Chile Pages,
LOWRIDERS
Set in East LA, this drama centers on Danny (Gabriel Chavarria), a teenage graffiti artist who is encouraged by his father (Demián Bichir) to become a mechanic and join the family business. When his no-good brother (Theo Rossi) returns from prison and seeks to compete with their father at a lowrider competition, Danny must choose his allegiances. Rated PG-13. 99 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
NEITHER WOLF NOR DOG
In the 1990s, author Kent Nerburn was contacted by a Native American elder named Dan to help him write a book that conveyed Dan’s wisdom, political opinions, and social commentary. That collaboration became the 1995 book Neither
Wolf Nor Dog, and now Nerburn has adapted the book into a screenplay about the journey the two men undertook. Christopher Sweeney plays Nerburn, and Dave Bald Eagle plays Dan, in this telling of how Nerburn accepted this responsibility while traversing Lakota country. Not rated. 110 minutes. Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Not reviewed)
A QUIET PASSION
The life of a writer is a notoriously difficult challenge to film. The life of a reclusive writer raises that difficulty exponentially. In director Terence Davies’ biopic of Emily Dickinson, the results are uneven. Davies has an exquisite visual sensibility, but much of his screenplay is filled with dialogue that seems extracted faithfully from the written word, from journals, letters, and poems. But people don’t often speak the way they write, and the effect is of characters being squeezed through a press of someone’s idea of period authenticity. Emma Bell plays the young Emily, who morphs into Cynthia Nixon in maturity. Nixon delivers a spirited and persuasive performance as she charts Dickinson’s arc from a radiant young woman into the eccentric recluse she became. Rated PG-13. 125 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
SNATCHED
In the latest Amy Schumer comedy, she plays Emily, a woman who is dumped by her boyfriend just before they are scheduled to embark on a trip to South America. Instead she coaxes her homebody mother (Goldie Hawn, in her first film role since 2002) to join her for a little bonding in paradise. Their adventure goes awry when they are kidnapped and must work together to get away from their captors. Rated R. 91 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown; DreamCatcher. (Not reviewed)
THEIR FINEST
By turns funny, romantic, moving, and harrowing, this movie about movies, war, and female empowerment hits every note with the exquisite ping of a fork struck to fine crystal. Gemma Arterton is Catrin Cole, a young woman who in blitz-ravaged London unexpectedly finds herself hired by the British Ministry of Information’s film division as a screenwriter to handle the “slop” (women’s dialogue) for propaganda movies. The assignment is to find real wartime human interest stories and turn them into morale-raising potboilers. The perfect casting includes Sam Claflin as her writing partner and perhaps more, Bill Nighy as an aging star, Eddie Marsden as his agent, plus Helen McCrory, Richard E. Grant, Jeremy Irons, and many more. To see Nighy raise an eyebrow, or sing an Irish air in a pub, is pure cinema magic. Impeccably directed by Danish filmmaker Lone Sherfig and adapted by Gaby Chiappe from Lissa Evans’s 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (a title they should have kept), this is certainly one of the year’s finest to date. Rated R. 117 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
THE WALL
There is a certain brand of thriller in which the story’s heroes are trapped in one place with an unseen enemy out to get them — last year’s shark movie The Shallows is a good example. This film by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) takes the concept to the war in Iraq, where two American soldiers (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and John Cena) are trapped behind a wall in the middle of the desert by an unseen Iraqi sniper. If they attempt to move from their position, they’ll be killed. Rated R. 81 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
THE WAR AT HOME
In 1979, six years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, a young anti-war movement veteran named Glenn Silber (with co-director Barry Alexander Brown) made a documentary about the Vietnam anti-war protest movement as it unfolded on and around the University of Wisconsin in the decade from 1963 to the war’s end. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Silber, now a Santa Fean, traces the escalation from peaceful protest to confrontation with club-wielding police. The stakes rose with the chaos at the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the subsequent election of Richard Nixon. It turned deadly with the National Guard’s killing of four students at Kent State and a bombing of the U.S. Army Mathematics Research Center on the Madison campus that killed a graduate student. The film is “not a nostalgic blast from the past,” Silber says. “It does connect. It’s almost like a CliffsNotes on how to resist.” The Jean Cocteau projects this as the first of a series called Films of Resistance, which Silber will help to curate. 4:50 p.m. Tuesday, May 23. Not rated. 100 minutes. Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Jonathan Richards)