-Fri., 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sat-Sun, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

One Loraine, SF

(415) 752-7891

www.neptune-society.com

 

 

Period Piece: Mission Creek houseboat community rocks with the tides

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Period Piece is Lucy Schiller’s recurring feature on the hidden histories of San Francisco. Give her a shout at culture@sfbg.com if you know of some hot dirt on olden times in the city

Few wander into Mission Creek’s small houseboat community. It’s hard to find, unless you live in the luxury condos across the channel or are tailgating in a nearby parking lot for a Giants game. But tucked under the I-280 ramp floats a tiny neighborhood, an undiscovered fixture of San Francisco.

On a recent visit, I am shown a residence festooned with skulls and racks of antlers, another with windowboxes full of carnivorous plants, and another with a ghoulishly grinning blowfish decorating the front door. Neighbors here include stingrays, anchovies, pelicans, seals, and – according to one resident – an on-again-off-again sea lion visitor of rather large proportions.  During the small-scale tsunami in March, the floating community felt their homes rise up by about three feet. When asked if any families lived in the boats, one resident responded sharply, “Yes. We’re all a family.” It couldn’t get any quainter, really. 

The short waterway has a long history. Before the white settlement of San Francisco, Ohlone Indians lived and boated along Mission Creek’s course, which was then much wider and longer, stretching almost from Twin Peaks to the Bay. Fast-forward some years and butchers were sending unwanted guts downstream, railroad companies were slowly paving it over to make way for new transportation networks, and Del Monte was setting up shop, using cheap labor to offload and can fruit in massive volume.

Today, a few of the creek’s residents are descendents of the dockworkers who worked to unload shipment after shipment of bananas. The houseboat community first began taking form in the early 1960s, with many of the original members moving from neighborhoods only a stone’s throw away. 

Now, the small settlement seems comprised of individuals filling strangely specific roles – I met and heard of the caretaker, the doctor, the weaver, the ex-taxi driver-current waterway historian. A small but productive community garden grows on a nearby bank. Needless to say, all who live here hold their patch of water very dear.

And it has changed considerably. In the still-recent past, San Francisco’s skyline gleamed through the boats’ kitchen windows; façades of the Berry Street condos have replaced that view. Mission Creek Park, a winding green space running parallel to the creek, is also a recent development. The inherent charm of living on a houseboat in the middle of the city is pretty obvious to outsiders, and residents worry about being slowly bought out by folks less devoted to the existing community. After recently renewing a lease with the Port Authority, however, the boaters should be sitting pretty till at least 2043, to the nightly sounds of shrieking egrets and Giants fans alike.

 

Film Listings

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OPENING

Amigo John Sayles’ career is a fascinating one too varied to fully examine here; suffice it to say, the man’s first big gig was writing 1978’s Piranha before he became the indie auteur behind such notables as 1984’s The Brother from Another Planet, 1987’s Matewan, 1988’s Eight Men Out, and 1996’s Lone Star. He favors large ensemble casts, socially-conscious themes, and an unhurried pace that allows the exploration of various plot threads. Amigo is possibly most similar to 1997’s Men With Guns, in that it’s largely subtitled, is set in a foreign country (here, the Philippines), and plays out against a backdrop of political and military unrest. The film takes place during the Philippine-American War, circa 1900, as U.S. troops (led by Sayles favorite Chris Cooper) roam the just-freed-from-Spain jungles searching for rebels who threaten America’s claim to the land. Also in the mix are town leader Rafael (Filipino superstar Joel Torre), his guerilla brother (Ronnie Lazaro), and a crooked priest (Yul Vázquez) fond of incorrectly translating between sides. Amigo‘s an important film simply because it educates about a little-known conflict — frankly, America’s conduct as occupiers is so cruel that it’s no surprise the history books gloss over it — but it’s slow-moving and heavy-handed, with a tone that pitches uneasily between humor and tragedy. (2:08) Stonestown. (Eddy)

*The Arbor An audaciously conceived and genuinely haunting chronicle of a family, The Arbor reinvents two of the most debased forms of nonfiction film: the venerating portrait of an artist who died young and the voyeuristic confession of abuse. The locus here is the short, bottle-strewn life of Andrea Dunbar, a brilliant playwright whose work distilled the manners and speech of the West Yorkshire housing projects. The Arbor effectively stages some of this work in a park near the same apartments, but the project’s focus is Dunbar’s shambling private life and its devastating effect on friends, lovers, and daughters. Our emotions are strained by their collective fury and grief, but never cheated. Curiously, Clio Barnard accomplishes this by being up front in her manipulations. After collecting interviews with the key players, she cast actors to lip sync the answers — that is, the voices are documentary while the images are staged, an uncanny effect that becomes even more so when Barnard stitches together responses to narrate a single event. The technique is eerie and literally disembodying. In the same way that one affected by trauma may experience a separation from his or her self, so the image of the actor speaking comes unglued from the “real” voice — and so too is there a crucial hesitation in our assigning authenticity to a single, undivided subject. There are shades of Greek tragedy in The Arbor‘s patient, distanced unfolding of its characters’ fates. The speakers are imagined as a chorus, and though the drama is offscreen, long since buried, the pain still lives. (1:34) Roxie. (Goldberg)

*Bellflower Picture Two Lane Blacktop (1971) drifters armed with “dude”-centric vocabulary and an obsession with The Road Warrior (1981) and its apocalypse-wow survivalist chic. There are so many pleasures in this janky, so-very-DIY, heavy-on-the-sunblasted-atmosphere indie that you’re almost willing to overlook the clichés, the dead zones, and the annoying characters. Seeming every-dudes Woodrow (director-writer-producer Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) are far too obsessed with tricking out their cars and building a flamethrower for their own good — the misfits must force themselves out of the metal shop of the mind to meet women. So when Woodrow goes up against Milly (Jessie Wiseman) in a cricket-eating contest at a bar, it’s love at first bite. Their meet-gross morphs into a road trip and eventually a relationship, while the flamethrower nags, unexplained, in the background, like an unfired gun — or an unconsummated, not-funny bromance. These manifestations of male fantasy — muscle cars, weapons, and tough chicks — are cast in a dreamy, saturated, and burnt-at-the-edges light, as Glodell and company weave together barely articulated reveries and bad-new-west imagery with a kind of fuck-all intelligence, culminating in a finale that will either haunt you with its scattershot machismo-romanticism or leave you scratching your noggin wondering what just happened. (1:46) (Chun)

