Calendar: Weekends

There Will Be Doc

A sampling of the latest releases, including summer blockbusters and lesser known gems.

New to Doc: two Sunday matinees! Never miss a weekend film again! The Sunday matinee schedule can be found here.

No Country for Old Men
Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 - 122 min.

The Coen brothers have brought us everything from bowlers who pack serious heat to wood chippers that pack serious feet. And in their latest effort, which recently won Best Picture of the year at the Oscars, they disappoint neither in shock, nor in substance, nor in style. With beautiful cinematography at once reminiscent of old Westerns and consciously in contrast to them, the Coens retell Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem at his terribly and unforgettably coiffed best). Josh Brolin delivers a breakout performance as Chigurh’s valiant foe. 35mm.

Margot at the Wedding
Noah Baumbach, 2007 - 91 min.

Writer and director Baumbach follows up The Squid and the Whale with another painfully accurate look at the strained relations of family and friends within New York’s intelligentsia. Margot (Nicole Kidman) takes her son to spend a weekend with her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is about to marry a whimsically erstwhile artist. Self-deprecating humor and hostile intra-familial ploys run rampant as Baumbach uses familiar tools to create a surprisingly fresh and entertaining story. Watch for Jack Black’s breakout artistic role. No, seriously. 35mm.

Atonement
Joe Wright, 2007 - 130 min.

This adaptation of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel, with an Oscar winning score and starring beauties Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, is a passionate and painful story of injustice, guilt, love and lust. In 1935 England, a young girl accuses her sister’s lover of a despicable crime he didn’t commit. While she’s completely incapable of understanding the ramifications of her actions, their effects are still devastating. The film follows the lovers’ (Knightly and McAvoy) attempts to undo the damage and find happiness together, while the young girl comes of age in war-torn London. 35mm.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tim Burton, 2007 - 117 min.

It’s hard to imagine typical movie-musical fans enjoying the dissonant score and violent plot of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd, a work more frequently performed these days in opera houses. But the film works, thanks to Burton, no stranger to the macabre himself. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter dramatically reinvent the roles of the titular barber and his assistant, who slit customers’ throats and bake them into pies, while remaining true to Sondheim’s original. 35mm.

There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 - 158 min.

Darker than billowing smoke, but conscious of the modern, Blood dispenses with the psychological nicety of an Horatio Alger story and tells us how the clashes between capitalism and religion, work and family, can drive a man mad. Daniel Day-Lewis delivers his Oscar-winning performance as Daniel Plainview, a California oilman whose gravelly voice and rotten demeanor evoke John Huston’s landmark performance as Noah Cross in Chinatown. With strong work from a stellar Paul Dano and a subtle Ciaran Hinds, this thriller drinks your milkshake. It drinks it up! 35mm.

Charlie Wilson's War
Mike Nichols, 2007 - 97 min.

Tom Hanks is Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who, with help from a disgruntled CIA operative and a fundamentalist Christian, succeeds in arming Afghani insurgents against the Soviets. Wilson is that rarity of rarities, a red-blooded American in habit and address with a liberal heart of gold. Whether this portrait is accurate or not, the politics of this farce are easy to agree with, if a little too narrow to embrace. Nichols seeks to expose the whim and pettiness behind politics, while always keeping his caricatures tasteful and his statements lighthearted. 35mm.

Juno
Jason Reitman, 2007 - 90 min.

If you haven’t heard about Juno by now, chances are you’ve been under a rock for a while. This lovable comedy, called the female response to Knocked Up but also much more than that, is the definition of cute. Ellen Page, who with this performance has suddenly and deservedly become superfamous, stars as Juno, a high-schooler impregnated by nerdy friend Paulie (Michael Cera). Despite the unwanted pregnancy, Juno delivers a consistently hilarious brand of flippant, no-nonsense humor throughout the film. Also, fantastic music mostly from the anti-folk band the Moldy Peaches. 35mm.

Macedonian Director Milcho Manchevski Visits Doc Films

I'm Not There
Todd Haynes, 2007 - 135 min.

With I’m Not There, director Haynes rejects conventional biopic by crafting a postmodern, historiographical biography of Bob Dylan. Haynes and co-screenwriter Oren Moverman create six different characters, each representing a different aspect of Dylan’s constantly shifting and multifaceted personality, and each played by a different actor. While the film has been described as unconventional, strange, and “for Dylan fans only,” in its themes of identity, celebrity culture, and truth, it is both intelligent and accessible, not to mention funny, tender, and totally daring. 35mm.

The Savages
Tamara Jenkins, 2007 - 113 min.

In The Savages, two siblings (Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman) realize their responsibilities as children when their aging, aloof father begins the slow descent into dementia. While hip “indie” films about dysfunctional families have been all the rage in the last two years, The Savages takes a different approach to familial discord, focusing instead on the dynamic between the two siblings as they come to grips with their new responsibilities and their strained relationship with their father. Director Jenkins brings focus and maturity to the project, drawing wonderfully rich, warm, and realistic performances from each of her leads. 35mm.

The Orphanage
Antonio Bayona, 2007 - 106 min.

