Friday, March 21, 2014
Opening / Film Muppets, nymphos, air sex, and the rest of this week's screenings
Posted By J.R. Jones on 03.21.14 at 12:34 PM
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In this week's long review Ben Sachs looks at Le Week-end, the latest from British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid); Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan star as a long-married couple hoping to salvage their relationship with a trip to Paris. And I review Divergent, the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling young-adult sci-fi novel.
Check out the latest issue for new reviews of: Bad Words, with Jason Bateman as a 40-year-old who enters a national spelling bee; Class Enemy, a Slovenian feature about high schoolers who blame their German teacher for the suicide of a classmate; just plain Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a history teacher who meets his doppelganger; Exhibition, with former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine and conceptual artist Liam Gillick as a married couple more in love with their London apartment than with each other; Love & Air Sex, a romantic comedy set amid the Air Sex World Championships in Austin, Texas; Muppets Most Wanted, the latest outing for Kermit, Miss Piggy, and the rest of the gang; and Nymphomaniac: Volume I, the first half of Lars von Trier's unrated, four-hour fuck fest (part two opens April 4).
Best bets for repertory: Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), all week at Music Box in a restored print; Robert Kramer's Ice (1969), Tuesday at Gene Siskel Film Center; and Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), with matinees Saturday and Sunday at Music Box.
And don't forget these special events: Genealogies of the New Aesthetic, a multimedia lecture by Christiane Paul on image-making in the age of the Internet, next Thursday at Film Center; Stress/De-Stress, which combines music, readings, and projector performance, Sunday at Museum of Contemporary Art; and Logan Square Home Movie Day, a program of celluloid home movies centered on the eponymous neighborhood, Wednesday at Comfort Station.
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