Conan the Barbarian Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones), Rose McGowan, and Ron Perlman star (in 3D) in this latest take on the Robert E. Howard hero. (1:42)

*The Future See “Fear and Longing.” (1:31)

Fright Night Don’t let the spooky trailer fool you: the Fright Night remake is almost as silly as the original. In fact, it follows the 1985 film closely, as young Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) comes to realize that his neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) is a vampire. The biggest change is a smart one — this Fright Night transforms late-night TV host Peter Vincent into Criss Angel-type illusionist Peter Vincent (David Tennant). The casting is spot on all-around, and frankly, Farrell is a lot more believable than Chris Sarandon as the seductive bad boy. The only real problem with the new Fright Night — other than the unnecessary 3D — is that it never fully commits to camp the way the original did. There’s a bit too much back-and-forth between serious scares and goofy blood splatters. Luckily, it’s still an entertaining remake that doesn’t crap all over a classic. It’s also a great reminder that vampires don’t have to be moody — remember, they used to be fun. (2:00) (Peitzman)

Griff the Invisible See “Fortress of Meh.” (1:33) Shattuck.

Gun Hill Road See “Once Upon a Time in the Bronx.” (1:28) Sundance Kabuki.

*One Day See “Deep in the Heart.” (1:48) Balboa.

*Senna When Ayrton Senna died in 1994 at the age of 34, he had already secured his legacy as one of the greatest and most beloved Formula One racers of all time. The three-time world champion was a hero in his native Brazil and a respected and feared opponent on the track. This eponymous documentary by director Asif Kapadia is nearly as dynamic as the man himself, with more than enough revving engines and last minute passes to satisfy your lust for speed and a decent helping Ayrton’s famous personality as well. Senna was a champion, driven to win even as the sometimes-backhanded politics of the racing world stood in his way. A tragic figure, maybe, but a legend nonetheless. You don’t have to be an F1 fan to appreciate this film, but you may wind up one by the time the credits roll. (1:44) Embarcadero, Smith Rafael. (Cooper Berkmoyer)

Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness This documentary cuts to the chase right at the beginning: yeah, Sholem Aleichem was the guy who wrote the Tevye stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. But filmmaker Joseph Dorman isn’t trying to make Fiddler: Behind the Musical. Instead, he takes an in-depth look at the life, writing career, and cultural significance of “one of the great modern Jewish writers — and our greatest Yiddish writer,” per the film’s press notes. Fans of Jewish lit will be particularly engaged by Sholem Aleichem’s tale; raised in a shtetl in what’s now the Ukraine, he moved around Europe and to the United States pursuing various careers, but always writing the popular stories that addressed not just Jewish life, but broader issues facing turn-of-the-last-century Jews, including the cross-generational conflicts that make up much of Fiddler‘s plot and humor. That said, this film does rely an awful lot on PBS-style slow pans over black-and-white photos and intellectual talking heads; one suspects the subject himself (so devoted was he to entertaining the regular folk who gobbled up his tales) would’ve preferred his life story to unfold in a livelier fashion. (1:33) Opera Plaza. (Eddy)

Spy Kids: All the Time in the World Robert Rodriguez just can’t stop making these. (1:29)

ONGOING

Another Earth After serving a prison sentence for a youthful drunk-driving incident that killed two passengers in another car, Rhoda (Brit Marling) emerges no longer a blithe party girl but a haunted loner who prefers working as a high school janitor. Obsessed by her crime, she starts spying on the man it had left widowed and childless, a onetime composer (William Mapother) who like her has retreated into a solitary shell of depression. She finds a way to integrate herself (without revealing her identity) into his threadbare current existence, the two of them bonding over fascination with a newly discovered planet that appears the exact duplicate of Earth — complete with the possibility of our doubles living a parallel existence there. You can take Mike Cahill’s modestly scaled U.S. indie feature (cowritten with actor Marling) as a familiar drama about grief and repentance with a novel gloss of sci-fi, or as a sci-fi story with unusual attention to character emotions and almost no need of fantasy FX. Either way, it’s earnest, well-acted and interesting if not quite memorable; as has been noted elsewhere, the material could have fit just as effectively into a half-hour Twilight Zone episode. (1:32) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Harvey)

*Attack the Block The Goonies go to a South London projects, with more gore, guts, and gumption? With good reason, writer, director, and Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg cohort Joe Cornish’s own project, Attack the Block, has been getting raves at fests for its effortless, energetic originality, discernible through its thick, glottal stop-chomping, Jafaican-draped local brogue. The question posed, ever so entertainingly: what happens when you pit the toughest kids on the block against a ferocious pack of outer-space critters — not quite out to serve man but rather sever him limb from limb? We start out seeing this gang of at-risk, risk-taking youth through the peepers of a vulnerable female mugging victim and neighbor, Sam (Jodie Whittaker) — they seem as scary as any alien invader and she wants to bring down the full force of the law on them. But the pack, led by Moses (John Boyega, who charismatically scowls like a young 50 Cent), has more pressing matters at hand: a mysterious creature has come crashing down from out of the sky, and naturally, being nasty terrors, they kill it, bringing down a intergalactic shit storm of trouble. Their favorite refuge: the top-floor weed room overseen by Ron (Pegg sidekick Nick Frost), where they attempt to suss out why they’ve become the prime prey for wolfish aliens out for blood. Throw in chills, bike chases, a resourceful use of elevators and dumpsters, and an epic, eerie dubstep theme by Basement Jaxx, and you have a very fun horror-thriller that declines to preach but manages to bring home a message reminiscent of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Consider this a whole-hearted, double-fisted antidote to the fearful vigilantism of films like 2009’s Harry Brown. (1:28) Metreon. (Chun)