Like producer Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, The Orphanage is a rich mixture of unsettling supernatural phenomena and intense emotion. A young couple move with their young son Simón into the old country mansion that housed the orphanage Laura lived in as a child with the intention of turning it into a home for disabled children. Their philanthropic dreams quickly turn into nightmares as Simón takes on invisible children as his playmates, and horrible secrets about the orphanage are gradually revealed. In Spanish with English subtitles. 35mm.

Persepolis
Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007 - 95 min.

Based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical novel, Persepolis provides a personal account of a nearly unknown way of life. The film follows Marjane, a precocious young woman growing up during the Iranian Revolution, as she rebels against the new Islamic regime, discovers punk and Iron Maiden, experiences first love, and most importantly learns to remain true to her identity. Filled with intelligence and humor, this stylistically cool, award-winning film blends serious historical issues with the pains of adolescence. In French with English subtitles. 35mm.

Planet of the Apes
Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968 - 106 min.

You had a crush on Dr. Zira, or maybe on Nova. You could recite all the dialogue, especially Heston’s coarse final monologue. Maybe you even discussed the caste system of the movie (orangutan: judicial; chimpanzee: scientific; gorilla: military) in relation to Austen in your freshman English class. Admit it: you have a soft spot for Planet of the Apes that age, pretense, and sour memories of the Tim Burton version will never, ever wipe away. So come see the original Apes in a brand new print and learn anew that “no human can remain human on the Planet of the Apes.” 35mm.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Julian Schnabel, 2007 - 112 min.

Based on the true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was completely paralyzed by a stroke at 43, save his left eye. Bauby is trapped in his body, with his mental faculties completely intact but unable to express as much to the outside world. Initially frustrated, he overcomes his inability to communicate with others by traditional means by developing a blinking alphabet. Through this system, he then dictates his memoirs for publication, and shares his dreams and fantasies, which reveal a vibrant and complex inner life. In French with English subtitles. 35mm.

Southland Tales
Richard Kelly, 2007 - 144 min.

An impossibly ambitious simulacrum of contemporary America, its cult of the personality and its Iraq War trauma, Kelly’s second feature after Donnie Darko has proved even more divisive than its predecessor. There’s little use giving a rundown of the plot, but: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is an amnesiac movie star who at the film’s start finds himself lying on Venice Beach in a police state Los Angeles populated variously by schizophrenic war veterans, philanthropist pornstars, neo-Marxist terrorists, and an addict narrator, whose collective star power manages to keep this pop culture phantasmagoria afloat. 35mm.

The Band's Visit
Eran Kolirin, 2007 - 87 min.

Not allowed as Israel’s submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language film, as less than half the dialogue is in Hebrew and Arabic, Kolirin’s directorial debut certainly deserved the honor. An Egyptian brass band travels to Israel to play at the opening of an Arab cultural center, but somehow gets lost along the way. Rather than building on the expected political and cultural tensions, the film develops as an emotionally varied, understated comedy, defined both by its quirky and effective visual humor and moments of lonely melancholy. In Arabic, Hebrew and English with English subtitles. 35mm.

Be Kind, Rewind
Michel Gondry, 2008 - 101 min.

When a freak accident causes Jerry (Jack Black) to become magnetized and erase all the video tapes from his friend Mike (Mos Def)’s struggling video store, there is only one solution: “You name it, we shoot it. Be Kind, Rewind Videos, a la carte.” From Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s Michel Gondry comes a unique comedy about two friends who, in an effort to save their video store, remake classic films like Ghostbusters and Rush Hour and inspire their community. This film will make you laugh, warm your heart, and like Cinema Paradiso - remind you of the movies’ magic. 35mm.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Christian Mungiu, 2007 - 113 min.

Many critics expressed shock when this austere Palme D’Or winner wasn’t among the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film. A young woman, aided by her roommate and friend, attempts to get an abortion under Ceausescu’s repressive regime. They encounter the seedy underbelly of Bucharest, including the grotesque abortionist Dr. Bebe. It’s been compared to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest, largely for their shared Romanian heritage, but 4 Months is even bleaker, a portrait of a nation trapped by tyranny and repression. In Romanian with English subtitles. 35mm.

The Counterfieters
Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007 - 100 min.

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters is an intense examination of the lengths people go to in order to survive under extreme circumstances. Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire, is torn away from his debauched lifestyle in Berlin when arrested and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. There he sees his fellow prisoners suffer from the brutal horrors of Nazism, but uses his skills to get special treatment. He eventually oversees the largest counterfeiting operation in history. In German with English subtitles. 35mm.

My Blueberry Nights
Wong Kar-Wai, 2007 - 111 min.

In Wong’s first American feature, Norah Jones becomes the director’s vehicle for sightseeing across the country and making cozy rest stops with a cast that seems designed to martial all that’s best in today’s acting talent in one fell swoop, as if to make up for not having arrived on the continent sooner. Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, and David Strathairn all make cameos in the film, but the force and effect of each player’s presence is to plunge us deeper into the intricate latticework of emotional and sexual tensions that defines all of Wong’s films. 35mm.