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AWOL
Part of the Hollywood's ongoing Queer Commons series, this indie drama follows Joey (Lola Kirke), a high school grad in Pennsylvania coal country who falls in love with a lonely housewife (Breeda Wool). NR. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Wednesday, March 15.
Beauty and the Beast
Critic's Rating: 3 stars. Disney is on a lucrative trip of reanimating its greatest hits: Cinderella in 2015, The Jungle Book last year and The Lion King forthcoming. There's hardly an artistic reason for them, but the top-dollar reimaginings have so far been reliably tasteful and sometimes enrapturing. The same holds true for Beauty and the Beast. The musical numbers and sheer spectacle of the 1991 neo-classic are the greatest assets of the new version. In addition to resembling the animated Belle, Emma Watson brings some Hermione-esque resolve to the heroine. And Luke Evans is having the time of his life as Gaston. The additions to the mostly faithful script are a mixed bag. The worst are a backstory about dead mothers and Josh Gad (as Gaston's sidekick, Le Fou) adding too many spell-breaking one-liners in modern parlance. The cleverer revisions simply extend the logic of the original. The transformed prince's erudite mind is appealing to Belle, and Gad's sycophantic character is actually in love with Gaston. As an experience, it's transportive, but your ultimate opinion of the remake will depend on whether more fashionable animation seems a good enough reason for it to exist. Tale as old as capitalism. PG. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bagdad, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Living Room Theaters, Lloyd, Moreland, Roseway, St. Johns Twin, Tigard, Vancouver.
Matt McCormick curates works by Portland experimental filmmakers Elijah Hasan, Hannah Piper Burns and Chris Freeman, award-winning auteurs who play with narrative and concepts of time and place to comment on society, technology and identity. Boathouse Microcinema. 8 pm Wednesday, March 15.
Kedi
Critic's Rating: 3 stars. Beyond the ultimate cat-lover movie, this documentary on the street cats of Istanbul follows felines on their daily adventures, their routines revealing the personality of the people and the neighborhoods that collectively tend to them. Director Ceyda Torun keeps the camera low to the ground, chasing her subjects through crowded marketplaces and busy streets to convey the momentum of their lives. The artful shots of Istanbul and moving observations from the locals elevate this cat-lady porn into an intimate portrait of a multicultural metropolis and its take on our relationship with animals. NR. LAUREN TERRY. Cinema 21, Kiggins.
Kong: Skull Island
Critic's Rating: 2 stars. With respect to genre, where should an 800-ton gorilla sit? Most outsized creature features blend horror and disaster, but the first monster movie tapped into post-colonial tensions for a sui generis ethnographic travelog, while retreads washed of racial signifiers ended up as accidental meta-commentary on the folly of grandiosity for sheer sake of spectacle. Following the original's blueprint, Kong: Skull Island sends a boatload of explorers—the hubristic ringleader (John Goodman), overmatched old soldier (Samuel L. Jackson), hunky iconoclast (Tom Hiddleston) and inexplicable nymphet photographer (Brie Larson)—past the perma-storm covering that's hidden the titular archipelago for millennia. The similarities end there. Shifting to Southeast Asia just after the fall of Saigon, Skull Island replaces Age of Discovery heroics with wartime ambience. Once a simian paw bats down Jackson's helicopter squadron, the survivors' trek through uncharted jungle imagines an Apocalypse Now with threats actually plucked from Revelation. Long-abandoned WWII paratrooper John C. Reilly none too subtly explains the parallels to military alliances by pumping up mammalian pride and recasting the titular ape as an island god-king and lord defender against the truly fearsome horde of demonic raptors crawling up from unknown depths. In advance of Kong's fated clash with Godzilla years hence, Skull Island assures audiences the monster of our monsters must be our friend. PG-13. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Lloyd, Milwaukie, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Pub and Theater, Tigard, Vancouver.