Beats, Rhymes & Life Actor Michael Rapaport probably didn’t set out to make a hip-hop Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), but that’s pretty much where his portrait of A Tribe Called Quest ends up. The first half of Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is predictably worshipful, slathering on low angles and slow motion to cover mediocre live shows. More effectively, Rapaport traces the Queens group’s brief incubation period and subsequent breakthroughs in what would later be called alternative or, more obnoxiously, conscious hip-hop. A slew of notable followers and contemporaries toast Tribe’s first three albums, but by the time Rapaport catches up to the group’s 2008 reunion even their longtime friends De La Soul are wishing they’d call the whole thing off. The documentary slides into the Monster zone of hurt feelings and passive aggressive behavior in accounting for the group’s split after their inappropriately named 1998 album, The Love Movement. Phife Dawg and Q-Tip are the warring egos, though perennially slighted Phife is really no match for the imperially cool Tip. DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad is the Kirk Hammett of the outfit, looking on helplessly as the two bigger personalities make a mess of things. There’s still novelty in a story about aging in hip-hop, but Rapaport’s portrait is utterly conventional. He also doesn’t pursue more interesting questions of race and politics that naturally follow the band’s crossover appeal. (1:38) Shattuck. (Goldberg)

*Beginners There is nothing conventional about Beginners, a film that starts off with the funeral arrangements for one of its central characters. That man is Hal (Christopher Plummer), who came out to his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) at the ripe age of 75. Through flashbacks, we see the relationship play out — Oliver’s inability to commit tempered by his father’s tremendous late-stage passion for life. Hal himself is a rare character: an elderly gay man, secure in his sexuality and, by his own admission, horny. He even has a much younger boyfriend, played by the handsome Goran Visnjic. While the father-son bond is the heart of Beginners, we also see the charming development of a relationship between Oliver and French actor Anna (Mélanie Laurent). It all comes together beautifully in a film that is bittersweet but ultimately satisfying. Beginners deserves praise not only for telling a story too often left untold, but for doing so with grace and a refreshing sense of whimsy. (1:44) Lumiere. (Peitzman)

Bride Flight Who doesn’t love a sweeping Dutch period piece? Ben Sombogaart’s Bride Flight is pure melodrama soup, enough to give even the most devout arthouse-goer the bloats. Emigrating from post-World War II Holland to New Zealand with two gal pals, the sweetly staid Ada (Karina Smulders) falls for smarm-ball Frank (Waldemar Torenstra, the Dutchman’s James Franco) and kind of joins the mile high club to the behest of her conscience. The women arrive with emotional baggage and carry-ons of the uterine kind. As the harem adjusts to the country mores of the Highlands, Frank tries a poke at all of them in a series of sex scenes more moldy than smoldery. This Flight, set to a plodding score and stuffy mise-en-scene, never quite leaves the runway. Not to mention the whole picture, pale as a corpse, resembles one of those old-timey photographs of your great grandma’s wedding. These kinds of pastoral romances ought to be put out to, well, pasture. (2:10) Opera Plaza. (Ryan Lattanzio)

*Bridesmaids For anyone burned out on bad romantic comedies, Bridesmaids can teach you how to love again. This film is an answer to those who have lamented the lack of strong female roles in comedy, of good vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members, of an appropriate showcase for Melissa McCarthy. The hilarious but grounded Kristen Wiig stars as Annie, whose best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is getting hitched. Financially and romantically unstable, Annie tries to throw herself into her maid of honor duties — all while competing with the far more refined Helen (Rose Byrne). Bridesmaids is one of the best comedies in recent memory, treating its relatable female characters with sympathy. It’s also damn funny from start to finish, which is more than can be said for most of the comedies Hollywood continues to churn out. Here’s your choice: let Bridesmaids work its charm on you, or never allow yourself to complain about an Adam Sandler flick again. (2:04) Shattuck. (Peitzman)

Buck This documentary paints a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman as a sort of modern-day sage, a sentimental cowboy who helps “horses with people problems.” Brannaman has transcended a background of hardship and abuse to become a happy family man who makes a difference for horses and their owners all over the country with his unconventional, humane colt-starting clinics. Though he doesn’t actually whisper to horses, he served as an advisor and inspiration for Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998). Director Cindy Meehl focuses generously on her saintly subject’s bits of wisdom in and out of a horse-training setting — e.g. “Everything you do with a horse is a dance” — as well as heartfelt commentary from friends and colleagues. In the harrowing final act of the film, Brannaman deals with a particularly unruly horse and his troubled owner, highlighting the dire and disturbing consequences of improper horse rearing. (1:28) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Sam Stander)

Captain America: The First Avenger OK, Marvel. I could get behind 2008’s Iron Man (last year’s Iron Man 2, not so much), but after Thor and now Captain America, I’m starting to get cynical about this multi-year build-up to the full-on Avengers movie, due in May 2012. Can even a superhero-stuffed movie directed by Joss Whedon live up to all this hype? There’s plenty of time to ponder, and maybe worry a little, with Captain America’s backstory-explaining picture now in theaters. Chris Evans stars as the 90-pound weakling who morphs into a supersoldier, thanks to the World War II-era tinkerings of a scientist (Stanley Tucci) and an inventor (Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man’s dad). The original plan for the musclebound shield-bearer (fighting Nazis, natch) gets waylaid a bit when the newly famous Captain America becomes a PR prop for the U.S. government; it’s abandoned entirely when a worse-than-Hitler foe, in the guise of power-obsessed Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), threatens the world. Directed by Spielberg cohort Joe Johnston, Captain America is gee-whiz enjoyable enough, but it’s very nearly the same movie as Thor, which no amount of Tommy Lee Jones (as a sarcastic army colonel) wisecracks can conceal. And here’s an anti-spoiler: there’s no post-credits surprise in this one, so you can bolt as soon as they start to roll. (2:09) SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

