Butler's Cinema Scene

Britt Marling (in blindfold) in “The East”

“THE EAST” My rating: B (Opens June 14 at the Tivoli)

116 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Perhaps Brit Marling is a visitor from another planet sent to Earth to remind us of just how much fun a smart movie can be.

So far this blond girl-next-door type has co-written and starred in “Another Earth” (a sci-fi relationship movie) and “The Sound of My Voice” (about a cult leader who claims to come from the future). She played Richard Gere’s daughter in the fine Wall Street meltdown drama “Arbitrage.”

Now Marling and her usual collaborator, director Zal Batmanglij, give us the topical thriller “The East.” As you’d expect from these two, it’s a very thoughtful but emotionally gripping yarn – this time about eco-terrorism.

Sarah (Marling) is a former FBI agent now in the employ of a huge security firm representing big-time corporate clients. Recently American mega-corporations have been under attack by a shadowy group of eco-warriors known as The East. Sarah’s boss (Patricia Clarkson) sends her undercover to locate and infiltrate the organization.

The assignment requires Sarah to do more than merely change her hair color and wardrobe and say farewell to her boyfriend (Jason Ritter), who thinks she has a job abroad. She has to put herself in the shoes of a disaffected and outraged tree hugger. And along the way she begins to experience the sense of persecution and futility of that mindset.

Eventually she does find herself admitted as a provisional member of The East. The group’s leader – to the extent that it has one – is Benji (“True Blood’s” Alexander Skarrsgard), a trust-fund kid using his fortune to wage a war on behalf of Mother Earth. Other members include the suspicious Izzy (Ellen Page), the scholarly Doc (Toby Kebbell), and the gender-bending Luca (Shiloh Fernandez).

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Macarena Garcia

“BLANCANIEVES” My rating: B (Opens May 31 at the Tivoli)

104 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Blancanieves” is Spanish for “Snow White.” And, yes, Spanish director Pablo Berger’s film is yet another telling of that classic tale from the Brothers Grimm.

But Berger has plenty of tricks up his sleeve. For one thing, he updates the story to Spain in the 1920s. For another, he shoots it in pristine black and white.

And most daringly, he makes it a silent movie. Even more silent than “The Artist,” for here there are no sound effects and not even a snippet of spoken dialogue.  Just music.

The Dwarfs

The results are frequently visually ravishing but, to my tastes, a bit undercooked dramatically. Unlike “The Artist,” “Blancanieves” doesn’t play with silent movie conventions. It embraces them totally and the results are sometimes less fun than, well, academic.

Poor little Carmen (played as a child by Sofia Oria) is the daughter of a famous matador crippled in the ring (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) and a mother who died during childbirth.

Her paralyzed father has married his nurse, Encarna (Maribel Verdu, the beautiful star of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and “Pan’s Labyrinth”), who treats him like dirt, has sado-masochistic sex with the chauffeur and gleefully revels in her newfound wealth.  As for little Carmen, she’s reduced to sleeping in a dank basement, slaving at household chores, and visiting her papa when the evil stepmother isn’t looking.

It’s during these father-daughter sessions that the former matador begins coaching his little girl in the art of bullfighting. It becomes their little secret.

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Ernst Umhauer and Fabrice Luchini

“IN THE HOUSE” My rating: B (Opening May 17 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s not a thriller, exactly, but the French release “In the House” has a way of toying with its audience that reminds of Hitchcock at his most perverse.

And when it’s all over you’re not exactly sure what you’ve seen. Which is exactly the point.

On the outside, anyway, the latest film from writer/director Francois Ozon (“Under the Sand,” “8 Women,” “Swimming Pool,” “Potiche”) doesn’t seem particularly threatening.

It begins in a French high school where middle-aged language arts teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) finds himself once again confronted by a crop of bonehead students who would rather doze than contemplate Flaubert.

Assigned to write essays on how they spent their weekend, the young dullards respond with four-sentence “compositions.” But there is one ray of hope in this dreary bunch, a young man named Claude (Ernst Umhauer) who turns in a provocative paper about going to the home of fellow student to tutor him in math.

On the surface, this seems  unremarkable and innocent.

Yet Germain senses something disturbing and compelling in Claude’s penetration of a pristine suburban home that he has often dreamed of entering.  Claude may be there for a legitimate reason — to tutor his mathematically-challenged classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) —  but he’s also an interloper, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who takes advantage of the situation to spy on the lives of his economic betters, to violate their privacy.

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Saskia Rosendahl, Kai Malina in “Lore”

“LORE”  My rating: B (Opening May 3 at the Tivoli )109 minutes | No MPAA rating

You’re born into a world of privilege and comfort. You grow up thinking you’re superior, that you’re entitled to all the good that comes your way.

And then it ends. Abruptly and forever.

That’s the situation facing five German children in “Lore,” Cate Shortland’s quietly devastating tale of siblings struggling to survive in the last days of World War II.

From the time of their births Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), Liesl (Nele Trebs), Gunther (Andre Frid) and Jurgen (Mika Seidel) have lived a blessed existence as the children of a high-ranking Nazi official. 

Now their father (Hans-Jochen Wagner) has returned to kiss them goodbye. The war is lost. The Americans, Russians and British are advancing and Papa’s work in the concentration camps makes him a marked man. (more…)

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