March is going out like a lamb in local movie theaters. But even on this quiet week you can take in the start of the Trylon/Heights annual Hitchcock Festival, an excellent experimental documentary about sound and communication, and a new Kong/Godzilla flick.
Special Screenings
Thursday, March 28
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Bloomington 13 at Mall of America/Emagine Willow Creek
Maybe the public domain is a bad idea. $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 1-3
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/
Catch up on Jesus: The TV Show in time for Easter. $16.35. 4 p.m. More info here.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Grandview 1&2
Rewatched this recently and it's as dopey as I remembered. $12. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 11;59 p.m. More info here.
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
The Heights
The annual Hitchcock Festival gets underway with this early silent, featuring live accompaniment from the Poor Nobodys. $20. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Sisters of the Heart (Hermanas del Corazon) (2023)
The Main
A doc about the founding of the Oblate Sisters of La Providencia. Part of the Cuban Film Festival. $7-$10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, March 22
The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 4-6
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
I don't know how Jesus is gonna get out of this one. $16.35. 4 p.m. More info here.
Monster Mash (2024)
Trylon
Oh no! Dr. Frankenstein is building a super-monster! $8. Friday-Saturday, Monday-Tuesday 5 p.m. Sunday & Wednesday 1 p.m. More info here.
Veerana (1988)
Trylon
A supernatural spectacle rom the low-budget Bollywood masters the Ramsay Brothers. $8. 7 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Tuba Thieves (2023)
Walker Art Center
Riffing off a real-life event—in the early ’10s, an unexplained rash of tuba thefts hit L.A. schools—Alison O'Daniel’s brilliant experimental doc explores tangents (the flight paths over L.A., the popularity of narcocorridos, and even a performance of John Cage’s 4’33) while following the everyday lives of a set of deaf characters. Also Saturday. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, March 30
Roméo et Juliette
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Showplace ICON
Live from the Met, it's Shakespeare with songs. Also Wednesday. $27.09. 11:55 a.m. More info here.
Hate to Love: Nickelback (2023)
Emagine Willow Creek/Lagoon Cinema
Remember when we tried to say something nice about these guys? $20. Noon. More info here.
Matilda (1996)
The Parkway
Starring beloved tweeter Mara Wilson. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Parkway Theater
Will you people keep it down? I’m trying to watch the movie! With live shadow cast performance by Transvestite Soup. $10/$15. Midnight. More info here.
Mahakal (1994)
Trylon
A Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street! $8. 7 p.m. Sunday 5:45 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, March 31
Harvey (1933)
Alamo Drafthouse
For Easter, of course. $10. 11 a.m. More info here.
Rascal Does Not Dream (2023)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
A pair of films adapted from the popular manga series. $16.35. 2 p.m. Wednesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Pride and Prejudice (2004)
Emagine Willow Creek
In this economy? Also Wednesday. $11. 12 & 6 p.m. More info here.
Monday, April 1
April Fool's Day (1986)
Emagine Willow Creek
You know they had to do it to 'em. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Wrong Man (1956)
Trylon
That's no criminal, that's Henry Fonda! $8. 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, April 2
Someone Like You (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Bloomington 13 at Mall of America/Emagine Willow Creek
"An achingly beautiful redemptive love story," it says here. Also Wednesday. $16.35. Showtimes and more info here.
Wednesday, April 3
The Ark and the Darkness (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
Noah's flood—proven by science! $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.
Caddyshack (1980)
Grandview 1&2
It's slobs vs. snobs out there on the links. $12. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
9 to 5 (1980)
The Parkway
You know it's an '80s movie when you see Dabney Coleman. $9/$12. Music by Favourite Girl at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks April
Trylon
New month, same ol' freaks! $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening This Week
Follow the links for showtimes.
Aadujeevitham
Things go badly for an Indian migrant in Saudi Arabia.
Asphalt City
Where the grass is green and the girls etc.
Crew
An Indian heist flick.
Drift
A woman flees her country and makes a friend.
Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
This time they're on the same side.
In the Land of Saints and Sinners
Liam Neeson is a retired assassin. You'll never guess what happens next.
Tillu Square
An Indian "romantic crime drama."
