Personally, I'm gonna be hunkered down at The Main all weekend taking in Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour—rare and restored films I may never get to see anywhere else. But let me also spotlight the harrowing documentary No Other Land, which is reviewed below, as is Becoming Led Zeppelin, a whole lotta rock doc.
Special Screenings
Thursday, February 13
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone (2001)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
They look so young! Showtimes and more info here.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
What, is it Harry Potter Day or something? Showtimes and more info here.
The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Emagine Willow Creek
An abomination. $4.60. 12 p.m. More info here.
Dune (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
I won’t say it’s better, but it’s definitely more memorable than the new adaptations. $11.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Badlands (1973)
Grandview 1&2
The plot is "Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek go on a killing spree" but that's really underselling it. Also Sunday. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Detour (1945)
The Heights
That Anne Savage is bad news! $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Black Panthers of WWII (2025)
Trylon
Black soldiers fight the Battle of the Bulge. $8. 3:30 p.m. More info here.
Friday, February 14
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Pretty sure this is the one about the Chamber of Secrets. Showtimes and more info here.
Babe (1995)
Emagine Willow Creek
The other side of Mad Max’s George Miller. All week. $4.60. 12 p.m. More info here.
Casablanca (1942)
Emagine Willow Creek
Because Valentine’s Day. $10.60. 12 & 6 p.m. More info here.
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe (1897-1902)
Main Cinema
Vintage footage shot on high-res 68mm film. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour. Free. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Murdering the Devil (1970)
Main Cinema
A central figure in the Czech New Wave, Ester Krumbachová showed off the full range of her production design skills on her only directorial feature. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour. $12. 8:30 p.m. More info here.
Despicable Me 4 (2024)
Marcus West End
Minions, etc. Through Monday. Showtimes and more info here.
Meshes of the Afternoon and other shorts (1943-55)
Trylon
Get surreal with a full hour of Maya Deren, with live accompaniment from Ten Thousand Lakes. $12. Friday-Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 3 & 5 p.m. More info here.
Wilfred Buck (2024)
Walker Art Center
A documentary about a First Nations astronomer and teacher. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, February 15
The Nutty Professor (1996)
Alamo Drafthouse
Eddie Murphy, you are no Jerry Lewis. $12.50. 2 p.m. More info here.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
This is supposed to be the good one, right? Showtimes and more info here.
Rom-Com Movie Night
Insight Brewing
Five romantic comedies of the '00s for your all-day/all-night viewing pleasure. Free. 1 p.m. More info here.
Festa—A Trilogy by Sarah Maldoror (1979-80)
Main Cinema
Three films about the early independence of Cape Verde and Guinean-Bissé from the director who documented the anti-colonial fight in Africa so brilliantly. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour. $12. 1 p.m. More info here.
Be Pretty and Shut Up! (1976)
Main Cinema
Delphine Seyrig (aka Jeanne Dielman) speaks with actresses (including Jane Fonda, Shirley Maclaine, and Juliet Berto) about being a woman in the movie industry. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 4 p.m. More info here.
Blow for Blow (1972)
Main Cinema
A quasi-documentary about female workers taking a factory over from their bosses. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Titanic (1996)
St. Paul Eagles Club
Comedy from the Funny Asian Women Kollective. Dinner from DeGidio's. A giant boat sinking. Presented by Trilingua Cinema. $20. 6 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, February 16
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Extended Edition (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
You're saying it could have been even longer? $11.50. 11 a.m. & 4:20 p.m. More info here.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
How many of these damn movies are there? Showtimes and more info here.
Sundance Shorts
Bryant Lake Bowl
Seven short films from Sundance. $8. 7 p.m. More info here.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Emagine Willow Creek
Gregory Peck at his Gregory Peckishness. Also Wednesday. $10.60. 12:30 & 5:30 p.m. More info here.
The Sealed Soil (1977)
Main Cinema
The earliest complete surviving feature film directed by an Iranian woman. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 1 p.m. More info here.
Marjan (1956)
Main Cinema
The two available reels (about 4/7ths) of the first film ever directed by an Iranian woman. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 3:30 p.m. More info here.
The Samama Chikli Project (1910-1924)
Main Cinema
Short silent Tunisian films with live music from Tim O’Keefe. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 5 p.m. More info here.
