Landmark Mayan Theatre

New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who's feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when "aspiring" really means not... More »

New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who's feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when "aspiring" really means not cutting it. Life with her best friend and roommate, Sophie (Mickey Sumner) has taken on the dull glow of old cutlery swiped from the college dining hall-- "We're the lesbian couple that doesn't have sex anymore," Frances observes. When Sophie moves out to live with her boyfriend, Frances finds herself adrift, shoehorning herself into new roommate situations. She is lacks a job and resources: Encountering a transaction that requires a credit card, which she of course doesn't have, she blurts, "I'm not a real person yet." At what age does one become a real person? Frances Ha may be director Noah Baumbach's tenderest movie, at least among his most recent ones. Shot digitally on the fly, its New York streets rendered in satiny black-and-white, the film is a patchwork of details that constitute a sort of dating manual, one that fortifies you for all the crap you have to deal with when you're a young person in love with a city that doesn't always love you back. Frances moves from here to there without flinching, but as Gerwig (who co-wrote with Baumbach) plays her, there's always a cellophane layer of wistfulness behind her optimism. When you want things you can’t name, how do you search for them? « Less

(5:00 PM), 8:00 PM, 10:00 PM

For many people, particularly those who were in their twenties at the time of its release, Richard Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise-- in which Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke play young tourists who fold a lifetime of romance (and plenty of arguing)... More »

For many people, particularly those who were in their twenties at the time of its release, Richard Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise-- in which Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke play young tourists who fold a lifetime of romance (and plenty of arguing) into one night--is one of those secret movies we keep in our pockets like lucky coins. For others, 2004's Before Sunset, which reunites Hawke's Jesse and Delpy's Celine in Paris and ends with one hell of a cliffhanger, is the treasure. Now along comes the painfully articulate Before Midnight. Proceed with caution, tissues, and possibly wearing armor. Here, Celine and Jesse-- now together although not married-- head off to a romantic hotel, free from their kids, where Celine's frustrations explode in a diatribe melding thousands of years of female oppression with the everyday anxieties of raising twins. She turns on Jesse with such vengeance that she nearly crushes their union. The original tagline for Before Sunrise was "Can the greatest romance of your life last only one night?" Here Celine raises a horrible counterpoint: Can you destroy the person you love most in less than an hour? Her suffering is real; it's her choice of words, their heat-seeking precision, that makes you want to take her by the shoulders and shout “STOP!” Celine does most of the talking, but it's really Hawke's movie-- we see in his eyes how Celine's misery cuts him. Her anguish is his failure. Jesse still dresses and carries himself like a kid, but adulthood has hit him hard, like a crack to the jaw, perhaps just now. « Less

(4:00 PM), 7:00 PM, 9:30 PM

Sitcoms, especially since Seinfeld, have a way of getting audiences to root for jerks. The Kings of Summer attempts to pull off the same narrative trick by getting us to mistake 15-year-old protagonist, Joe (Nick Robinson), for a scamp instead of... More »

Sitcoms, especially since Seinfeld, have a way of getting audiences to root for jerks. The Kings of Summer attempts to pull off the same narrative trick by getting us to mistake 15-year-old protagonist, Joe (Nick Robinson), for a scamp instead of a sullen little shit, even when he calls his widower dad's girlfriend a "spider woman you found in the gutter." Joe thinks his gruff, sarcastic father (Nick Offerman, playing a less noble variation of Parks and Recreation's Ron Swanson) is totally ruining his life, so he moves into a fantasy cabin-- complete with a loft and air hockey table-- with his athletic best friend, Patrick (Gabriel Basso), and a nonsense-spouting ethnic cartoon named Biaggio (Moises Arias)-- one of the two dark-skinned, asexual characters the film prods us to laugh at. To clinch all the Urkel-era clichés, Joe and Patrick run away by telling their parents they're sleeping over at each other's house. For a while, the teenagers live in a Boys' Life paradise, jumping into lakes, dueling with swords, and sneaking off to Boston Market to retrieve dinner. But their idyll evaporates with the arrival of a popular blond girl (Erin Moriarty)-- do teenage boys in movies ever fall for anyone else?-- who unwittingly pits Joe and Patrick against each other. Joe’s conflicts with his friend and father lead to a tense, funny, mettle-testing climax, but the ending is more cornball than Tony Danza. The film's grown-up world-- populated by the tart, shticky likes of Offerman, Megan Mullally, Alison Brie, and Mary Lynn Rajskub-- a lot more interesting than its pimple-faced counterpart. « Less

(4:30 PM), 7:30 PM, 9:45 PM