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Opens Friday
GANGES: RIVER TO HEAVEN
Gayle Ferraro's meticulous documentary observes four families, each with a dying matriarch, who have travelled to the banks of the Ganges; the devoutly Hindu believe that those dying near the holy river have a greater chance of being liberated from the suffering of endless rebirth. Ferraro's camera unhesitatingly captures the gorgeous, garish and ghoulish indiscriminately, from funeral processions bedecked in red silk and marigolds to corpses floating in the river depths; the result is an intimate record of the subcontinent's struggle to retain ancient custom amidst modern problems.
CCA, NR, 79 min.
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
Stranded one summer in South Texas, we once chain-read all five of the then-available JK Rowling novels and staggered around for days afterward talking like Dobby the House-Elf: Not recommended. If you take your Hogwarts installments in more measured gulps, though, you'll already have noticed that the films are catching up on the books…enough to make any Spells & Potions student nervous. Well, enjoy Harry's A-levels while they last; in this chapter, the plot gets ratcheted up another notch as himself, Hermione and Ron must cope with the Tri-Wizard Tournament, Lord Voldemort in the flesh (apt cast addition Ralph Fiennes) and perhaps most formidably of all, puberty.
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA North, PG-13, 157 min.
ONE BRIGHT SHINING MOMENT
Gravelly, tendentious voice of reason Amy Goodman narrates this retracing of the days leading up to George McGovern's exhilarating but doomed 1972 presidential bid, defeated ultimately by Nixon's campaign (and by political machinery new at the time and now well-oiled and seemingly intractable). Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, Warren Beatty, Gary Hart, Howard Zinn and the senator himself (at 82 years of age) are among those reminiscing with filmmaker Stephen Vittoria (
Black & White, Hollywood Boulevard
) about the political defeat of the 20th century, the "one that got away" from the Democratic Party, changing the course of American history right up to the present bleak day. Prepare to be fascinated and utterly drawn in by its intelligence; and prepare to grieve and get furious all over again.
CCA, NR, 125 min.
TONY TAKITANI
Issei Ogata (
Yi Yi
) plays the title character in this feature based on the spare short story by Haruki Mirakami (
South of the Border, West of the Sun
) that appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago; when an illustrator tries to get his wife (Rie Miyazawa) to give up her addiction to shopping, the results are delicately tragic, in a shades-of-grey kind of way that meshes seamlessly with a Satie-influenced piano score and director Jun Ichikawa's quiet, minimalist camerawork.
The Screen, NR, 75 min.
WALK THE LINE
It's hard not to get short of breath and sweaty-palmed over this one: Endorsed enthusiastically by the ever-relevant (Trent Reznor-covering) Man in Black himself before his demise. Joaquin Phoenix (
Signs, Gladiator
) has that baritone nailed (and seems to know how to manhandle a Gibson as well). Reese Witherspoon might yet deploy her sometimes annoying brightness to good dramatic purpose as steely June Carter. For pure entertainment appeal, groovy outfits, some messed-up rockabilly and what's apparently an honest take on Cash's struggles with addiction, the Sun Records studio is the place to be this weekend.
DreamCatcher, Jean Cocteau, UA South, PG-13, 136 min.
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Short Runs
BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
Originally filmed in 2002,
Xiao cai feng
is set in 1971 in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, when two Chinese university students (Kun Chen and Ye Liu) are sent to a labor camp in a mountain mining village to purify them of their Western education. When the two bored young intellectuals meet a beautiful, gifted young peasant woman (Xun Zhou), they decide to steal books (ergo, Balzac) and educate her. Guess their Western education didn't include anything about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil….
The Screen, NR, 110 min.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
We've been thinking that an interesting Fabulous Thursday ticket would include
Dog Day Afternoon
and
Cruising
, both problematic films, troubling for different reasons, and both, of course, starring a younger, edgier Al Pacino. Someone must've read our minds, because
Based on a True Story
, released this year from director Walter Stokman, seeks to unravel the reality behind the fictionalized
Dog Day Afternoon
, researching John Woltowicz's 1972 bank robbery (which he hoped would pay for his lover's sex change operation).
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 75 min.
DANCES OF ECSTASY
Documentarians Michele Mahrer and Nicola Ma travelled the world from Turkey to Nigeria, the Kalahari to Brazil, recording rituals to discover the nature of the altered state people seek in religious trance, induced by rhythm, music and above all dance-what do Sufi whirling dervishes and teens at an all-night rave have in common?