My Grandmother (1929)
Main Cinema
A fearless satire of Soviet bureaucracy. Part of Il Cinema Ritrovato. $12. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
The Cameraman (1928)
Northrop
The Buster Keaton classic, with live organ accompaniment from David Aaron Miller. $22. 3 p.m. More info here.
The Big Clock (1948)
Trylon
Really, you won’t believe how enormous it is. $8. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Monday, February 17
Ghost (1990)
Alamo Drafthouse
You know that iconic pottery wheel scene? It comes before he dies! WTF! Anyway this movie is a convoluted apology for gentrification. $14.50. 6:40 p.m. More info here.
The Claw (2024)
Main Cinema
The life and career of local wrestling great Baron von Raschke. Also Tuesday. $5. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Candyman (1992)
Emagine Willow Creek
A man made entirely of candy? Delicious! $7.60. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
WTF! Watch Terrible Films Club
56 Brewing
I don’t what it is, but I know it’ll be terrible. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, February 19
The Wedding Singer (1998)
Alamo Drafthouse
A crucial moment in Drew Barrymore’s transformation from wild girl to romcom sweetie. $20.59. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Princess Bride (1987)
The Heights
Wallace Shawn is a solid dude. $13. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Kitty Mammas (2021)
Trylon
A mockumentary about a clinic where women give birth to cats. Presented by Trash Film Debauchery. $5. 7p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Captain America: Brave New World
“Since when are they red?” Oh yeah, that’s the snappy MCU dialogue we all know and love.
Ne Zha 2
A Chinese animated film and, apparently, a sequel.
No Other Land
Maybe the Oscars can be a force for good? Certainly a Best Documentary nomination has helped this acclaimed look at the Israeli displacement of Palestinians on the West Bank belatedly access U.S. theaters, after major distributors ignored it for more than a year. But the struggle for distribution shouldn’t overshadow the film itself, which is much more than just a competent document of brutality. No Other Land is the product of four directors (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor), two Israeli and two Palestinian; the various sources of footage from cameras and phones are brilliantly edited, and the strained friendship between two of the filmmakers—the Palestinian Adra and the Israeli Abraham—is central to the story it tells of the limits of empathy and humanitarian universalism. There are plenty of horrors to catalogue here, and even if months of violent clips from Gaza have desensitized you, watching a settler casually gun down a displaced Palestinian will still make you gasp. Yet it's the everyday cruelty that's most unsettling, the sight of an army pouring concrete into a well and bulldozing the homes of families forced to relocate to caves. Humans really are capable of doing anything to one another, and in cold blood. A
Paddington in Peru
The title really says it all.
Rob Peace
A young Yale grad sells drugs to help get his dad out of jail.
2025 Oscar Nominated Short Films - Animation
It’s that time of year.
2025 Oscar Nominated Short Films – Documentary
And more shorts.
2025 Oscar Nominated Short Films - Live Action
And yet more shorts.
You, Me & Her
A married couple considers a threesome.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
All We Imagine As Light
Two nurses live together in Mumbai. The responsible Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is married to a man who emigrated years ago to Germany, a fact we only learn when he ships her a rice cooker with no note of explanation. Her younger and more carefree roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) has a secret Muslim boyfriend, Shiraz (Hridhu Haroon). Writer/director Payal Kapadia’s second feature Is about how their relationship changes once they help the hospital’s cook Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) move back to her village after she’s booted by luxury housing developers. But All That We Imagine as Light is also collection of indelible moments: scenes from the playful courtship of Anu and Shiraz (leading up to a gentle, realistic sex scene), the devastating chill of Prabha when a doctor shyly expresses a romantic interest, and above all shots of teeming Mumbai nightlife, accompanied by voiceovers from unidentified individuals about how they came to live in this massive city. The stakes here are pretty high—the displacement of working people, religious intolerance, marital abandonment—but Kapadia has such a light touch that what we see are humans enduring the obstacles that humans endure. She tells these stories without softening any blows or overstating any drama, and that’s a rare gift. Ends Thursday. A
Becoming Led Zeppelin
