Cinema Village

1:10 PM, 3:10 PM, 7:30 PM, 9:45 PM

Opening with a shotgun blasting a hole in the face of a grotesque brute-- and soon afterward treating us to the sight of a self-disembowelment by chainsaw--Hatchet III announces exactly who it's aimed at right from the start. (If you don't like... More »

Opening with a shotgun blasting a hole in the face of a grotesque brute-- and soon afterward treating us to the sight of a self-disembowelment by chainsaw--Hatchet III announces exactly who it's aimed at right from the start. (If you don't like sequels where the title's Roman numerals are rendered in jagged slashes of blood, this isn't for you.) Hatchet heroine Marybeth (Danielle Harris) has just killed the deformed bayou hulk Victor Crowley (four-time Jason Voorhees Kane Hodder), and then marches, slathered with blood, into a local police station to turn herself in. But Crowley is a "repeater," a ghost destined to return to life every night in an endless cycle, so staying dead isn’t an option. Amanda (horror vet Caroline Williams), a journalist disgraced by her obsession with the Crowley legend, has an plan on how to break that cycle, and she needs Marybeth to, ahem, execute it. Meanwhile, cops and EMTs descend on the crime scene at Honey Island Swamp, where a revived Crowley soon commences tearing them to pieces. There's no shortage of visceral, gross-out thrills: Aside from the dismemberments, we're presented with a death by defibrillator, and a loving shot of half a brain falling from half a skull. Disappointingly, Marybeth is largely passive in this installment, the apparent climax of writer-producer Adam Green's Hatchet trilogy. She gets her Final Girl status merely by being the last one to show up. « Less

9:15 PM

Any job that requires meetings involving a scary silent gunman laying plastic tarp on the ground in order to catch post-execution bloodletting is, by nature, stressful. For Colette (Andrea Riseborough), those anxious circumstances are the... More »

Any job that requires meetings involving a scary silent gunman laying plastic tarp on the ground in order to catch post-execution bloodletting is, by nature, stressful. For Colette (Andrea Riseborough), those anxious circumstances are the byproduct of being forced to work as a reluctant mole inside her close-knit IRA gang for MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen) in 1993 Belfast, a scenario that's handled with suspenseful precision by director James Marsh in Shadow Dancer. Working from Tom Bradby's screenplay (based on his book), the former documentarian (Man on Wire, Project Nim) gives his material edgy life via his economy of style, with his framing exhibiting an unfussy, astute attention to spatial power dynamics-- even in a seemingly simple shot-countershot sequence of advancing/retreating close-ups-- that reveal him to be an assured classicist. Populated by a host of strong if somewhat underutilized supporting players (Gillian Anderson, Aidan Gillen, Domhnall Gleeson), the film rests on the desperate chemistry of a paunchy, weathered Owen and a tense, quietly ferocious Riseborough. Their relationship, marked by equal measures of need, desperation and exploitation, ultimately comes to a head during a walloping finale in which terrorism is carried out in the name of politics, and betrayal-- and sacrifice-- are performed in service of family. « Less

1:00 PM, 3:05 PM, 5:05 PM, 7:05 PM

Perhaps it was disingenuous for George Plimpton to insist for so long that he was above all else an "am-uh-ter." Yes, this tweedy beanpole would lark off from his day job-- only editing The Paris Review, the world-champion lit mag, for almost 50... More »

