We’ve got capsule reviews of: Youth, Paolo Sorrentino’s first feature since his Oscar-winning The Great Beauty; The Big Short, adapted from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the subprime mortgage meltdown; The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as the first man to undergo sex reassignment surgery; Don Verdean, a new comedy from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess; Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a documentary about the revered Colombian novelist; In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard’s whaling epic about the true story behind Moby-Dick; The Keeping Room, a drama about three southern women menaced by Union scouts in the last days of the confederacy; Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and David Thewlis; Paradise Is There, a “video memoir” by singer Natalie Merchant; Stinking Heaven, a black comedy set at a sober-living commune in Passaic, New Jersey; and Theeb, billed as the first “Bedouin western.”
Best bets for repertory: Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas (1954) and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), screening as part of Music Box’s annual holiday blowout; Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), Saturday and Tuesday at Gene Siskel Film Center, with a lecture by Fred Camper at the second screening; Busby Berkeley’s Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949), Wednesday at Northbrook Public Library; and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Saturday at the Vic as part of a special horror extravaganza.