The Change-Up This brom-com just might go down as the one where Ryan Reynolds proves his acting chops by playing a creepy Peter Pan and an upstanding family man with Jason Bateman’s physical tics. And it’s almost good enough to wipe out those terrible memories of Reynolds’ dances with CGI in Green Lantern. Yet 2011 summer movies’ MVP Bateman still manages to steal all the best scenes as both the straight man and the kidult-in-a-grown-up’s-body: namely those R-pushing moments he’s changing diapers and taking a face full of baby poo, coming on like a pink-Polo’d jackass at a big-money meeting, and watching the woman of his dreams saunter into the can to cope with backfiring Thai grub. It’s the stuff of fantasy — as well as some clever writing and considerable buddy-buddy chemistry — when career-climbing, do-right lawyer Dave (Bateman) and perpetual playa Mitch (Reynolds) voice envy for each other’s lives while pissing into a magical fountain. The old switcheroo inexplicably occurs the next morning when each chum find himself in the other’s body. Fortunately the Freaky Friday (1976) kookiness that ensues rises a bit above the safe norm by plunging headlong into all the cringey discomfort that comes with watching babies toy with cleavers and electrical outlets. The Change-Up is completely ludicrous, fo’ sho’, and never really strays from the reassuring confines of its story arc, but the laughs accompanying its morning-afters will satisfy more than any new Hangover. (1:52) Four Star, Marina, 1000 Van Ness, Shattuck. (Chun)

Cowboys and Aliens Here ’tis in a nutshell: the movie’s called Cowboys and Aliens — and that’s exactly, entirely what you’ll get. Director Jon Favreau may never best 2008’s Iron Man (actor Jon Favreau will prob never top 1996’s Swingers, but that’s a debate for another time), but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a good time trying. Cowboys is a genre mash-up in the most literal sense; as the title suggests, it pits Wild West gunslingers (Harrison Ford as a crabby cattleman, Daniel Craig as an amnesiac outlaw) against gold-seeking space invaders who also delight in kidnapping and torturing humans. As stupidly entertaining as it is, this is a textbook example of a pretty OK movie that could have been so much better … if only. If only the alien characters had a little bit more District 9-style personality. If only the story had a shred of suspense — look ye not here for “spooky” and “mysterious;” this shit is 100 percent full-on explosions. If only Craig’s comically fine-tooled physique didn’t outshine his wooden acting. And so forth. (1:58) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center. (Eddy)

Crazy, Stupid, Love Keep the poster’s allusion to 1967’s The Graduate to one side: there aren’t many revelations about midlife crises in this cleverly penned yet strangely flat ensemble rom-com, awkwardly pitched at almost every demographic at the cineplex. There’s the middle-aged romance that’s withered at the vine: nice but boring family man Cal (Steve Carell) finds himself at a hopeless loss when wife and onetime teenage sweetheart Emily (Julianne Moore) tells him she wants a divorce and she’s slept with a coworker (Kevin Bacon). He ends up waxing pathetic at a slick nightclub where he catches the eye of the well-dressed, spray-tanned smoothie Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who appears to have taken his ladies man stance from the Clooney playbook. It’s manly makeover time: GQ meets Pretty Woman (1990)! Cut to Cal and Emily’s babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is crushing out on Cal, while the separated couple’s tween Robbie (Jonah Bobo) hankers for Jessica. Somehow Josh Groban worms his way into the mix as the dullard suitor of Hannah (Emma Stone) in a hanging chad of a storyline that must somehow be resolved in this mad, mad, mad, mad — actually, the problem with Crazy, Stupid, Love is that it isn’t really that crazy. It tries far too hard to please everybody in the theater to its detriment, reminding the viewer of a tidy, episodic TV series (albeit a quality effort) like Modern Family more than an actual film. Likewise I yearned for a way to fast-forward through the too-cute Jessica-Robbie scenes in order to get back to the sleazy-smart, punchy complexity of Gosling, playing adeptly off both Carrell and Stone. (1:58) Marina, 1000 Van Ness, SF Center, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Crime After Crime In 1983, Deborah Peagler was sentenced to 25 years to life for first-degree murder in the death of her former boyfriend Oliver Wilson, whom two local L.A. gang members had strangled — supposedly at her behest. Encouraged to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, Peagler had a juryless trial and was quickly shunted off to prison. There she was repeatedly turned down for parole despite spending the years of her incarceration as a church leader, mentor, and tutor to other inmates; a highly skilled electronics-assembly supervisor; earning two degrees; and sustaining good long-distance relationships with her two daughters. Even most of the victim’s surviving relatives had come to believe she should have been released years earlier. For her part, Peagler always claimed she intended Wilson to be beaten, but had not asked for or condoned his murder. What was missing (or suppressed) from the original trial were the myriad reasons she’d wanted to frighten him away from herself and her family, including the fact that he’d frequently beaten her. Walnut Creek attorneys Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran agreed to take on Peagler’s case pro bono, and they launched what turned into years of effort during which her cause becomes a public cause célèbre, and indications emerge of some very ugly misconduct by the District Attorney’s office. This battle is chronicled in Bay Area filmmaker Yoav Potash’s documentary Crime After Crime. It’s a story with plenty of lurid and tragic revelations, ranging from child sexual abuse to terminal illness to hidden evidence of perjury. The film won’t exactly stoke your faith in the justice system, but this thoroughly engrossing document does affirm that there is hope good people can and will fight the system. (1:33) Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

