Road To Nowhere

PIFF ends with horrors and prostitutes.

DARWIN

Venue Abbreviations:

C21: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st St.
CM: CineMagic, 2021 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
LM: Regal Lloyd Mall Cinema, 2320 Lloyd Center Mall
LT: Lake Twin Cinema, 106 N State St., Lake Oswego
PP: Regal Pioneer Place, 340 SW Morrison St.
WH: Whitsell Auditorium, 1219 SW Park Ave.
WTC: World Trade Center Theater, 121 SW Salmon St.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 22

Eternity
Critic’s Score: 67
Eternity

It'd be better if: It didn't live up to its title so handily. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LM, 6 pm Wednesday and 8:15 pm Saturday, Feb. 22 & 25.

Trailer:


Pink Ribbons, Inc.
Critic’s Score: 80

It'd be better if: It presented hard numbers on spending, instead of frustratingly folding them into a brief pie chart. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. C21, 8:30 pm Wednesday, Feb. 22. WH, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:


THURSDAY, FEB. 23

Corpo Celeste
Critic’s Score: 85
[ITALY] Ah, the small urban Italian church. The priest is a middling, disappointed bureaucrat troubled by politics; his attendant is a lobotomized, sexually sublimated old maid; and the janitor beats a bag of 10 kittens against a sidewalk and drowns them in an inlet. Not a place for a 13-year-old girl from Switzerland, apparently, but that’s where she is, and it’s all quite confused and sweetly searching and shot through with disappointment, the way a gentle European coming-of-age story should really always be.

It'd be better if: The kittens came back for their revenge, backed up by a vengeful, bloody-eyed Jesus. Or not. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. LM, 6:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 23. C21, 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:


Short Cuts VI: Made in Oregon
Critic’s Score: 70
Dear Peter, Goats
Dear Peter, Yaks
Mossgrove/Bed of Moss
Shine
The Turin Horse

It'd be better if: Oregon soundtracks didn't employ acoustic fingerpicking quite so much. AARON MESH. WH, 6:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 23.


Whores’ Glory
Critic’s Score: 38
Born Into Brothels
 

It'd be better if: The director had a heart of gold. AARON MESH. C21, 8:15 pm Thursday, Feb. 23.

The Day He Arrives
Critic’s Score: 78

It'd be better if: The aw-shucks main character had any charisma whatsoever that could make us believe he might get the girl. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 23.

Trailer:



Toll Booth
Critic’s Score: 57
Five Easy Pieces

It'd be better if: I could get a side order of wheat toast. AARON MESH. PP, 8:30 pm Thursday, Feb. 23. LM, 3:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:


FRIDAY, FEB. 24

Snowtown
Critic’s Score: 16
Monster
Snowtown

It'd be better if: You never walked in. AARON MESH. LM, 6:30 pm Friday, Feb. 24. WH, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:



Extraterrestrial
Critic’s Score: 95
Timecrimes

It'd be better if: I thought maybe Michelle Jenner might notice me, too. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. WH, 8:45 pm Friday and 6 pm Saturday, Feb. 24 & 25.

Trailer:



Grandma, A Thousand Times
Critic’s Score: 81
I Could Be Your Grandmother
 

It'd be better if: Teta, irritated by the misleading title of her grandson's film, went on a quest to fight 999 other matriarchs. AP KRYZA. WTC, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 24.

Trailer:



The Loneliest Planet
Critic’s Score: 84
The Blair Witch Project
Day Night Day Night
 

It'd be better if: You didn't know that crisis was coming. But then you might not go. AARON MESH. C21, 8:45 pm Friday, Feb. 24.


Kill List
Critic’s Score: 67
[
GREAT BRITAIN] For the first 84 of its 85 minutes, Ben Wheatley’s
Kill List
is an effectively unnerving descent into human depravity. It also features enough comedic bickering between the leads to resemble
The Trip
, if Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon were hitmen and, instead of touring Northern England’s finest dining establishments, they traveled around the country bludgeoning people to death with hammers. In other words, for its first 84 minutes,
Kill List
is the most intriguing (and most unflinchingly brutal) genre experiment of this year’s PIFF. As the violence grows more gratuitous, though, you get the sense that all it’s building toward is one big, empty shock. Then it happens, in a final reveal so preposterous it curdles everything that came before into waste. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? You will.

It'd be better if: Wheatley went with literally any other ending. MATTHEW SINGER. C21, 11:30 pm Friday, Feb. 24.

Trailer:


SATURDAY, FEB. 25

Darwin
Critic’s Score: 86
 

It'd be better if: Looniness weren't the initial selling point. But that's to say it'd be better if we lived in a different world. AARON MESH. C21, 1 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:



Kiss Me
Critic’s Score: 41
[SWEDEN] Well, the movie certainly isn’t mistitled. In fact, making out is pretty much the foundation of the film’s central relationship, between two soon-to-be stepsisters. They kiss in a tool shed. They kiss in an elementary-school restroom. They kiss in a dewy meadow populated by grazing deer. Occasionally, they augment the kissing with sensual lovemaking, sometimes while bathed in enough gauzy sunshine to light a toilet paper commercial. In between all the Sapphic tonsil hockey is a stultifyingly standard rom-dram that only faintly touches on Swedish mores regarding homosexuality, and even then so tritely it doesn’t matter.  

It'd be better if: It was just a two-hour make-out session set in various odd locations: in the Vatican; inside a double-wide suit of armor; in the hollowed-out corpse of a dead camel, etc. MATTHEW SINGER. C21, 8:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.


Invasion of the Alien Bikini
Critic’s Score: 41
Invasion of the Alien Bikini
 

It'd be better if: There were actually a sentient bikini sidekick. AP KRYZA. C21, 11:30 pm Saturday, Feb. 25.

Trailer:


GO: The Portland International Film Festival ticket outlet is at the Portland Art Museum Mark Building, 1119 SW Park Ave., 276-4310. nwfilm.org. General Admission $10, Art Museum members, seniors and students $9, children 12 and under $7, Silver Screen Club memberships from $300.

WWeek 2015

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