Frances Ha
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| Funny, flirty, and shot in crisp black and white, Noah (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg) Baumbach’s latest is like today’s Manhattan, perfectly capturing the rhythms of an over-educated, underemployed generation. | |||||||||||||
| Frances, played with expert oddness by co-writer Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Damsels in Distress), is a struggling dancer. Despite the fun she’s having at 28, without a solid job or stable partner, she is flailing. All elbows and punchlines, Frances develops a romance with a male friend, but both have trouble with the ground rules. Unable to make it as a dancer, her greatest triumph to date is her friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a dour-looking, tart-tongued girl who matches her sense of humor quip for quip. Sincerely ironic and ironically sincere, the film maintains an openness and generosity toward its characters, conferring charm and substance on even the most mundane interactions. For all the awkwardness Frances displays, this movie loves her. | |||||||||||||
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Stories We Tell
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| In her inspired, genre-twisting new film, writer/director Sarah (AWAY FROM HER) Polley discovers that the truth, aka the secrets and lies of someone’s life, in this case her mother’s, depends on who’s doing the telling. | |||||||||||||
| Polley is both filmmaker and detective as she investigates the secrets kept by her family of storytellers. She playfully interviews and interrogates a cast of characters of varying reliability, eliciting refreshingly candid, yet mostly contradictory, answers to the same questions regarding her mother. As each relates their version of the family mythology, present-day recollections shift into nostalgia-tinged glimpses of their mother, who departed too soon, leaving a trail of questions. Polley unravels the paradoxes to reveal the essence of family: always complicated, warmly messy and fiercely loving. STORIES… also explores the elusive nature of truth and memory, but at its core is a deeply personal film about how our narratives shape and define us as individuals and families, interconnecting to paint a profound, funny and poignant picture. (c) Roadside Attractions |
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Coming Next...
The East
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| THE EAST, a suspenseful and provocative thriller from acclaimed writer-director Zal Batmanglij and writer-actress Brit Marling, stars Marling as former FBI agent Sarah Moss. | |||||||||||||
| Moss is an operative for an elite private intelligence firm that ruthlessly protects the interests of its A-list corporate clientele. Handpicked for a plum assignment by the company’s head honcho (Patricia Clarkson), Sarah goes undercover to infiltrate an elusive anarchist collective seeking revenge against major corporations guilty of covering up criminal activity. Determined, highly-trained and resourceful, Sarah soon ingratiates herself with the group, overcoming their initial suspicions and joining them on their next action or “jam.” But living closely with the intensely committed members of The East, Sarah finds herself torn between her two worlds as she starts to connect with anarchist Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and the rest of the collective, and awakens to the moral contradictions of her personal life. (c) Fox Searchlight |
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Dakota 38+2
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| Tickets $15. Q&A with Unity Riders to follow film. | |||||||||||||
| Smooth Feather Productions’ Dakota 38+2 chronicles the 330-mile healing journey on horseback from Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota, to honor the 38 Dakota men executed on December 26, 1862 by order of President Lincoln. |
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| Bringing forth the spirit of reconciliation, the ideas of personal action, building healthy relationships with each other and the land, and moving forward in peaceful co-existence, the screening is a fundraiser for the Unity Riders, who will make the epic trip in July and August from Manitoba, Canada to the east coast. Stops include Woodstock, The United Nations, Sandy Hook, CT, and The White House. The riders will lead this year’s Walk for World Peace in Woodstock on August 4th. While the Dakota 38 ride has been specifically to remember the ancestors and transmute that dark part of history, Gus High Eagle, of the Dakota Nation, is clear that the spirit of the Unity Ride is, “about awakening, really.” For more information, please visit www.theunityride.com |
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| View Unity Ride Website | |||||||||||||
Kon-Tiki
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| One of the great real-life adventures of the twentieth century, Kon-Tiki recounts the stirring tale of explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl, who began an 8,000-kilometre voyage across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft in a dangerous attempt to prove that Polynesia was populated by settlers from South America rather than Asia, as widely assumed by the scientific community. | |||||||||||||
| A risk-taker since childhood, Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) is one of the last examples of the scientist as adventurer. Unable to find a publisher to print his thesis about the migration of early civilizations — much of it devised during his stay on Fatu Hiva, an island in the Marquesas — he hatches his plan to cross the Pacific on a raft, just like the ancient Incas before him. Unshakeable in his determination, Heyerdahl simply refuses to give up — despite the fact that the scientific community openly mocks him, he can’t find funding for the voyage, his first recruit for the raft’s crew is a somewhat stocky refrigerator salesman, and he himself can’t actually swim. A bold and inspiring epic, the episodes when the crew must deal with sudden thunderstorms, a shark attack, and an encounter with a playful whale that escalates into a near catastrophe, are breathtakingly executed. Kon-Tiki is one of those rare movies that restores our sense of wonder. In English, Norwegian, French, and Swedish with subtitles. | |||||||||||||
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