Perhaps it was disingenuous for George Plimpton to insist for so long that he was above all else an "am-uh-ter." Yes, this tweedy beanpole would lark off from his day job-- only editing The Paris Review, the world-champion lit mag, for almost 50 years-- so that he could have a go at goaltending for the Boston Bruins, or bomb as a stand-up comic, or pitch to Mickey Mantle. Was this "participatory journalism," as he put it, or maybe proto-performance-art media manipulation-- there were those TV specials and, later, endorsement deals that would make Orson Welles blush-- or just some kind of make-a-wish dilettantism? Crammed with lit-world walk-ons and delicious anecdotes, the agreeable new doc Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself posits that he was all this and more. Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer, and some of the master-novelist talking heads they've assembled-- James Salter, Peter Matthiesen-- imply Plimpton was right not to aspire to their company. But the doc also treats us to affecting, insightful passages from Paper Lion, his great account of training as a quarterback for the Detroit Lions, confirming that, often enough, the work was as substantial as his efforts as an athlete were minor. Plimpton himself, recorded in interviews and at lecterns, narrates much of the doc, retelling his best tales. A favorite: the time on a fishing boat he asked Hemingway what the white birds that showed up in so often in the novelist's sex scenes were meant to symbolize. Hemingway, infuriated, shouted back, "So you think you can do better?" « Less

5:20 PM

"You use big words to say simple things," says Augustine (Soko), an illiterate kitchen maid, to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly female malady "hysteria." This would be a show of boilerplate feistiness in most films, but in... More »

"You use big words to say simple things," says Augustine (Soko), an illiterate kitchen maid, to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly female malady "hysteria." This would be a show of boilerplate feistiness in most films, but in writer-director Alice Winocour's Augustine, it stands as a subtler, more complex victory. Having been largely silent or monosyllabic for much of the film, subjected to all manner of brutal poking and prodding in the name of science, the fact that she has spoken at all is something of a defiant act, a signal of her emerging sense of self. Augustine was a real life figure, subject of a case-study by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, a pioneering 19th-century French neurologist who claimed Freud as a student. The doctor (played by Vincent Lindon) was a formidable man, a celebrity who revolutionized the ways patients were diagnosed and treated while also forging breakthroughs in conceptualizing the workings of the brain itself (thus setting the stage for modern neurology). But according to Winocour's film, his bedside manner was often unthinkingly cruel. Charcot's brusque manner, the way he ignores Augustine's questions and callously manhandles her nude body, underscores an imbalance of power that has everything to do with differences in gender and class. He wields that power in an especially punitive way once his sexual attraction to his star patient gets the better of him. Gorgeously shot, lavishly costumed, and well acted, Augustine is something of a paradox, simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, its ending tethered to both bruised triumph and a sense of things falling apart. « Less

3:15 PM, 7:20 PM

With the advent of bullet-cam and the various slo-mo elements used as visual punctuation, American blockbusters often veer into musclebound, shoot-'em-up fantasy. Eric Valette's action thriller The Prey (La Proie), on the other hand, roots itself... More »

With the advent of bullet-cam and the various slo-mo elements used as visual punctuation, American blockbusters often veer into musclebound, shoot-'em-up fantasy. Eric Valette's action thriller The Prey (La Proie), on the other hand, roots itself in the realm of the possible, if not always the plausible. Convicted bank robber Franck Adrien (Albert Dupontel) trusts the wrong man in prison, and soon his former cellmate, sex offender Jean-Louis Maurel (Stéphane Debac), has placed his wife and child in jeopardy, and is framing him for a string of teen killings. When Adrien breaks out of prison to protect his family, detective Claire Linné (Alice Taglioni) is pulled away from dismantling a crime family and charged with tracking him down. DNA evidence points to The Fugitive in this thriller's lineage, although an exhilarating foot chase through oncoming Paris traffic reveals traces of John Frankenheimer's Ronin. Resourceful Dupontel and dogged Taglioni-- in spite of a superior who dismisses her investigative hunches as "feminine intuition"-- are well matched as the two protagonists working at cross-purposes, and Debac's unassuming serial killer operates with mousy menace. The script, by producers Luc Bossi and Laurent Turner, plays fair with the viewer, and offers a few extra moving parts in its clockwork, in the form of a grieving father and a disgraced former cop. If the thrills it yields are expected ones, the pleasure in the formula remains. « Less

1:05 PM, 5:15 PM, 9:25 PM