Land of Mine
Critic's Rating: 3 stars. It's 1945, and Denmark has turned its former Nazi occupiers, many of them teenagers, into POW crews forced to clear thousands of land mines from the Danish coastline. Adolescents trying to defuse explosives certainly wracks the audience's nerves, as director Martin Pieter Zandvliet unfolds a powerful fable of punishment and mercy between the minesweepers and their Danish commander (Roland Møller). Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at last month's Oscars, this World War II epilogue doesn't break new ground, but its beaches are stunning. So are the bloody lessons it leaves on them. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room Theaters.
Personal Shopper
Critic's Rating: 3 stars. The setup sounds preposterous. A medium (Kristen Stewart) tries to commune with her deceased twin while intermittently perusing Paris boutiques as a celebrity model's assistant. But director Olivier Assayas doesn't find it preposterous. His second collaboration with Stewart (after Clouds of Sils Maria) never winks. With quiet conviction, it fuses at least two genre movies—a haunting thriller by way of the muted tone of a character study. Stewart's the one who really holds these contradictions together. She's perfectly mysterious in her dispassionate, slouching way. Answers are elusive, but savor the near-constant tension and surprisingly naked cinematography and the film's spirit will make contact with you. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21.
The Sense of an Ending
Critic's Rating: 2 stars. This adaptation of Julian Barnes' acclaimed novel is nearly the Jim Broadbent opus the world didn't know it wanted. The owl-faced character actor fidgets and frowns brilliantly as retired, lonesome protagonist Tony Webster. One day, Tony receives notice that a former girlfriend's mother, now deceased, has bequeathed him the diary of a different old friend. A puzzle of English boarding school flashbacks ensues to explain the convoluted premise. Broadbent portrays a mounting obsession with the past in a deceptively innocent way, as though he's picked up a new hobby that happens to include stalking people. Featuring a talented crop of English vets—Charlotte Rampling, Harriet Walter, Emily Mortimer and Matthew Goode—the adaptation comes across as extremely novelistic and not quite film-ready. You can instinctively feel the omission of Tony's first-person narration (despite occasional voice-overs) and his recollection of the old days told in his own words. Maybe Barnes' material would be better treated in two 90-minute parts on the BBC. It needs the space to let the audience buy into a version of Tony's history before revealing his unreliability. This film tries to dramatically pull the rug out without giving us a floor to stand on. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Fox Tower, Bridgeport.
Shut Up Anthony
Critic's Rating: 2 stars. Anthony (Robert A. D'Esposito) is a neurotic creative who can't stop talking. His anxious chatterbox tendencies cost him his job, his girlfriend (Katie Michels), and his psychological well-being. In an effort to reclaim his mental health, Anthony retreats to his family's timeshare where he runs into Tim (Jon Titterington), an equally antsy alcoholic who's hoping to escape from his own domestic problems and responsibilities. Together, Anthony and Tim argue about love, religion, and buried personal traumas until the quarrelsome duo is finally ready to rejoin society. Portland filmmaker and Oregon native Kyle Eaton makes his feature debut with this dialogue-driven comedy. In some scenes, the humor stems from drunken frustrations, shroom-fueled antics, and short character performances by standups and improvisers local to the Portland scene. But most of the laughs come from Anthony's Seinfeldian observations and the way both he and Timothy interact with the world. Almost every scene is filled with the same uncomfortable comedy you'd expect from an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. And while the characters aren't always likable, their awkward misadventures are bound to get a chuckle. NR. CURTIS COOK. Hollywood Theatre. 7 pm Thursday, March 16.
Strike a Pose
A new doc follows the lives of seven dancers who joined Madonna on her controversial 1990 Blond Ambition Tour. NR. Clinton Street Theater.
Women Working for the Wild
The Portland EcoFilm Festival presents a program of shorts about women working in conservation, including Maiden of the Mountain, about activist Kate McCarthy, whose work played a key role in protecting Mount Hood and the Columbia River Gorge. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Sunday, March 19.