Films

A spicy comedy with Scarlett Johannsson and Rebecca Hall playing Vicky and Cristina, two young American women who've installed themselves for a European summer in a lush Barcelona home where they meet Javier Bardem, a lothario who invites the pair to share his private plane and bed on a weekend trip to Oviedo. Cristina ends up living with Juan with both of them enjoying a loving Bohemian life, until his tempestuous ex-wife Maria Elena, played with an amusing mania by Penelope Cruz, comes back on the scene and ends up shacking up with the pair of them and initiating a welcome screwball flavour to the proceedings. These lightly melodramatic sexual shenanigans are played for laughs, and Barcelona's ochre beauty is on full display. "Vicky Cristina Barcelona has a natural, flowing vitality to it, a sun-drenched splendor that never falters" (David Denby, The New Yorker).

Nearly thirty years after the premiere of the acclaimed BBC mini-series adaptation, Evelyn Waugh's portrait of the British aristocracy is resurrected in this handsomely mounted adaptation. Charles Ryder, an unworldly aspiring artist, becomes entranced with the mystique of the aristocratic Marchmain family when he visits their misfit son Sebastian at the luxurious estate, Brideshead. His remove dissolves as he falls into painfully protracted affairs with the dandyish Sebastian and obedient daughter Julia, finding himself in the thick of the family's desperate decadence. Co-starring Emma Thompson as the cold Lady Marchmain. "It's a great piece of work that deserves to be seen even if you swear undying allegiance to the mini-series" (Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor).

In American Teen, Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) follows four John Hughes archetypes — the beauty queen, the band nerd, the popular jock, and the lovable basket case — through a senior year at a Midwestern high school. Over the course of nine months, the young adults cope with standard high school drama — depressing break-ups, broken alliances, private-turned-public pin-ups — and reveal their inner troubles. Though each character belongs to a completely different caste, under Burstein's honest lens, all of them display an understandable angst — their futures are terrifyingly unwritten. American Teen's glossy visual style has drawn comparisons to MTV reality shows, but but beneath the surface seethes the complicated culture of contemporary youth. "Never has a film captured the spirit of being a teenager better" (Zack Haddad, Film Threat).

The return of the True/False Film Fest's stunning closer, and the hands-on favorite for best doc of 2008, Man on Wire is a gorgeous, innovative, nail-biting and operatic celebration of free spirits. The French acrobat Philippe Petit thrilled the world in 1974 when, after months of spying and planning, he snuck to the top of the World Trade Center, strung a high wire from the corner of one of the Twin Towers to the other, and performed the world's greatest high wire walk. For the serious-minded, acrobatics might seem a frivolous pursuit. But raise the stakes to 1,300 feet above New York City's cold, hard pavement, and circus stunts become a matter of life — as in the kind that's lived to its fullest — and death. "This documentary raises the bar for the genre to skyscraper height" (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal).

Ellis Library's Special Collections presents a new documentary from Iowa novelist/filmmaker Max Allan Collins, best known as the writer of the graphic novel Road to Perdition. It tells the story of Vincent T. Hamlin, the innovative cartoonist from Iowa who created the dinosaur-laden, long-running comic strip credited with inspiring everything from The Flintstones to Jurassic Park. In attendance will be producer Mark Lambert and Carole and Jack Bender, the current artists of Alley Oop, for the Q&A.

The Last Mistress pairs cinema's provocative director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl) with the fearless Asia Argento. A penniless rogue shocks 19th century France with his engagement to the virginal gem of the aristocracy, but lurid rumors brew of his ten- year affair with the carnal Vellini (Argento). "What's explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh" (Manohla Dargis, N.Y. Times).

Weimar. The word invokes a time barely in living memory. To some, Weimar is a place of smoky nightclubs and decadent cabarets, where anything can be had for the right price. To others, Weimar is a historical term, more properly described as the Weimar Republic, a time in German history starting in 1918 — at the end of WWI — and extending until 1933, when the Nazis came to power. But to film fans, the word "Weimar" represents a key era in film history. In the midst of high political drama and social unrest (after its bitter defeat in WWI), Germany produced some of the greatest movies ever, from the spectacular Fritz Lang epic Metropolis, to the "unchained camera" mastery of F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh. This fall The Ragtag is proud to bring you a "best of show" selection of Weimar films, with styles as diverse as the intense expressionism of the early '20s, to the end-of-decade documentary approach taken by filming events as they happened.