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 80 min.
THE GREATEST GOOD
A documentary in four parts about the history of the US Forest Service and its policies, from early exploitation to public land management and conservation during the Great Depression, then from postwar production and "multiple use" to the current situation with competing interests between an outspoken public, environmental activists and the logging and ranching communities.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 120 min.
HARLAN COUNTY, USA
The 1976 Oscar-winner, here shown in a newly restored print, changed documentary filmmaking in much the same way that James Agee and Walker Evans forever altered the course of journalism with
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. Director Barbara Koppel lived with her subjects, coal miners and their struggling families, in Kentucky during a bitter, lingering strike as the miners sought to unionize. With a heartbreaking score featuring authentic folk music by artists like Hazel Dickens and Nimrod Workman
, Harlan County
can be relied upon to take up residence in your brain and not go anywhere for quite a spell.
CCA, PG, 103 min.
MACHUCA
It's the most genuine sign of a country's having come to terms with the messier details of its recent past that its movie producers become willing to back an historically astute film. Now that there's some padding between Pinochet and the present tense of Chile, we're lucky enough to have Andrés Wood's lyrical, funny and also unapologetic, ruthlessly accurate child's-eye version of the events of 1973. Gonzalo (Matías Quer) is an awkward upper-class 12-year-old who's befriended by a scholarship boy from Santiago's shantytown, Machuca (Ariel Mateluna)-and the politics of Gonzalo's family suddenly don't quite stack up for him anymore.
CCA, NR, 121 min.
PET ALIEN
Five episodes from the Cartoon Network series about a boy and his bewildered but jovial extraterrestrial friends.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR
PLAGUES & PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA
It's difficult to explain the enormous appeal of a documentary about, among other things, "Hungarian revolutionaries, Christian nudists, pop stars, land sharks, hard drinkers, empty cities, failed resort towns, tons of dead fish, a dying café, and a man who built a mountain" (out of trash, no less)-but the collation of all these disparate subjects yields a movie that's Dickensian, Dionysian and a total delight. Maybe it's the Technicolor vintage stock footage, the pop sensibilities of its two young filmmakers, the voiceover narration by none other than John Waters or the astonishing eagerness of truly bizarre people to be themselves on camera in front of God and everybody; we don't really know, but we know you don't want to miss it.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 86 min.
SUDDEN RAIN: THE FILMS OF MIKIO NARUSE
Nervy, damn-the-torpedoes maneuvers like this are why we can't help but love the Screen, who for the next 11 Sundays will be showing fearsomely prolific (but little-known outside Japan) director Naruse's work, continuing with his 1954
Sound of the Mountain
, adapted from Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata's novel.
The Screen, NR, 96 min.
TOUCH THE SOUND
After introducing us to the work of Andy Goldsworthy,
Rivers and Tides
' Thomas Riedelsheimer brings us another uncommon artist in this documentary about world-class, Grammy-winning percussionist Evelyn Glennie, whose ability to perceive and create riotous cascades of sound is not in the least limited by the fact that she is profoundly deaf.
The Screen, NR, 95 min.
TROPICAL MALADY
Its title perhaps better translated as
Strange Animal
, Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film straddles genres: half-gay love story between a soldier (Banlop Lomnoi) and a country boy (Sakda Kaewbuadee); half-monster myth, involving a Thai folk legend about a shapeshifter living deep in the jungle; its theme partly inspired by the work of Jacques Tourneur (
I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People
). The Cannes-selected film will only be onscreen for four days, so catch the beast while you can.
The Screen, NR, 120 min.
WAL-MART: THE HIGH COST OF LOW PRICE
As he did with pointed, controversial documentaries
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
and
Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War
, filmmaker Robert Greenwald dives headfirst into the fray with this piece of investigative reportage, taking a close, unblinking look at a few of the business practices that have made the son of Sam so very successful-you know, the Asian sweatshops, the unpaid overtime and absence of health insurance, the debilitation of small-town economies-common-sense thrift like that. The ACLU hosts the first screening, with a Q&A afterward. Lest anyone cry bias, next week the Film Center will also show
Why Wal-Mart Works and Why That Drives Some People Crazy
; you can peruse the competing-theory visions yourself at www.walmartmovie.com and www.whywalmartworks.com.
Santa Fe Film Center, NR, 97 min.
