- Batkid Begins
If a movie review falls in the online forest, does anyone hear it? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself about my piece on Batkid Begins, which we yanked from the print edition after learning that the movie would close on Thursday. Also this week, Ben Sachs considers the inefficacy of using celebrities to provide the voices of animated characters. Case in point: Minions, the latest in the Despicable Me series.
Check out the new issue for capsule reviews of: The Ardor, starring Gael Garcia Bernal as a mysterious stranger who comes to the aid of a farming family in the Amazonian rain forest; Fidelio: Alice’s Odyssey, about the sexual experiences of a female sailor; Five Day Lover, a 1961 comedy from Philippe de Broca (King of Hearts) starring Jean Seberg as a Paris housewife who has an affair with a bohemian layabout; Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellen as a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes; Tangerine, a tale of West Hollywood hookers on Christmas Eve, directed by Sean Baker (Starlet, Prince of Broadway); and Trainwreck, the latest from producer-director Judd Apatow, starring Amy Schumer.
Best bets for repertory: Bugs Bunny and Friends, a collection of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons featuring the wascally wabbit, Saturday morning at Music Box with free admission; Dudley Digges’s The Emperor Jones (1933), with Paul Robeson, Wednesday at University of Chicago Doc Films; Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything . . . (1989), midnight Friday and Saturday at Landmark’s Century Centre; Michael Powell’s Tales of Hoffman (1953), Sunday and Wednesday at Film Center; Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962), Saturday and Thursday at Film Center; and Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), screening outdoors with free admission on Wednesday at Northwestern University Norris Center.
Don’t miss these special events: Steve Polta presents his experimental Super-8 films on Sunday at Nightingale Cinema; short works by local filmmakers screen outdoors on Sunday at Revere Park, and Music Box presents vintage sex-ed films in The Wonderful World of Boning. Take that, Uncle Walt.