The Devil’s Double Say hello to my little friend, again— and rest assured, it’s not a dream and you’re seeing double. New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori gets back to his potboiler roots with this campy, claustrophobic look back at the House of Saddam Hussein, based on a true story and designed to win over fans of Scarface (1983) with its portrait of mad excess and deca-dancey ’80s-ish soundtrack. The craziest poseur of all is Hussein’s son Uday (Dominic Cooper), a petty dictator-in-the-making — and, according to this film, a full-fledged murderous pedophile — who chomps cigars and wraps his jaws around schoolgirls while Cooper happily chews scenery. Uday needs a double to sidestep all those troublesome assassination attempts, so he enlists look-alike childhood friend Latif (also Cooper) to get the surgery, pop in the overbite, bray like a madman, make appearances in his stead, and function as a kind of pet human. Never mind Ludivine Sagnier, glassy-eyed and absurd in the role of Uday’s favorite sex kitten Sarrab — Double is completely Cooper’s, who seizes the moment, investing the morally upstanding Latif with a serious sincerity with just his eyes and body language and infusing evil odd job Uday with a dangerous, comic-book unpredictability. To his credit, Cooper imbues such cult-ready, blow-the-doors-off lines as “I love cunt! I love cunt more than god!” with, erm, believability, even as the denouement rings somewhat false. (1:48) California, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Final Destination 5 The thing about my undying love for the Final Destination series is that it’s completely legitimate and 100 percent sincere. You know exactly what you’re getting with each new movie, and these films never try to tell you otherwise. Yes, everyone will die. Yes, the deaths will be creative and disgusting. Yes, the quality of acting will be sacrificed for some of the more expensive splatter effects. For those of us who understand what the series is all about, Final Destination 5 is a triumph. It’s gory, wickedly funny, and a notable improvement on previous sequels. Not to mention the fact that Tony “Candyman” Todd gets a beefed-up role. For once, the 3D is actually a big help, with some of the best in-your-face effects I’ve seen. As for non-fans, I can’t say Final Destination 5 has much to offer. You have to embrace the absurdity and the mission statement before you can fully appreciate death by laser eye surgery. (1:32) 1000 Van Ness. (Peitzman)

*Friends With Benefits If you see only one romantic comedy this summer about a sex-sans-pair-bonding pact between a girl and a guy saddled with intimacy issues — well, chances are, if you tend to see movies with premises like this, you probably already saw No Strings Attached. In which case, poor unlucky Friends with Benefits may be filed away in your brain as that other movie about fuckbuddies, the one in which Ashton Kutcher is played by Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman (in a slightly eerie cosmic echo of last year’s Black Swan) is played by Mila Kunis. But if you see two such movies this summer, and admit it, you probably might, you’ll likely agree that FWB kicks NSA‘s booty call, particularly in the areas of scriptwriting ingenuity, pacing, and the casting subcategory of basic chemistry between romantic leads, with points possibly taken off for shark-jumping use of flash mobs and the fact that the maddeningly sticky song “Closing Time” will now be with you from closing credits ’til doomsday. This is not a searing, psychologically nuanced portrayal of two young people’s struggles to grapple with modern-day sexual mores and their own crippling pathologies — rather, the pair’s emotional baggage mostly seems to be stuffed with packing peanuts, and scenes in which they catalog their sexual proclivities in a humorously businesslike, gently raunchy fashion reveal them to be hearteningly adept at the art of communication. But such moments keep us entertained as the film, salted with light jabs at the genre’s worn-down touchstones yet utterly complicit, depicts the inevitable stages of a non-relationship relationship. (1:44) Sundance Kabuki. (Rapoport)

*The Future Dreams and drawings, cats and fantasies, ambition and aimlessness, and the mild-mannered yet mortifying games people play, all wind their way into Miranda July’s The Future. The future’s a scary place, as many of us fully realize, even if you hide from it well into your 30s, losing yourself in the everyday. But you can’t duck July’s collection of moments, objects, and small gestures transformed into something strangely slanted and enchanted, both weird and terrifying, when viewed through July’s looking glass. Care and commitment — to oneself and others — are two vivid threads running through The Future. Cute couple Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) — unsettling look-alikes with their curly crops — appear at first to be sailing contently, aimlessly toward an undemanding unknown: Jason works from home as a customer-service operator, and Sophie attempts to herd kiddies as a children’s dance instructor. But enormous, frightening demands beckon — namely the oncoming adoption of a special-needs feline named Paw-Paw (voiced by July as if it’s a traumatized, innocent child). Lickety-splitsville, they must be all they can be before Paw-Paw’s arrival. The weirdness of the familiar, and the kindness of strangers, become ways into fantasy and escape when the couple bumps up against the limits of their imagination. This ultra-low-key horror movie of the banal is obviously remote territory for July (2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know). The Future is her best film to date and finds her tumbling into a kind of magical realism or plastic fantastic, embodied by a talking cat that becomes the conscience of the movie. (1:31) Shattuck. (Chun)

Glee: The 3D Concert Movie (1:30) 1000 Van Ness.