When a sinister hypnotist and his clairvoyant sleepwalker arrive in a small town in Germany, a series of murders shocks the community, and a young man must learn to secret behind these murders before his fiancé becomes the next victim. With its wild, exaggerated sets, and with a story coming from the darkest place of one's soul, this groundbreaking film immediately became the standard for what we think of today as expressionist filmmaking. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a seminal work — a major influence for both the development of the horror film and the psychological thriller, and also an inspiration to filmmakers such as David Lynch and Tim Burton. Tonight we are joined by Portland-based cellist/composer Gideon Freudmann who creates elaborate sound textures, haunting melodies and driving rhythms that incorporate classical, jazz, folk and world music elements, beautifully enchancing the power of Caligari.

Filmmaker John Jeffcoat's doc takes an unanticipated, endearing and eclectic look at all that is bingo — from Welfare recipients to drag queens and the Catholic Church — all at their gaudy, bawdy and grandly humorous best. The film reveals all that lies below the gloss of American kitsch: an unexpected subculture of eccentric and tightly knit people for whom hope truly springs eternal. This isn't your grandmother's bingo anymore; this film plays it hand like an anthem to hope, devotion and recently hip addiction. Ragtag holds a fundraiser with grandiose prizes.

A refreshing, charming look at Israeli society, following three unconnected female characters as their lives intersect against an urban landscape. Batya is conspicuously falling apart: Her boyfriend has moved out, her apartment is slowly filling with water, her socialite mom ignores her and she brings home a mute, spritelike little girl she sees walking out of the sea. Another is a newlywed with a broken ankle and a perennial spoiled-girl demeanor, who's had to give up her Caribbean honeymoon for one in a second-rate beach hotel. Joy is a homesick Filipina immigrant who speaks no Hebrew, taking care of a sourpuss old lady who speaks no English. "Yes, Jellyfish says, it's a wonderful life, in a surprising new and magical way all its own" (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times).

Ragtag 101 is a free class with a fun instructor (MU's Ramsay Bishop Wise or Nancy West), and you don't have to enroll. Just show up. Mostly we show a great film, usually on beautiful 16 mm film, and then we discuss. Tonight: Billy Wilder's The Apartment. Free.

Wet Hot American Summer is a delectable parody of Reagan era teen flicks, set on the last day of summer camp in 1981. It is crammed with priceless period detail and gleeful pop satire, taking in an entire culture through a lens made of cheese. Since its mostly misunderstood debut a few months before 9/11, it has achieved a growing cult, so much so that it was ready for its Missouri Theatre debut. At 9pm come for a costume contest with big prizes, and a solo set from Molly Trull, a singer-songwriter in the Jenny Lewis-Neko Case vein, who walked away with Hickman's Battle of the Bands crown last year.

Chicago-based film critic Ray Pride writes for the arts weekly Newcity, among other publications. He kicks off our series featuring visiting critics playing their favorite films with the work of French director Olivier Assayas on two successive nights. Irma Vep is a free-associative comedy on the politics of international low-budget filmmaking and a fascinating entry-point into the director's ongoing engagement with the clash between individuals and industry. Maggie Cheung stars as her Hong Kong starlet self, imported by an eccentric auteur (Jean-Pierre Leaud) to star in an updated remake of Louis Feuillade's 1916 serial Les Vampires. From the moment she squeezes into her latex costume, she must navigate through the on- and off-set madness. Moving from incisive parody, to cathartic dance, to full-blown abstraction, Irma Vep is thrillingly off-kilter.

Few other directors move the camera as confidently as Assayas; with Late August, Early September we're brought into the thick of his breathlessly mobile cinema. Herein Assayas follows a group of close friends — primarily a middle-aged novelist facing illness, an anxious writer-editor settling for a stable job (Mathieu Amalric), and their current and former girlfriends (including Virginie Ledoyen). What results is a tender portrait of personalities in flux, rendered with beautiful velocity.

In honor of this year's One Read selection, The Whistling Season, the Daniel Boone Regional Library presents this memorable doc about a one-room school in rural France, where the students are educated by one devoted teacher.