I’d hoped that the sensory bludgeoning of IMAX Zep would be ideal Super Bowl counterprogramming last Sunday, but this all-too-authorized doc (no sex or drugs or mudsharks) is way scarcer on live footage than I’d been led to believe. Well, actually there’s lots of footage (and hell, I’d watch silent film of John Bonham slapping and stomping) but too much of it is set to the studio recordings. The ’60s studio recordings, that is—Becoming Led Zeppelin is true to its name, wrapping up with the band’s Royal Albert Hall homecoming in 1970, which I’d honestly rather watch in full rather than listen to so much jawing from three elderly Brits who really need to get over a certain 1968 Rolling Stone review already. (At least give me visuals of the wonderfully sloppy Eddie Cochran covers that are instead relegated to the credits.) Those studio LPs do sound great over a cineplex soundsystem, of course, but first you’ve got to wade through 45 minutes about skiffle and life as a ’60s session man in London. Some of that's engaging enough, but sorry but I did not pay $20 to see and hear Lonnie Donegan and Lulu in The World’s Most Immersive Movie Experience. B
The Brutalist (read the full review here)
Brady Corbet’s aspiring epic tracks the disillusionment of a man who believed himself beyond illusion. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, once more a heroic European Jew) is a Bauhaus-tutored architect, Buchenwald survivor, and recent immigrant in Philadelphia. Into his life strides Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Bucks County nouveaux with a pseud’s hunger for as much expert-approved culture as money can buy. He enlists his pedigreed discovery to design and construct a massive community center for the suburban backwater of Doylestown. The Brutalist is a film about grandiosity that also aspires to it. There are tremendous moments, in which far from subtle images communicate boldly what language cannot, that only a filmmaker gifted with a certain degree of self-importance can achieve. But on the back end it loses the shape of a masterpiece, and the sturdy facsimile of a greatness we'd been watching reveals itself as something lumpier and less monumental. And for a film supposedly about ideas, The Brutalist is strangely devoid of them, unless you count “rich people will fuck you over,” “Americans hate foreigners,” and “the Holocaust!” B
Challengers (read the full review here)
Mildly pervy Euro auteur Luca Guadagnino has concocted a sort of Jules et Jim for les enfants de TikTok et PRIME sports drinks, with Zendaya as the apex of a love triangle who reveals that the other two points—scurfy Josh O’Connor and submissive Mike Faist—also have the hots for each other. What Guadagnino gets about Zendaya is that she excels as an observer, a judgmental force that doubles as a relatable audience surrogate. If there’s something of the fashion model’s posture to her confidence, and a flatness to her characterization—she’s all impulse and response—Challengers allows us to postpone any hard questions about development as an actor because its pleasures are all so wonderfully superficial. You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it. Why in my day, we had to go to grad school, study Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and learn to read homosocial desire into seemingly “straight” fictions. What once was subtext is now reflected vividly in Zendaya’s shades. B+
A Complete Unknown (read the full review here)
Timothée Chalamet’s relative success here—he gets that Bob Dylan himself has always been a guy performing as Bob Dylan—is just one reason that James Mangold’s new biopic is so relatively un-embarrassing. The source material also helps: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoroughly researched and reported account of Newport ’65 that’s preceded by an even-handed evaluation of what was at stake. Wald represents the ethos of the folk scene with a respect that rockist triumphalists could never see past their ingrained generational narratives to allow, and the film’s climax, Dylan’s amplified defiance of the Newport folkies, doesn’t feel as triumphant as we might expect. Dylan comes off less as a genius coming into his own than a cornered, confused guy lashing out at whoever comes closest; when his pal Bobby Neuwirth asks him point blank who he wants to be, it’s hard not hear a hollowness in the defiance of Dylan's reply: “Whoever they don’t want me to be.” When he returns to visit Woody Guthrie one last time after Newport, reflecting on what he’s done and lost, Bobby Zimmerman is now as completely Bob Dylan as Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith. How does it feel? Not great, Bob. B
Conclave
Edward Berger may think he’s cooked up something more substantial than a chewy Vatican potboiler here—a meditation on faith in the modern era, or some other middlebrow (papal) bull. Who knows and who cares? The crowd I saw it with thought Berger’s flamboyant pope opera was funny as hell (pardon the expression, Father) and they were right. Watching old guys from around the world in funny clothes politic, gossip, and backstab is just solid entertainment. Cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine milks everything he can from the ornate setting and bright costumery, and this cast knows how to project an ominous seriousness that’s forever camp adjacent. We’re talking Ralph Fiennes working his timeworn visage of existential indigestion, John Lithgow looking more like Donald Rumsfield than ever, Sergio Castellitto as a gregarious bear who wants to repeal Vatican II, Isabella Rossellini as a mysterious nun, and, for the ladies, a little Stanley Tucci. You’ll guess most of the twists, groan at some, and even get blindsided by a few. Still, without giving too much away, it’s hard not to notice that none of the scandals here are as horrific as those the Catholic Church has covered up in real life. B+