The Guard Irish police sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson) is used to running his small town on his own terms — not in a completely Bad Lieutenant (1992) kind of way, though he’s not afraid to sample drugs and hang with hookers. More like, he’s been running the show for years, and would prefer that big-city cops stay the hell out of his village. Alas, a gang of drug smugglers is doing business in the area, so an officious group of investigators from Dublin (horrors!) and America (in the form of an FBI agent played by Don Cheadle) soon descend. His mother’s dying, his brand-new partner’s missing, and between all the interlopers on both sides of the law, Boyle’s having a hard time having a pint in peace. Good thing he’s not as simple-minded as all who surround him think he is. Writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin, who directed 2008’s In Bruges — also starring Gleeson) puts an affable Irish spin on what’s essentially a pretty typical indie comedy, with some pretty typical crime-drama elements layered atop. Boyle’s character is memorably clever, but the film that contains him never quite elevates to his level. (1:36) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Sundance Kabuki. (Eddy)

*Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 Chances are you aren’t going to jump into the Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. So while the movie is probably the best Harry Potter film yet, it’s more a fitting conclusion than a standalone film. For fans of the books, there are no real surprises — this is a close adaptation. And for those Harry Potter movie fans who haven’t read the books, shame on you, and kudos if you managed to not get spoiled. It’s hard for me to offer a serious critical analysis of Part 2, because it represents the end of a long and very emotional journey. (Everyone in that audience was crying. Everyone.) I will say that, as was the case in the book, there are a few overdone, schmaltzy moments that aren’t really necessary. But in the context of the series, they’re forgivable — this may not be the great cinematic event of our generation, but Harry Potter as a whole is sure to be one of our most enduring cultural icons. (2:10) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Sundance Kabuki. (Peitzman)

The Help It’s tough to stitch ‘n’ bitch ‘n’ moan in the face of such heart-felt female bonding, even after you brush away the tears away and wonder why the so-called help’s stories needed to be cobbled with those of the creamy-skinned daughters of privilege that employed them. The Help purports to be the tale of the 1960s African American maids hired by a bourgie segment of Southern womanhood — resourceful hard-workers like Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer) raise their employers’ daughters, filling them with pride and strength if they do their job well, while missing out on their own kids’ childhood. Then those daughters turn around and hurt their caretakers, often treating them little better than the slaves their families once owned. Hinging on a self-hatred that devalues the nurturing, housekeeping skills that were considered women’s birthright, this unending ugly, heartbreaking story of the everyday injustices spells separate-and-unequal bathrooms for the family and their help when it comes to certain sniping queen bees like Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard). But the times they are a-changing, and the help get an assist from ugly duckling of a writer Skeeter (Emma Stone, playing against type, sort of, with fizzy hair), who risks social ostracism to get the housekeepers’ experiences down on paper, amid the Junior League gossip girls and the seismic shifts coming in the civil rights-era South. Based on the best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, The Help hitches the fortunes of two forces together — the African American women who are trying to survive and find respect, and the white women who have to define themselves as more than dependent breeders — under the banner of a feel-good weepie, though not without its guilty shadings, from the way the pale-faced ladies already have a jump, in so many ways, on their African American sisters to the Keane-eyed meekness of Davis’ Aibileen to The Help‘s most memorable performances, which are also tellingly throwback (Howard’s stinging hornet of a Southern belle and Jessica Chastain’s white-trash bimbo-with-a-heart of-gold). (2:17) Balboa, California, Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

Horrible Bosses Lead by a clearly talented ensemble of comic actors, Horrible Bosses is yet another example of a big-budget summer comedy with a promising conceit (see Bad Teacher) that fails to deliver anything but crude alms to the lowest common denominator. Seth Gordon directs Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day as three pals fed up with their evil employers (Kevin Spacey, Colin Farrell and Jennifer Aniston, respectively) so they hatch a plan to have them killed. Because the answer to their problem obviously lies in a dive bar in the “bad part of town,” Jamie Foxx plays Motherfucker Jones, their murder consultant and the film’s most likable character-stereotype. In the tradition of The Hangover (2009) and its ilk of beer-guzzling, frat-boy cousins, Horrible Bosses is a disastrous pile-up of idiocy that’s more vapid than vulgar despite a few amusing performances. See it for no other reason than Michael Bluth and Charlie Kelly on coke. (1:33) 1000 Van Ness. (Lattanzio)

*Magic Trip How to bottle the lysergic thrills and chills of a monumental road trip that marked the close of the Beat Generation era and the dawn of the hippie years? Remarkably, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters did just that — and with the help of directors-writers Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, their efforts have been retrieved from the swamps of yesterday. You don’t have to be a Summer of Love easy rider, Kesey reader, Deadhead, or acid gobbler to appreciate the freewheeling energy and epoch-making antics of Magic Trip, which arrives well-outfitted in much invaluable, real-deal-y footage and audio of Kesey, driver Neal Cassady, and the proto-Merry Pranksters, shot during their 1964 trip from La Honda to the World’s Fair in NYC, off, on, and hovering 10 miles above the paint-strewn school bus named Further. Already viewed through the lens of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the trip unfolds in all its truly weird, silly, LSD-laden, improvised, awkward, flailing, freeing glory, as the filmmakers gracefully sidestep the audio sync problems that drove Kesey to give up on assembling the film himself. Instead Ellwood and Gibney contextualize the hijinks with voice-over interviews from Pranksters prepped to look back on the journey’s consciousness-expanding trips, both good and bad, and imaginatively animate memorable asides, including a tape recording of Kesey’s first LSD experiments as a Stanford student. “What long, strange trip,” indeed — and this affectionate document viscerally, wonderfully conveys why it changed lives as well. (1:47) Lumiere. (Chun)

Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-confessed “Hollywood hack” visiting the City of Light with his conservative future in-laws and crassly materialistic fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). A romantic obviously at odds with their selfish pragmatism (somehow he hasn’t realized that yet), he’s in love with Paris and particularly its fabled artistic past. Walking back to his hotel alone one night, he’s beckoned into an antique vehicle and finds himself transported to the 1920s, at every turn meeting the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Dali (Adrien Brody), etc. He also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a woman alluring enough to be fought over by Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) — though she fancies aspiring literary novelist Gil. Woody Allen’s latest is a pleasant trifle, no more, no less. Its toying with a form of magical escapism from the dreary present recalls The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), albeit without that film’s greater structural ingeniousness and considerable heart. None of the actors are at their best, though Cotillard is indeed beguiling and Wilson dithers charmingly as usual. Still — it’s pleasant. (1:34) Albany, Embarcadero, 1000 Van Ness, Piedmont, Sundance Kabuki. (Harvey)

