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CLARA SOLA
**** Filmmaker Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s feature debut borrows its structure from Stephen King’s Carrie, but tells a very different story. Clara Sola takes place in a village in the mountains of Costa Rica, where 40-year-old Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) lives with her strictly religious mother (Flor María Vargas Chaves) and a young niece (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza) gleefully preparing for her approaching quinceañera. Her deepest connection, though, is with Yuka, the family’s beautiful white horse, and the natural world that surrounds her. Clara is seemingly endowed with mystic abilities that are exploited as a connection to the Virgin Mary, thus codifying her role in town and emboldening her mother’s control over her. (“I’m interested in how religion helped to form and reproduce gender roles that aren’t healthy,” Alvarez stated in a press release.) The niece’s maturation into womanhood is what finally awakens Clara to her own sexuality—and her desire for freedom results in fits of rebellion that the people around her treat like childish tantrums. In her topical struggle for liberation from patriarchal control, Clara allows Alvarez to expose systematically repressive patterns, creating a cathartic journey. NR. RAY GILL JR. Fox Tower.
ELEMENTAL
As our world faces existential threats like a depleted water supply and increasingly deadly wildfires, the best weapon we have is information. So it matters that the Portland-made Elemental is not just a documentary, but a wonderfully constructed one that systemically outlines the challenges and failures of humanity’s battle against wildfires—and their impact on both people and the planet. The film, narrated by David Oyelowo (Selma), features interviews with world-renowned forest and climate experts, along with a cross section of individuals impacted by and fighting back against the growing threat. Thanks to director Trip Jennings, it’s a comprehensive look at a war that isn’t lost, but must be redefined. (“I have visited with scientists, investigators and firefighters, and they have told me again and again that we can have healthy forests and safe communities, and that we can prepare for and adapt to fire,” Jennings says in his director’s statement.) Parts of Elemental may be too academic for a wider audience, but the use of drone shots gives a dynamic sense of scope to the documentary, while Nick Jaina’s velvety score brings texture to Jennings’ portrait of nature’s wrath and resilience. NR. RAY GILL JR. Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 pm Wednesday, July 20.
BOTH SIDES OF THE BLADE
*** The latest film by French luminary Claire Denis (Beau Travail, High Life) opens with wordless frolicking on a beach, allowing us to briefly bask in the late-middle-age beauty of Sara and Jean (Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon). But vacation quickly ends, and the rest of Both Sides of the Blade is drenched in high-toned dread and martial negotiations as Binoche and Lindon cultivate a simmering apartment chemistry back in COVID-masked Paris. The sudden appearance of François, Sara’s ex-lover and Jean’s ex-business partner (played by frequent Denis collaborator Grégoire Colin), reinstigates a desperate, illogical love triangle from yesteryear—and the fallout is simultaneously scattered and fatalistic. Amid all the drama, Lindon’s and Binoche’s performances endure, despite Denis offering no answers (or even questions) regarding why Sara, a successful, intelligent public radio broadcaster, would act as a weather-vane seductress in Jean and Francois’ faintly rendered sports-agenting underworld. Blade is hardly Denis’ best script, but she has still crafted a tense, erotic yarn about characters unable to savor real life amid looming ideas of who they once were. That much is real. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
FIRE OF LOVE
*** An essayistic portrait of volcanologist power couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, Fire of Love doesn’t overexert itself to make them camera ready. Pioneering and aestheticizing their field until their deaths in a volcanic explosion in 1991, they were always inadvertently preparing to be the subjects of director Sara Dosa’s stylish, adoring testament to the Kraffts’ two shared loves: volcanoes and each other. (By the way, Wes Anderson probably owes their estate a royalty for the red beanies and direct-to-face zooms we see in their mountains of documentary footage.) Narrated by the poetic murmurs by Miranda July and featuring a soundtrack that includes Ennio Morricone, Brian Eno and others, the film is head over heels for the “alchemy” of the Kraffts’ love and all that volcanoes symbolize in parallel: death, rebirth and unbridled, mysterious emotion. Eventually, Fire of Love runs dry of things to say about a couple who appears to have had no existence beyond studying and filming gorgeous hellfire, but it’s a film begging for big-screen beholding. The Kraffts spent their lives impossibly close to volcanoes, and in the film, they’re often seen as silhouettes dwarfed by nature at its most overpowering. Get small with them. PG. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Hollywood, Living Room.