Flow
Every house cat stalks through its domain like some fierce jungle predator indifferent to any challenge. Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis calls that supposedly independent beast’s bluff, tossing a kitty into a flood and saying “How tough are you now, huh puss?” Flow is in part a unique hangout movie, a kind a postdiluvian animal Real World where a prickly black cat is forced to coexist on a boat with a wounded secretarybird, an acquisitive lemur, a stolid capybara, and an all too friendly Lab. None of the critters speak—aside from knowing how to work a rudder, they generally behave as animals would. And while the computer animation isn’t exactly beautiful, and can’t avoid an occasional cutscene quality, we pass through computer-generated environments with an unmatched three-dimensional ease that's its own reward. Though we never learn what happened to the humans—Flow is blessedly free of any backstory—there’s also an element of wish fulfillment here. If humans ever do finally off themselves en masse, it suggests, at least the animals we love will find ways to survive. If they learn to work together better than humans did, that is. A-
The Girl With the Needle Ends Thursday.
I’m Still Here
There’s a lot to admire about Walter Salles’s newest film, which documents the struggle of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) to learn the truth about what happened to her dissident husband Ruben (Selton Mello) after his abduction by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Mostly there’s Torres’s performance, which projects an astonishing dignity and perseverance. (As a nice touch, Fernanda Montenegro, the jaded teacher from Salles’s 1998 breakthrough Central Station, plays the older Eunice.) Salles’s timing couldn’t be better: Surely the film’s Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Actress for Torres) owe something to the mood of “it can happen here?” now belated descending upon the privileged in the U.S. But as a director Salles lacks the historical sweep required to tell a multi-decade story, the Paivas’ family life feels idealized both before and after the arrest, and we rarely quite get inside Eunice’s mind and heart. The film exists for a worthy goal, bearing witness to the fact that repressive regimes someday come to an end—sometimes even with a single lifetime. But it’s more testimonial than art. B
Nickel Boys
You probably know the deal: director RaMell Ross’s debut feature is shot almost entirely from the point of view of two Black teens sentenced to a brutal Florida reform school. The opening moments are so perfect and impressionistic you think, well, this could be a fine short film, but there’s no way Ross can keep that level of formal command up for over two hours. And there are occasional stumbles, but the technique is no gimmick, or maybe it’s just a gimmick that deepens the content. Being essentially trapped in a character’s body with them creates a distancing effect. We feel as alienated from the strange surroundings as the somewhat naive innocent Elwood (Ethan Herisse) does; we keep a keen eye open as the more savvy Turner (Brandon Wilson) has learned to do. Using the techniques of screen realism to tell this story is what would have felt like a gimmick—just a gimmick we’ve learned to accept as natural. A
Nosferatu
Who needs a vampire to drain the life from a town when you’ve got Robert Eggers directing? Wisborg, the German community that Count Orloc (Bill Skarsgård) will eventually infest with plague, is so gloomy at the start of Eggers's take on the Dracula story that the fiend has hardly got any work to do. And the wan woman Orloc is drawn to (Lily Rose-Depp) already endures joyless orgasmic gasps and speaks in trite Emily Dickinson first drafts. Like any well-prepared corpse, Nosferatu can be striking, even beautiful, in its airless, stylized way. For the German scenes, Eggers favors a blue filter familiar to admirers of The Piano or the first Twilight movie, and some of his fussily framed shots do rise to a Barry Lyndon quality—no mean feat. Orloc’s castle is a black-on-black-on-black realm of shadows within shadows, a daring and somewhat frustrating design for those of us who like to occasionally see what we’re looking at. Willem Dafoe’s mad, chaotic Prof. Albin Eberhart Von—ah fuck it, I’m just gonna call him Van Helsing—brings a mad touch of chaos to the proceedings, but much of Nosferatu advances with the grim inevitability of a fairy tale. Skarsgård’s Orloc, a hulking, shadowy beast with the bristly mustache of an ancient warlord and a booming, electronically modulated voice, is a beastly embodiment of menace, a dark force awakened. But without pathos or malice, he’s just acting on instinct. Turns out pure evil can be almost as boring as pure good. B-
