Sie FilmCenter

This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars, but has its easy pleasures, and it's likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O'Dowd, who played the laid-back... More »

This fact-based, girl-group empowerment story never quite soars, but has its easy pleasures, and it's likely to become one of those movies everyone sees, maybe more than once. The wonderful Irish actor Chris O'Dowd, who played the laid-back highway patrolman in Bridesmaids (2011), stars as Dave Lovelace, a musician living out of his car who stumbles upon a gifted girl group in rural Australia circa 1968. The four young women are Aboriginals, and as such are shunned and abused by white neighbors they've known all their lives. When Julie (Jessica Mauboy), the one with the really great voice, sees an advertisement seeking acts to perform for American troops in Vietnam, she convinces the others (Deborah Mailman, Shari Sebbens, and Miranda Tapsell) to audition. After Dave encourages the girls to switch their repertoire from Merle Haggard to Otis Redding tunes, the girls soon find themselves performing in Saigon and the war zone beyond. First-time director Wayne Blair and screenwriters Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, adapting Briggs' stage play, don't shy away from the era's social complexities, but they keep their eye on the ball, which in this case is the sweet pull of soul tune harmony. Why resist? « Less

2:00 PM, 4:40 PM, 7:20 PM

A bewitching helix of pure movie stuff, Peter Strickland's seething and self-conscious whatsit Berberian Sound Studio may scan as a psychological thriller, but it's really a lavish gift to film geeks in a lovely matryoshka box. We haven't been... More »

A bewitching helix of pure movie stuff, Peter Strickland's seething and self-conscious whatsit Berberian Sound Studio may scan as a psychological thriller, but it's really a lavish gift to film geeks in a lovely matryoshka box. We haven't been here before: the Italian film industry circa 1976, in that post-dubbing-craze industry’s seediest foley studio, and once we're in there's no getting out. It's an irresistible dynamic: being trapped in a Kafkaesque netherworld of genre film post-production, where "reality" is an ungraspable quantity, but what's "happening" in the film under construction is overwhelmingly vital. Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a shy British sound engineer, is imported to fabricate the soundtrack for what seems to be an absurdly gory Dario Argento-ish giallo. Seems to be, because we never see the film in question, but only hear it, as a thousand cabbages and melons are decimated with knives and sledgehammers, and as the brittle Gilderoy finds himself lost in whimsical Italian bureaucracy and appalled by the bloody mayhem on the screen. Naturally, Strickland's film is infected with the menace emanating from the film within the film. Again and again, the aural horror becomes the sly soundtrack of Berberian, and vice-versa. Giallo-ness is everywhere; Gilderoy is even haunted by a daddy-longlegs. Although the experience is filthy with satiric details (Italian moviemakers take it in the knees), almost nothing happens in Strickland's film-- it's almost completely rampaging atmosphere, which assaults Jones's shaky artisan even as he manufactures it. The screaming, bloodletting business of the giallo is "nothing," too, just sounds and images, no matter how much the pretentious director, once he shows up, blathers on about his film's "truth." « Less

2:20 PM, 4:50 PM, 9:45 PM

Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It's fun, easygoing, and it lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning. It's... More »

Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It's fun, easygoing, and it lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning. It's clear that director Douglas Tirola is passionate about cocktails and the art of tending bar, and that he's as charming as the members of the hospitality industry he's convinced to tell their stories on camera. The bartenders themselves are a motley crowd, most of whom ended up in the service industry by accident—or without intending to stay. These ex-actors and military veterans have a dogged energy for performance, and are often surprised by their enthusiasm for their own profession, especially when the reasoning voices of less-than-proud parents and weary partners threaten to drown out the din of clinking glass and comfortable chatter. The film is more of love song, a Terrence-Malick-meets-Ken-Burns mood piece, than it is a narrative. But if there's a central story, it's how the craft cocktail, absent from American drinking culture since prohibition, re-entered the scene, gaining popularity with cosmopolitan drinkers at bars like New York's neo-speakeasy Employees Only (profiled in the film) but also in places like Westport, Connecticut, where Steve Carpentieri manages Dunville's, a neighborhood restaurant and bar. What carries the doc is Tirola's expansive, democratic spirit-- his understanding of the value of bar as meeting place, not just a stage for bitters and booze. His friendly film goes down as easily as a well-mixed drink. « Less

4:30 PM, 7:10 PM, 9:40 PM

At last! A documentary about that underexposed group: the 1 percenters in their lair. In Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's, the storied store is presented in cinematic terms as ex-screenwriter Matthew Miele watches decorator David Hoey madly... More »

At last! A documentary about that underexposed group: the 1 percenters in their lair. In Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's, the storied store is presented in cinematic terms as ex-screenwriter Matthew Miele watches decorator David Hoey madly creating window displays of phantasmagorical "installation art" that moves. The film's climax is the famous annual holiday unveiling as the hoi polloi press their noses against the glass. Yet the long-term employees fascinate more than the clothes: They are beautiful gargoyles, true freaks of fashion. We don’t get interviews with non-celeb shoppers of the reticent monied class, but designers Manolo Blahnik, Jason Wu, Patricia Field, and others each give their rendition of "What Bergdorf's Meant to Me." Vera Wang nails it: Being obsessive is a given; the key is how you fit into the market. A one-size-fits-all documentary format includes a mini-history; apparently the founders weren't just in it for the money. Edwin Goodman was a tailor who knew how to cut and cared about quality. Yet this macchiato with 24-karat gold flecks may not be to everyone’s taste. Spending $7,000 on shoes is shrugged off, since here success is affording Bergdorf Goodman's. Without the dueling-divas drama of The September Issue, or the shiny dynamism of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, this doc, title taken from a remark by a wealthy European shopper and immortalized in a New Yorker cartoon, is fun and frothy, a fan's mash note. « Less

2:10 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

9:50 PM