★ BATMAN
While there have been been decades worth of live-action superheroics on the big screen since Tim Burton’s 1989 blockbuster shaved itself into the back of your little brother’s head, there’s still a special something about Batman that nobody’s been able to replicate. Having Jack Nicholson go apeshit with a clotheshanger shoved in his mouth definitely helps on that front, but for all the corniness and dated decoration curling up around the edges, there’s a still-propulsive, still-mesmerizing, still-fucking-awesome blend of character, design, and action at the center. You can see why executives decided they needed to get back in the superhero game… and you can also see how they learned every wrong lesson along the way. BOBBY ROBERTS Clinton Street Theater.
BEAUTY AND THE DOGS
Kaouther Ben Hania’s latest thriller focuses on a young Tunisian woman who goes home with a mysterious man she met at a party. Seeing as the film is not a romantic comedy but a crime drama, an assortment of unpleasantness awaits her. Living Room Theaters.
BLOCKERS
See review, this issue. Various Theaters.
ENDLESS POETRY
Straight male filmmakers are drawn to the semi-autobiographical coming-of-age film like cats to a cardboard box: even if it makes little sense for them to do it, they’re compelled to jump in and see how it feels. It’s the rare director who can do justice to the well-worn template—and when that director is venerated surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man behind eye-popping midnight movie classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain, things get curiouser and curiouser. ROBERT HAM Hollywood Theatre.
FLOWER
A wild rollercoaster ride through pitch-black lows and neon-pink highs, Flower is gritty, vulgar, depraved, often hilarious, and periodically charming. But its shock-jock approach to sensitive subjects like child molestation wind up feeling hollow and exploitative, which isn’t a great look for a movie written by three men in 2018. CIARA DOLAN Various Theaters.
FOURPLAY
Looking at the poster, it appears this film stars Tammy Blanchard as a woman in a very nice sweater unfortunately trapped inside a giant upside-down tumbler with three other insufferable peop—oh. Apparently the imagery is metaphorical, and these unfortunate people aren’t really trapped inside a giant drinking glass, they just can’t stop being awkward around each other and fucking people they ought not to. Clinton Street Theater.
★ FOXTROT
See review, this issue. Fox Tower 10.
GEMINI
Who killed famed actress Heather Anderson (Zoë Kravitz)? Was it her doting assistant? Her lesbian lover? Her bad-boy ex? The grumpy director whose project she blew off? The creepy paparazzo with the camcorder? The slightly obsessive fan? These are the questions writer/director Aaron Katz (Cold Weather, Land Ho!) wants you to be turning over in your head you watch his latest feature, Gemini, rather than the question that will actually be plaguing you: When is something interesting going to happen? Beautiful to look at but empty inside, this is the cinematic equivalent of a drained bottle of Cristal. Director in attendance Fri April 6. ROBERT HAM Cinema 21.
★ HAUSU
Seven Japanese schoolgirls visit a haunted house in Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 head-trip, which is quite simply one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen. The effects are incredibly cheesy and the movie refuses to settle on a consistent tone, but Obayashi’s visual style creates a wispy, sugary dream world that gushes with blood. NED LANNAMANN NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
★ ISLE OF DOGS
Superficially, Isle of Dogs dazzles. Wes Anderson’s second foray into stop-motion animation—following 2009’s unassailably wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox—is full of delectable visual treats. (This time, the director’s grade-school diorama aesthetic floods your ocular circuits with a retro-futuristic version of Japan, where all the dogs of Megasaki City have been exiled to Trash Island following an outbreak of snout fever.) Things get a little more… complicated below the surface, as Anderson’s depiction of the film’s Japanese humans leaves something to be desired. NED LANNAMANN Hollywood Theatre.
JAPANESE CURRENTS
In a world where we’re always connected—to a sometimes-frightening degree—there’s an added value to truly foreign experiences. We travel to get out of our ordinary environment, and we’re generally thrilled by how vast the differences are. Take comfort, then, in the strangeness found in Japanese Currents—the annual NW Film Center-hosted overview of noteworthy and contemporary Japanese films. It’s proof that the internet hasn’t succeeded (yet) in drumming out the idiosyncrasies of culture. MARJORIE SKINNER NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
JOURNEY’S END
The latest big-screen adaptation of R.C. Sherriff’s World War I play stars Asa Butterfield as a young private spending his last days in a British dugout on the eve of Germany’s failed Operation Michael. Living Room Theaters.
★ KUNG FU THEATER: THE YOUNG MASTER
This month’s installment in Dan Halsted’s ongoing celebration of all things whoop-ass is a rare 35mm print of 1980’s The Young Master, the film that capitalized on a young Jackie Chan’s early promise in films like Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and the original (and much less interesting than its all-timer of a successor) Drunken Master. The Young Master is where Jackie’s blend of comedy and carefree destruction solidly locked into the formula that would make him the biggest action star in the world. In fact, this film and its jaw-dropping final fight was the first to earn Jackie more plaudits—and more importantly to the studios, more money—than the legendary Bruce Lee. BOBBY ROBERTS Hollywood Theatre.
LOGAN’S RUN
No one over the age of 30 will be allowed to attend this screening. Ha! Just kidding, old people! You can totally go! (But you will be murdered afterward.) Academy Theater.