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Now Showing
CAPOTE
In September of 1959, two men broke into a Kansas farmhouse where they'd been told $10,000 was hidden. Finding only about $50, they shot and killed the family of four, only to be apprehended soon afterward. Truman Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in the role of his career), at loose ends after the fantastic success of
Breakfast at Tiffany
's, persuaded his longsuffering editor at the New Yorker to let him write about the case; the film follows him from his trip to the Midwest with best friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener, similarly brilliant), where he began researching what was to become
In Cold Blood
. Director Bennett Miller, writer Dan Futterman (
The Birdcage
) and Hoffman make it clear that
In Cold Blood
doesn't just refer to the two murderers; they don't seek to whitewash Capote's self-serving qualities, and the result is an uncannily accomplished character assassination turned ode to its careerist yet immensely gifted subject-a film awash in structured, complicated ambiguity, and delicately terrifying.
UA DeVargas, R, 98 min.
CHICKEN LITTLE
Somehow, Zach Braff is pretty much the last guy in the world you'd peg to play an animated chicken, but there it is. This fairy-tale revamp (you know, baseball plus aliens who want to take over the world-your standard stuff) manages to waste the vocal talents of Garry Marshall, Patrick Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Wallace Shawn, Steve Zahn, Joan Cusack, Adam West and Don Knotts (as Mayor Turkey Lurkey).
DreamCatcher, UA DeVargas, UA South, G, 77 min.
CORPSE BRIDE
In a brooding gray 19th-century European village, on the eve of his wedding to sensitive, shy Victoria (Emily Watson), an equally bashful Victor (Johnny Depp) accidentally marries the Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a maiden no less alluring for being deceased and a trifle decayed. Trademark stop-motion mastery from Tim Burton (
The Nightmare Before Christmas
) makes it possible to completely forget this macabre little fairytale is animated. And speaking of animation, how can Victor return to his above-ground love when life after death seems so much livelier-or as one character says plaintively, "Why go up there when people are dying to get down here?" We take his point.
UA North, PG-13, 76 min.
DERAILED
See SFR's review.
UA North, R, 147 min.
GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN'
There may be other, more experienced and talented actors in this movie (for instance,
Hustle & Flow
's Terrence Howard) but few of them will be as discussed as its star, Curtis Jackson (aka rapper 50 Cent)-in part because the film's story is taken from his own life as a street kid turned drug dealer turned rap star. Rather as
8 Mile
benefitted from Curtis Hanson being there to rein in Marshall Mathers,
Get Rich
profits from the direction of Jim Sheridan, who has his own kind of street cred (
In the Name of the Father, In America, The Boxer
); but Jackson's performance remains surprisingly tentative and uncertain, given that he's playing himself.
DreamCatcher, R, 134 min.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
It's hard to remember a time when corporate couldn't quite control editorial and when anchors appeared live on the news with cigarettes burning indifferently in their fingers; the face of CBS then was Edward R Murrow (David Strathairn), who, along with his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) dared to speak out against Senator Joe McCarthy's witch-ducking character assassinations. Clooney's unusually restrained, staying out of the way of his fantastic cast-especially Strathairn, who's gobsmackingly convincing: unsmiling, ferocious and dark, dark, dark. Combine this with sleek period details like vacuum-tube broadcasting equipment and gorgeous long expanses of uncut newsreel footage, and you get classic, compelling cinema that's also, unfortunately, still all too pertinent.
UA DeVargas, PG, 93 min.
JARHEAD
Four actors at the top of their game (Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Chris Cooper and Jamie Foxx) and one of our most enigmatic directors (Sam Mendes of
American Beauty
and
Road to Perdition
) take on Anthony Swofford's Desert Storm memoir. The result is cryptic at best, veering confusingly between cinematic cliché and the blank-faced, stultifying boredom of war. Mendes self-consciously references Vietnam-era classics like
The Deer Hunter
and
Apocalypse Now
, but it's utterly unclear where he's trying to position the film, despite good performances from Gyllenhaal, Sarsgaard and Foxx.
DreamCatcher, UA North, R, 122 min.
THE LEGEND OF ZORRO
And this film needed to be made because…? It has an oddly historical flavor, even taking into account the fact that it's set in 19th century California, almost as though the movie were made 10 years ago and has been sitting around some back lot in a can gathering dust, waiting to go straight to video. Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pick up their original roles as the passionately duelling de la Vegas, whose marriage is on the skids because the señor just can't seem to quit with the mask-wearing and the crime-fighting, even though Mrs. Zorro has moved out and started dating Rufus Sewall (go her!).
