On today’s slate: Italian movies In Marin, plus new releases featuring June Squibb, Emma Thompson and a controversial true-crime series.
The Italian Film Festival of Marin County launches its 48th-anniversary edition Saturday. Six films screen over six weeks in Angelico Concert Hall on the Dominican University of California campus in San Rafael, at 4:30 and 7 p.m. Organizers promise high-quality films from Italy and an authentic Italian atmosphere; the Sept. 27 opening film is “A World Apart,” a dramedy by Riccardo Milani about a teacher who has relocated from Rome to a tranquil village who takes race-against-time action to keep his tiny school from closing. On Oct. 4 it’s “High Stakes,” a comedy set in a hospital ward. “My Killer Buddy” follows on Oct. 11; “When Mom Is Away With the In-Laws” screens Oct. 18; “There’s Still Tomorrow” screens Oct. 25 and “Truffles” on Nov. 1 completes the lineup. The festival is the creation of Marin-based Italian culture advocate, teacher and cinephile Lido Cantarutti. Tickets are $26 at cityboxoffice.com or (415) 392-4400 or at the door. Visit italianfilm.com for more information.
“Eleanor the Great,” Scarlett Johansson’s uneven but enjoyable directorial debut, is a seriocomedy about loss, loneliness and a riveting, unjustifiable deception. The formidable June Squibb plays sharp-tongued nonagenarian Eleanor Morgenstein, who relocates from Florida to New York to live with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) and grandson (Will Price) after the devastating loss of her best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar). Something stirs in Eleanor when she inadvertently walks in on a support group for Holocaust survivors. Asked to share her experiences, Eleanor spellbinds the others with a tale of escaping from the Nazis. The problem is that Eleanor is presenting Bessie’s story as her own, and there are consequences from the terribly wrong act of appropriation. College student Nina (Erin Kellyman), believing Eleanor to be a Poland-born survivor of wartime terror, profiles her for a journalism project. The two women, one old, one young, become friends. Nina’s newscaster father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), too, decides to share Eleanor with the world. “Eleanor the Great” screenwriter Tory Kamen’s promising premise is compromised by plot contrivances and implausibly behaving characters, and Johansson’s efforts to blend lighter comedy with darker material involving the Holocaust and grief fall short. To Johansson’s credit, though, the movie contains impressive emotional complexity. An actor herself, she draws a memorable lead performance from Squibb, whose needy Eleanor is entertaining and embraceable. “Eleanor the Great” opens Friday at Bay Area theaters. Rated PG-13.
Two truths stand out about “Dead of Winter,” director Brian Kirk’s snowy thriller: Emma Thompson can probably do anything, and it’s the writing that matters. In a Coen-esque northern Minnesota where local color means red blood on white snow, Thompson’s character, a grieving fisherwoman named Barb, gets lost while looking for a plot-pivotal lake. At a nearby cabin, she sees, through a boarded-up window, a bound and gagged young woman named Leah (Laurel Marsden). Leah’s abductors—a sinister bearded man (Marc Menchaca) and his even scarier wife (Judy Greer)—have horrifying plans for their captive. The screenplay by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb shifts into serious thriller gear as Barb, combining keen strategizing and survival skills, braves murderous adversaries and dastardly weather to save Leah. Kirk (“21 Bridges”) keeps the suspense steady and substantial. Thompson is entertaining and believable as a rugged, resourceful American action hero with a midwestern quality; you half-expect her to say “you betcha.” However, the unoriginal, implausible and full-of-holes story does not satisfy through 98 minutes. Greer’s character, a one-dimensional psycho, gets tiresome quickly. Flashbacks designed to give Barb a romantic backstory offer less than a single closeup of Thompson’s face. “Dead of Winter” opens Friday at Bay Area theaters. Not rated.
Two decades ago, Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” program lured alleged child sex offenders to a film set where, captured by hidden cameras, they were interviewed and arrested, their lives ruined. The series ran from November 2004 to December 2007, ending after one of its targets killed himself. In his new documentary “Predators,” filmmaker David Osit examines the program’s popularity and influence and ethical questions surrounding it. The film features footage from the show and conversations with perpetrators; law-enforcement figures; adult actors who posed as minors online; and the program’s host, Chris Hansen. Osit also examines his own feelings about the program and looks at copycat versions of it. The result is a thought-provoking and fittingly disturbing film that examines the public’s obsession with heinous behavior and addresses how projects like “To Catch a Predator” feed on a thirst for retaliation and punishment. While acknowledging that child abuse is reprehensible, Osit observes how the program entrapped and dehumanized its subjects. “When you show these men as human beings, the show kind of breaks down,” one interviewee says. “Predators” opens Friday at Bay Area theaters. Q&As with David Osit are at 2:45 p.m. Sept. 27 at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission in San Francisco and 7 p.m. Sept. 27 the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.
A 25th-anniversary screening of “Artists in Exile: A Story of Dance in San Francisco”—Austin Forbord and Shelley Trott’s documentary covering more than 40 years of dancemaking in the Bay Area—is at 1:15 p.m. Saturday at the Roxie in San Francisco. A short conversation with dance artists Joanna Haigood of Zaccho Dance Theatre and Dazaun Solyen will follow the screening. Proceeds benefit the Roxie and Counterpulse.
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