★ LOVE, SIMON
If you’re one of those people who only reads the first sentences of movie reviews, here you go: Love, Simon is FANTASTIC, and you should see it IMMEDIATELY. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.
★ NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND
Almost everything you could, should, and do love about Mad Max: Fury Road, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Avatar (both the blue-kitty-people version and the kid-with-the-arrow-on-his-head version) was already present in this 1984 anime classic, but made more visually interesting and emotionally engaging (if you can believe that, and you should), thanks to the beautiful mind of legendary storyteller Hayao Miyazaki. Part of the Hollywood Theatre’s Hayao Miyazaki Celebration series. BOBBY ROBERTS Hollywood Theatre.
★ OUTSIDE IN
See review this issue. Director in attendance Sat April 7. Cinema 21, Kiggins Theatre.
PERCEPTION: FROM PRISON TO PURPOSE
Voices in Action hosts this screening of Garrett Guinn’s short documentary about Noah Schultz, who used the rehabilitation resources available in prison to transform himself from a convicted attempted murderer to a published TEDx speaker. Screens with Brian Lindstrom’s 11-minute short Measure 11: The Law and Its Consequences. Director in attendance. NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
★ PONYO
A loose retelling of “The Little Mermaid,” Ponyo isn’t quite a masterwork—there’s nothing as amazing here as the stuff in Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, or My Neighbor Totoro—but even when Hayao Miyazaki isn’t at the top of his game, his stuff’s still pretty great. Part of the Hollywood Theatre’s Hayao Miyazaki Celebration series. ERIK HENRIKSEN Hollywood Theatre.
A QUIET PLACE
See review, this issue. Various Theaters.
RANCHO NOTORIOUS
Thanks to his cold-hearted German expressionist landmarks M and Metropolis, Fritz Lang is not a name people readily associate with large-scale Technicolor westerns. But he did make more than a few two-fisted whiskey-swillers during his time as a Hollywood workhorse. The best of them is Rancho Notorious, probably because it’s a pessimistic, mean-spirited, angry little movie about getting old, getting revenge, and how unsatisfying it all is—which is to say, it’s a Fritz Lang movie, all right. BOBBY ROBERTS NW Film Center’s Whitsell Auditorium.
READY PLAYER ONE
There’s a phenomenal sequence early in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One: Countless vehicles rev their engines at a starting line, the air electric. There’s the DeLorean from Back to the Future. There’s Adam West’s Batmobile. There’s Speed Racer’s Mach 5 and the Akira motorcycle. But it’s not important what the vehicles are so much as what Spielberg does with them: The race starts and the cars peel out, speeding and skidding over twisted, contorting roads, launching into the air and spinning into crashes. It’s such a great car chase—even before King Kong and Jurassic Park’s T-rex show up—that you forget it’s all CGI. It’s just motion and color and sound, expertly cut together, telling a story that thrills and delights. It’s a reminder that when Spielberg’s firing on all cylinders, nobody else even comes close. And then, from this high, Ready Player One plunges straight downhill. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.
ROLLERBALL
One of the very best things about dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s is revisiting them during the years in which they’re set and doing the A/B comparison of fiction and reality. Wyrd War presents this 35mm screening of Norman Jewison’s Rollerball, putting roller skates on James Caan in his Brillo-headed, oafish prime and throwing him into an anti-corporate sports drama with John Houseman and Ralph Richardson. Did Rollerball get anything right about the 2018 we occupy? If we’re grading on soothsaying accuracy, it’s somewhere around a D+. But so what? It still packs a spiked, disorienting punch if you give yourself over to its meandering, weird blend of earnestness and cynicism. BOBBY ROBERTS Hollywood Theatre.
★ SHADOW OF A DOUBT
Alfred Hitchcock is best known for being both a silhouette and a shadow: his profile branding some of the sharpest popular entertainment ever filmed, his shadow dwarfing the multitude of directors toiling within it. But Hitch didn’t just cast shadows, he used them, and the ink-black work (both visually and morally) in this 1943 noir is why Shadow of a Doubt is widely considered his first real masterpiece, pitting the unctuous Joseph Cotton against Teresa Wright, whose wide-eyed innocence very quickly turns rancid in a relentlessly tense battle of wills. BOBBY ROBERTS Hollywood Theatre.
SPIRITED AWAY
Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography is an embarrassment of riches, each movie an almost perfectly sculpted work of magic, wonder, action, and emotion. Spirited Away is the master at his most whimsical—but what separates Miyazaki from most storytellers is that he can (and often does) wield whimsy like a scalpel. Something as airy and light as Spirited Away would be not much more than an empty confection in even the best director’s hands. But Miyazaki, working without a script (!), weaves a modern fairy tale so affecting that for many, his story of a 10-year-old girl on a mystical journey to free her parents is still the best—and most human—animated film ever made. Part of Hollywood Theatre’s Hayao Miyazaki Celebration film series. BOBBY ROBERTS Hollywood Theatre.
★ MEANS WE RECOMMEND IT. Theater locations are accurate Friday-Thursday, unless otherwise noted. Movie times are updated daily and are available here.