Presence Ends Thursday.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A disappointment. Shot in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s film wants to be both an effective thriller and a depiction of how state-generated paranoia strengthens the Iranian patriarchy, but these two elements don’t entirely mesh. Appointed to the role of investigating judge despite his bosses’ reservations about him, Iman (Missagh Zareh) learns that he’s expected to rubber stamp certain political rulings. He does so despite his qualms, and thus begins his descent from loving father and husband to tyrant of the household. Desperate to find his missing state-issued gun, fearing that he’ll be jailed for incompetence, Iman turns on his family, who belatedly fight back. At times this is almost an Iranian take on The Shining, complete with a tense chase through a disorienting setting. But... B-
September 5
If turning a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller is a morally questionable act, how do we feel about turning the TV coverage of a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller? That’s what director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum does here with the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and to his credit September 5 is wholly upfront about the amorality of journalism. Both John Magaro’s control room newb Geoff Mason and Peter Sarsgaard’s quietly authoritative ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge are in this for the story, and to hold on to it they’ll fight the local police, the ABC News team, and the other networks demanding equal satellite time. It’s hard not to root for the scrappy, ingenious sports journalists improvising with the limited tech on hand as events unfold, even as we realize their tricky sensationalism is the future of TV news. (September 5 is otherwise as stripped of politics as this story can possibly be, which is probably for the best. I mean, just imagine.) For all the sharp performances—Benjamin Walker perfectly capturing Peter Jennings’s plummy cool, Leonie Benesch as a translator who becomes an essential part of the team—everyone here is upstaged by actual footage of ABC Sports’ Jim McKay, a guy visibly struggling with how to convey this horror to viewers in real time. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little skeevy after September 5. But it’d be just as false to say I wasn’t caught up in it all. Like the man said, this is tremendous content. Ends Thursday. B+
The Substance (read the full review here)
Without our shared cultural knowledge of Demi Moore’s life and career, The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s absurdist experiment in gory meta-hagsploitation, is a fairly limp if expressively graphic satire of impossible female body standards. Moore’s presence, and her performance, give the film its moments of depth—moments Fargeat doesn’t always seem particularly interested in. Moore is an aging, discarded star who injects herself with a black-market serum that looks like radioactive pee and mitoses into the “ideal version of herself,” a perky-butted and gleam-smiled Margaret Qualley who calls herself Sue. Each woman gets to remain conscious for exactly a week apiece, spending each alternate week as a nude, comatose lump ingesting bagged nutrients. And as Elisabeth begins to sulk through her allotment of days and Sue wants more time to shine, rules are inevitably bent, with increasingly disastrous results. The subtlety-free finale, which fire-hoses blood at the patriarchy and anyone else in proximity, will either have you pumping your fist at its audacity or rolling your eyes at what a cop out it is. For better or for worse, what Fargeat is “trying to say” and her grisly overindulgence are inseparable. B-
Wicked (read the full review here)
Thinkpieces are surely in the works about how Wicked, the story of a good woman who is cast as an enemy of the people by authoritarians using fiendishly disseminated lies, is a perfect Trump era fable (just as it was a perfect Bush era fable two decades ago). But maybe the best topical lesson that Wicked offers is that villains are often more entertaining than heroes. If anything, Cynthia Erivo has too much screen presence for her already underwritten part, and her almost-adult dignity undermines her character arc. Her Elphaba (a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West) is no ingénue misled by foolish dreams, and seems incapable of humiliation. Meanwhile, Glinda is a dream of a role that Ariana Grande floats through with perfect timing, flaunting her shallow vanity, scene-stealing blonde hair tosses, and comically sudden upshoots into her showy soprano. And while I’ll take songwriter Stephen Schwartz’s generically inspirational pop over the wan schlock of the dreaded Pasek and Paul, I have seen better movie musicals set in Oz. B