*My Perestroika Robin Hessman’s very engaging documentary takes one very relatable look at how changes since glasnost have affected some average Russians. The subjects here are five thirtysomethings who, growing up in Moscow in the 70s and 80s, were the last generation to experience full-on Communist Party indoctrination. But just as they reached adulthood, the whole system dissolved, confusing long-held beliefs and variably impacting their futures. Andrei has ridden the capitalist choo-choo to considerable enrichment as the proprietor of luxury Western menswear shops. But single mother Olga, unlucky in love, just scrapes by, while married schoolteachers Lyuba and Boris are lucky to have inherited an apartment (cramped as it is) they could otherwise ill afford. Meanwhile Ruslan, once member of a famous punk band (which he abandoned on principal because it was getting “too commercial”), both disdains and resents the new order just as he did the old one. Home movies and old footage of pageantry celebrating Soviet socialist glory make a whole ‘nother era come to life in this intimate, unexpectedly charming portrait of its long-term aftermath. (1:27) Balboa. (Harvey)

*The Names of Love Arthur (Jacques Gamblin) is a 40-ish scientist being interviewed about the threat of a bird flu epidemic when his radio broadcast is interrupted by 20-something Baya (Sara Forestier), who denounces him on-air as a “fascist” for frightening the public. But then, Baya tends to use that label rather indiscriminately, applying it to anyone who might conceivably have views to the right of the dial — and Arthur is in fact a solid liberal, which means she can bed him for love. As opposed to the many, many other men she beds as a self-described “political whore,” seeking out conservative types in order to seduce them and hopefully induce an idealogical shift by whispering sweet nothings (“Not all Arabs are thieves,” etc.) as they orgasm. Raised by parents whose emotions are so tightly wound his mother won’t acknowledge her parents were Jews killed at Auschwitz, Arthur has a hard time adjusting to a relationship with a lover who is faithful emotionally but sees promiscuity as her propagandic gift to the world. Meanwhile Baya’s largely Algerian family treats garrulous political argument as the very air they breathe. This odd-couple story written by Baya Kasmi and director Michel Leclerc deals with serious issues in both humorous and respectful fashion, making for one of the more novel, delightful and depthed French romantic comedies in a long time. Added plus: lots of antic gratuitous nudity. (1:42) Clay, Piedmont, Shattuck, Smith Rafael. (Harvey)

*Point Blank Not for nothing did Hollywood remake French filmmaker Fred Cavaye’s last film, Anything for Her (2008) as The Next Three Days (2010) — Cavaye’s latest, tauter-than-taut thriller almost screams out for a similar rework, with its Bourne-like handheld camera work, high-impact immediacy, and noirish narrative economy. Point Blank — not to be confused with the 1967 Lee Marvin vehicle —kicks off with a literal slam: a mystery man (Roschdy Zem) crashing into a metal barrier, on the run from two menacing figures until he is cornered and then taken out of the action by fate. His mind mainly on the welfare of his very pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya), nursing assistant Samuel (Gilles Lellouche) has the bad luck to stumble on a faux doctor attempting to make sure that the injured man never rises from his hospital bed. As police wrangle over whose case this exactly is — the murder of an industrialist seems to have expanded the powers of the stony-faced, monolithic Commandant Werner (Gerard Lanvin) — Samuel gets sucked into the mystery man’s lot, a conspiracy that allows them to trust no one, and seemingly impossibly odds against getting out of the mess alive. Cavaye never quite stops applying the pressure in this clever, unrelenting cat-and-mouse and mouse-and-his-spouse game, topping it with a nerve-jangling search through a messily chaotic police station. (1:24) Embarcadero. (Chun)

*Rise of the Planet of the Apes “You gotta love a movie where the animals beat up on the humans,” declared my Rise of the Planet of the Apes companion. Indeed, ape must not kill ape, and this Planet of the Apes prequel-cum-remake of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) takes the long view, back to the days when ape-human relations were still high-minded enough to forbid smart apes from killing those well-armed, not-so-bright humanoids. I was a fan of the original series, but honestly, I approached Rise with trepidation: I dreaded the inevitable scenes of human cruelty meted out to exploited primates — the current wave of chimp-driven films seems focused on holding a scary, shaming mirror up to the two-legged mammalian violence toward their closest living genetic relatives. It’s a contrast to the original series, which provided prisms with which to peer at race relations and generational conflict. But I needn’t have feared this PG-13 “reboot.” There’s little CGI-driven gore, apart from the visceral opening and the showdown, though the heartbreak remains. Scientist Will (James Franco, brow perpetually furrowed with worry) is working to find a medicine designed to supercharge the brain in the wake of Alzheimer’s — a disease that has struck down his father (John Lithgow). When the experimental chimp that responds to his serum becomes violently aggressive, the project is shut down, although the primate leaves behind a surprise: a baby chimp that Will and his father name Caesar and raise like a beloved child in their idyllic Bay Area Victorian. Growing in intelligence as he matures, Caesar finds himself torn by an existential dilemma: is he a pet or a mammal with rights that must be respected? Rise becomes Caesar’s story, rendered in heart-wrenching, exhilarating ways — to director Rupert Wyatt and his team’s credit you don’t miss the performance finesse of Roddy McDowell and Kim Hunter in groundbreaking prosthetic ape face in the original movies — while resolving at least one question about why humans gave up the globe to the primates. One can only imagine the next edition will take care of the lingering question about how even the cleverest of apes will feed themselves in Muir Woods. (1:50) Empire, 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Sundance Kabuki. (Chun)

*Salvation Boulevard The ridiculous and ill-reputed worlds of ex-Deadheads and evangelical mega-churches collide in director George Ratliff’s Salvation Boulevard, based on Larry Beinhart’s novel of the same name. When proselytizing pastor Dan Day (Pierce Brosnan) accidentally murders an atheist professor (Ed Harris), churchgoer Carl (Greg Kinnear) tries to forget what he saw. He soon finds himself embroiled in plots involving a kidnapping in Mexico and the fundamentalist takeover of his town. Carl’s god-fearin’, brainwashed wife (Jennifer Connelly) isn’t the least bit understanding, and instead takes to painting demons to exorcise her grief. Though the film often struggles to find a consistent tone, its lampoon of spiritual hogwash (i.e. purity balls) and the sheer inanity of the situational comedy makes for pleasantly amusing satire. The real saint of the film — and no surprise here — is Marisa Tomei as a pothead security guard named Honey. (1:35) Opera Plaza, Shattuck. (Lattanzio)

Sarah’s Key (1:42) Albany, Embarcadero, Piedmont.

Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (2:09) Four Star.

30 Minutes or Less In some ways, 30 Minutes or Less is reminiscent of 2008’s Pineapple Express: both are stoner action comedies about normal people shoved into high-stakes criminal activity. But while Pineapple Express was an exciting addition to the genre, 30 Minutes or Less is a flimsy 80-minute diversion that still feels like a waste of time. Jesse Eisenberg plays Nick, a pizza delivery boy who is forced to rob a bank after two would-be criminals strap a bomb to his chest. Strangely, Eisenberg was more charming as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (2010) — and his buddy Chet (Aziz Ansari) doesn’t exactly up the likability factor. There’s actually the potential for an interesting story here: something darker seems appropriate, given that 30 Minutes or Less was inspired by a true story with a very unhappy ending. But the film completely fumbles, delivering an action comedy that’s neither tense nor funny. That means the pizza’s free, right? (1:29) 1000 Van Ness, Presidio, SF Center, Shattuck. (Peitzman)

The Tree of Life Mainstream American films are so rarely adventuresome that overreactive gratitude frequently greets those rare, self-conscious, usually Oscar-baiting stabs at profundity. Terrence Malick has made those gestures so sparingly over four decades that his scarcity is widely taken for genius. Now there’s The Tree of Life, at once astonishingly ambitious — insofar as general addressing the origin/meaning of life goes — and a small domestic narrative artificially inflated to a maximally pretentious pressure-point. The thesis here is a conflict between “nature” (the way of striving, dissatisfied, angry humanity) and “grace” (the way of love, femininity, and God). After a while Tree settles into a fairly conventional narrative groove, dissecting — albeit in meandering fashion — the travails of a middle-class Texas household whose patriarch (a solid Brad Pitt) is sternly demanding of his three young sons. As a modern-day survivor of that household, Malick’s career-reviving ally Sean Penn has little to do but look angst-ridden while wandering about various alien landscapes. Set in Waco but also shot in Rome, at Versailles, and in Saturn’s orbit (trust me), The Tree of Life is so astonishingly self-important while so undernourished on some basic levels that it would be easy to dismiss as lofty bullshit. Its Cannes premiere audience booed and cheered — both factions right, to an extent. (2:18) California, Lumiere. (Harvey)

*The Trip Eclectic British director Michael Winterbottom rebounds from sexually humiliating Jessica Alba in last year’s flop The Killer Inside Me to humiliating Steve Coogan in all number of ways (this time to positive effect) in this largely improvised comic romp through England’s Lake District. Well, romp might be the wrong descriptive — dubbed a “foodie Sideways” but more plaintive and less formulaic than that sun-dappled California affair, this TV-to-film adaptation displays a characteristic English glumness to surprisingly keen emotional effect. Playing himself, Coogan displays all the carefree joie de vivre of a colonoscopy patient with hemorrhoids as he sloshes through the gray northern landscape trying to get cell reception when not dining on haute cuisine or being wracked with self-doubt over his stalled movie career and love life. Throw in a happily married, happy-go-lucky frenemy (comic actor Rob Brydon) and Coogan (TV’s I’m Alan Partridge), can’t help but seem like a pathetic middle-aged prick in a puffy coat. Somehow, though, his confused narcissism is a perverse panacea. Come for the dueling Michael Caine impressions and snot martinis, stay for the scallops and Brydon’s “small man in a box” routine. (1:52) Bridge, Shattuck. (Devereaux)

*Vigilante Vigilante Eschewing any pretense of objectivity and adopting a civic-journalism approach, Bay Area director Max Good and producer Nathan Wollman exhaustively explore the issues at stake in the current graffiti and street art scene by focusing on some unexpected, once-hidden antagonists: the so-called buffers, graffiti abatement advocates, and self-styled vigilantes who obsessively paint over graffiti in cities like Los Angeles (Joe Connolly) and New Orleans (Fred Radtke). Good wraps his interviews with well-known street artists like Shepard Fairey, cultural critics such as Stefano Bloch, and graf advocates a la SF author Steve Rotman around his central pursuit: he’s trying to uncover the identity of the Silver Buff, the mysterious figure who has splashed silver over artwork and tags in Berkeley for more than a decade. After capturing the Buff on camera in the wee hours of the morn, the documentarian get his story — it’s Jim Sharp, a stubborn preservationist intent on “beautifying” the blight, tearing down street posters, picking up trash, and covering over what he sees as vandalism, even if he has to damage the property he claims to be cleaning up. In a witty twist on if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em, Good and Wollman ratchet their tale up a notch when they follow Sharp with colorful paint of their own, brilliantly driving home an appeal for freedom of expression and a reclamation of public space. (1:26) Roxie. (Chun)

The Whistleblower (1:58) Embarcadero, Shattuck, Smith Rafael.


Film listings are edited by Cheryl Eddy. Reviewers are Kimberly Chun, Michelle Devereaux, Max Goldberg, Dennis Harvey, Louis Peitzman, Lynn Rapoport, Ben Richardson, and Matt Sussman. For rep house showtimes, see Rep Clock.