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG, 100 min.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE
See SFR's review.
UA DeVargas, PG, 127 min.
PRIME
This little piece of guilty pleasure is an oddball mix of terrible situation comedy (Uma Thurman's dating her therapist's son, whatever will she do!) and a bittersweet Manhattan romance built along the lines of
Annie Hall
. Recently divorced 37-year-old Rafi begins dating 23-year-old David, never dreaming that he's the son of her Jewish therapist (Meryl Streep, hamming it up)-or imagining that the two of them will fall thuddingly in love, only to discover the difficulties of being a couple when one of you is ready for parenthood and the other still plays Nintendo. Don't let
Prime
's stupid plot device keep you from seeing it-but be prepared to get verklempt.
UA North, PG-13, 99 min.
THE PRIZE-WINNER OF DEFIANCE, OHIO
Julianne Moore reprises her 1950s housewife (
Far from Heaven, The Hours
) as Evelyn, mother of 10 (yep) and wife to a man who can't seem to make ends meet (Woody Harrelson, whose horn-rimmed glasses and goofy haircut imply that he's acting, here). In desperation, Evelyn turns to writing jingles for contests-and then wins, repeatedly, keeping her family in washing machines, automobiles, and lifetime supplies of cream of celery soup. Look for newbie director Jane Anderson to recreate such authentic period details as television aerials and jello salad with marshmallows, shredded coconut and fruit cup.
Jean Cocteau, PG-13, 99 min.
SAW II
Like its indie horror predecessor, only more so; stars Donnie Wahlberg, Franky G and Beverley Mitchell, among other unfortunates captured and offed by that mischievous rapscallion Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) in ever-more elaborate, grotesque and gratuitous ways, like a Rubik's Cube that's trying to kill you.
DreamCatcher, UA North, R, 91 min.
SHOPGIRL
Steve Martin stars in the screen version of his own novella, which he also adapted; Martin plays Ray Porter, a hollow-man millionaire who takes a shine to the glove saleswoman at Saks, starving artist Mirabelle (an underworked-of-late Claire Danes)-who's dating an impecunious and romantically clueless young font designer, Jeremy (
Rushmore
's Jason Schwartzman). Will she choose finesse over jeunesse, or someone who honks the horn when he comes to pick her up for a date over someone who knows what a wine list is? It's worth spending the hour and a half to find out, largely thanks to the performances, including unabashed scene-stealing from Schwartzman.
UA DeVargas, R, 104 min.
WALLACE AND GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT
Finally, after five long years, thousands of pounds of clay and 250 toiling animators, some little bendy Britons to fill that gaping wound left in our lives since
W&G: A Close Shave
. Nick Park's Wensleydale-loving inventor Wallace (still given voice by 84-year-old Peter Sallis) and his expressively silent pup Gromit seek to exterminate the mysterious critter eatin' th' wegetubbles of Lady Tottington (the omnipresent Helena Bonham Carter), vying with her scurrilous suitor Quartermaine (Ralph Fiennes) to do so before the peckish hare ruins the town's annual giant veg contest. Huzzah for Plasticene!
UA South, G, 85 min.
ZATHURA
Fans of actor-director Jon Favreau's
Swingers
and
Made
probably wouldn't have him figured for a kids' movie guy; but it's clear he can still manage to be witty even on a big budget, without indulging in the aimless pyrotechnics most directors instinctively head for when they aim to please pint-sized audiences. Based on the book by children's writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (as were
The Polar Express
and
Jumanji
), the story is simple: Two squabbling brothers (Jonah Bobo and Josh Hutcherson) discover a dusty old vintage board game called Zathura, which turns their house into a rocket ship hurtling through outer space, and teaches a few lessons about fraternal loyalty along the way.
DreamCatcher, UA South, PG, 113 min.
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Nothing Trivial About It
This week's winner is
Tim Ramick
, who correctly identified the film in which Ava Gardner so winsomely sings "Coming through the Rye" as being John Ford's
Mogambo
. Tim will receive a DVD chosen from our eclectic collection here at the SFR offices. This week's question is of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon variety: Can you connect French author Marcel Proust to actress Joan Allen in no more than four steps (and preferably three)? Tell us how, at
.