From the barren yet beautiful landscape of the Inner Mongolian steppes comes this unlikely, passionate love story. The film has a tragicomic circle that begins and ends with the same wedding scene, one whose bride, the lovely but tough-as-nails Mongolian herdswoman Tuya has fled in tears. In between those bookended scenes, we learn the complicated back story of Tuya's tears. "A compact near-masterpiece that combines a romantic comedy with a docudrama-style portrait of a remote, nomadic culture as it is gradually eroded by the tides of the 21st century" (Andrew O'Hehir, Salon).

Many people think that feature length animation started in 1937 with Walt Disney's Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs. But twelve years before, Lotte Reiniger used paper cutouts to produce Prince Achmed, a form of shadow puppet play, in which the figures move by stop action animation rather than by rods or strings. The plot is from One Thousand and One Nights: An evil magician kidnaps the Caliph's daughter, Dirazade, and throws her brother, Achmed, into a wasteland, where he meets Aladdin — together with the Witch of the Fire Mountain they join forces to fight the magician to rescue the princess. The magic of this film is in the beauty of the silhouettes and cut-outs, creating an "other-worldly" atmosphere that to our computer image, Pixar-fatigued eyes, still seems exotic and fresh. Tonight we are joined by the Seattle duo Miles and Karina (David Keenan and Nova Devonie) whose new score features viola, guitar, banjo, accordion, percussion, and glockenspiel.

Transsiberian combines a twist-filled story with a stark, beautiful backdrop, the famed railway which stretches from Beijing to Moscow. American couple Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer are getting on the train from Beijing, where they've just participated in a church-based humanitarian mission. He's gregarious and almost relentlessly upbeat, she's introverted and tough to read; when an attractive couple turn up as their new bunkmates, it drives a deeper wedge between them. Meanwhile, Russian narcotics detective Ben Kingsley is investigating a drug-related homicide, and he takes a keen interest in the foursome's activities. "Anderson and his very fine cast keep things chugging along at a breathless pace, complete with a midfilm reversal of fortune nearly as unexpected as Psycho's shower scene" (Scott Foundas, LA Weekly).

Outsourced is an oddity, an exceptionally likable romantic comedy made on a shoestring. Jeffcoat's sideways approach to a controversial social issue — the relocation of customer-service jobs to India — is fresh and never condescending. An American call-center manager is reassigned to a newly constructed building outside Mumbai, where he has to train his own replacement and ends up falling in love with an Indian woman and then the country itself. Jeffcoat's depiction of the call-center world is funny, fascinating and almost anthropological; he never preaches at you on the morality, or lack thereof, of this distinct late-capitalist phenomenon. Q&A with director John Jeffcoat at Sept. 28 showing.

In this French psychosexual thriller, a pediatrician gets knocked into a coma the night his wife was killed, apparently by the same goons. Eight years later, when the case is reopened, he receives a series of anonymous video e-mails indicating that his wife may still be alive. "Canet — channeling Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo — has fired off one terrific, twisty thriller. Hot-blooded, haunting and packed with the pleasures of the unexpected, Tell No One will pin you to your seat" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone).

Born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, director Fatih Akin brought an unusual cultural perspective to Head-On, about a marriage of convenience between a beautiful Turk and a suicidal German. In The Edge of Heaven, his first dramatic feature since then, the characters navigate the same cultural divide, but here Akin is more preoccupied with the sense of responsibility that links parents to their children (or vice versa). The narrative is defined by two scenes of caskets at the Istanbul airport: the first arrives carrying a middle-aged Turkish woman who became a prostitute to put her daughter through school; the second departs with the remains of a young German woman who unwisely followed the daughter — her lesbian lover — back to Turkey. "Akin's film is so full of life that it leaves you breathless" (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal).

Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's novel, Choke guides us through a world of kinked-out sex addicts, extortionist nuns and historic recreations of colonial America. The story centers around Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a scheming sex addict working as an actor in a theme park. As a means of supporting the financial burden of his mother's (Angelica Huston) care, Victor has taken on the peculiar habit of purposefully choking himself on his meal at restaurants and extracting cash payments. Laced with with Palahniuk's off-kilter sensibility, Choke is an antic and absurd ride.