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Bob Marley: One Love
For me, the most forgivable music biopic cliché is the scene in the studio “where it all comes together,” usually after the genius has been struggling to articulate his vision to the band. At least in their clumsy way scenes like this try to understand where great music comes from. And so the best part of this rote retelling of the reggae great’s life, rigorously vetted by his family, comes during the Exodus sessions, where new guitarist Junior Murvin adds a rock tinge to the Wailers’ established sound. As for the rest, well, it’s not all as ridiculous as when Bob and his crew leave a Clash show and stroll blithely through London as riots break out behind them, or the singer’s flashbacks to his youth that occur while he’s performing onstage, but if you know anything about Bob Marley’s life, you’ll learn nothing new here. Lashana Lynch does what she can as Rita Marley, James Norton’s job as Chris Blackwell is to keep saying “I don’t know if that’ll work, Bob,” and Kingsley Ben-Adir has real screen presence but his charisma doesn’t suggest Bob’s own. Optimistically, I’ll take the movie’s success as a good sign that there’s real hunger to know more about one of the great international Black diasporan culture heroes, and I hope the curious don’t stop here. Read Chris Salewicz's Bob Marley: The Untold Story or Timothy White’s Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley or, hell, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which fictionalizes Marley’s shooting. Watch any number of YouTube clips, including Marley’s 1977 set at the Rainbow. And definitely listen to the music. If you know Legend, which you probably do even if you’ve never listened to it on purpose, go back to Marley’s start at Island Records—Burnin’, Natty Dread, and Catch a Fire. Sample the earlier Studio One recordings. And don’t stop there. C+
Dune: Part 2 (read the full review here)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was a well-crafted slog, occasionally spectacular but often merely studently, as the director seemed intent to prove that he deserved the assignment. But with all the power players set in place, Part Two does an awful lot right. Villeneuve distills the essence of the novel’s currents of deception and misdirection into a legible screenplay while generating some truly uncanny moments. And as Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet shows us a man who makes a pragmatic decision to exploit the dogmatism of his followers because he believes that every other choice will cause more death and destruction, or who at least rationalizes his motives that way. With IP-recycling now the culture industry’s standard cannibalistic practice, Villeneuve, like Paul, imagines himself the good guy in this scenario, respectful of the traditions placed in his care rather than merely exploitative. But also like Paul there are forces at play beyond his control. So what happens when Villeneuve’s hero threatens to become a butcher? Stay tuned for Part 3. B+
Love Lives Bleeding
If you head in to Love Lies Bleeding to watch Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian fuck each other and murder dudes—and why else would you be there?—you will not be disappointed. In true noir fashion, Jackie (O'Brian) is a drifter, en route from an Oklahoma childhood to a bodybuilding competition in Vegas, stopping off in New Mexico because that’s the sort of place these stories happen. Here she meets Stewart's Lou and the bodies start to hit the floor. As the knot tightens around the lovers, generating a titillating claustrophobia à la Jim Thompson, the question becomes whether Lou’s brains will save Jackie or Jackie’s brawn will save Lou, or whether theirs is the sort of love that dooms them both. Not till the final scene are the roles they’ve chosen to play in this relationship finally clear. (Love, Glass seems to say, means never complaining about disposing of your sweetheart’s murder victims.) I’ll admit, for a half-hour or so I worried that director Rose Glass’s euphorically nihilist lesbian death trip was too nutty to be a good movie and yet not nutty enough to be a great one. After [SPOILER REDACTED], that concern felt stupidly quaint. A-
Perfect Days
In Wim Wenders’s latest, Koji Yakusho is Hirayama, an elderly man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo with dutiful care. (Every American will leave this film envious of a city with such well-maintained public restrooms.) In his work and his free time, Hirayama hews to a routine so strict that every slight deviation over the course of the film feels seismic, to him and to us. He doesn’t exactly shrink from human contact—he bonds with his irritating young co-worker’s would-be girlfriend while listening to Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach” and plays shadow tag with a dying man. But his existence is largely self-contained, and this is one of the rare films to show that a life lived alone is not necessarily lonely and certainly isn’t meaningless, though like any life it comes with its own regrets. Hirayama is open to beauty in every moment—during his breaks he photographs the way the sunlight hits the leaves—and so is Wenders. In fact, I would say that Perfect Days captures the unbearable joy of being alive if it didn’t make me sound like a pretentious sap. Fortunately, the closing sequence, as we watch an array of emotions flickering across Yakusho’s face, makes that point for me without using any words. A
The Taste of Things
Trần Anh Hùng’s sumptuous tale of love in a rural French kitchen is a good old-fashioned movie—by which I mean, it could’ve been released by Miramax during the first Clinton administration. And while I might have found it a bore back when similar dinosaurs ruled the Earth, now it’s nearly as charming as a baby triceratops. Benoît Magimel is late 19th century gourmet Dodin Bouffant and Juliette Binoche is Eugénie, his cook of 20 years (and lover when she’s in the mood); he repeatedly courts her, while she remains aloof. But the love story feels like an excuse to linger in the presence of these gourmets and, more to the point, the lavish meals they prepare. The deliberate, patient efficiency with which Eugénie works just highlights how thoroughly TV has conditioned us to think of cooking as a hectic, nervous affair—here even gutting a fish becomes an elegant task. Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg shoots Binoche’s wonderful ass as lovingly as he does the dishes she cooks, and he goes for the gold in every scene. While Dodin may hold forth on the notion of balance in a meal, this film hardly shares his aesthetic—it’s suffused with the summer light that Eugénie cherishes. Bougie as hell, mais oui, but any class warriors who don’t salivate over the fare on offer here don’t deserve a share in the spoils of the revolution. B+
