Black Orpheus, the most underrated Miyazaki film ever, and sisters – nefarious and otherwise
Wednesday
Black Orpheus (7:00p — Union South Marquee)
“Orpheus and Eurydice” gets a twentieth century treatment in Marcel Camus’s boss nova iteration set in Rio de Janeiro. As bonus trivia, it’s also one of Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler’s favorite films. (FREE admission.)
All freakin’ weekend
Our Little Sister (Sundance)
Wisconsin Film Festival attendees may remember 2014’s Hirokazu Koreeda feature for the heart-on-its-sleeve premise about two children switched at birth; Our Little Sister doesn’t tug at the heart strings as hard as Like Father, Like Son. After visiting the countryside one last time for their estranged father’s funeral, three sisters meet their much younger half-sibling for the first time. Suzu follows them home and well, not much else happens. Koreeda privileges feelings and relationship first and plot development second, adapting the serialized emotions of Umimachi Diary from a long-running manga into a far shorter but no less placid story arc. (Showtimes and admission vary.)
Friday
Sisters + Raising Cain (7:00p + 8:45p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
(FREE admission.)
Saturday
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (7:00p — 4070 Vilas Hall)
Last week’s hallucinatory start to the “Heroines of Anime” series set the Cinematheque-WUD Film collaboration with a bit of a misdirect. It doesn’t have the same scintillating reputation, but Hayao Miyazaki’s steam punk fiction has been no less essential to animation and film with its high-flying, no-shit-taking, eco-avenging princess set on preventing the wrath of giant, prehistoric insect monsters. From influencing Final Fantasy to essentially birthing Studio Ghibli thereafter, it’s astounding that Nausicaä is (somehow) still underrated. (FREE admission.)
Everybody Wants Some!! (11:00p — Union South Marquee)
Whatever Richard Linklater made after Boyhood was destined to sound underwhelming by comparison. After all, it didn’t take the director over a decade to follow around a group of college baseball players. Blake Jenner’s Jake is the new kid on the block, acclimating to collegiate life in 1980 with joints and records and sage wisdom on men’s cologne. Like the Before films, Dazed and Confused, and the aforementioned Boyhood, Everybody Wants Some!! is more about the sum of its smaller, mustachioed parts. Jake’s cat-and-mouse romance with Zoey Deutch’s Beverly, Foreigner, and freshmen pranks all add up to the bittersweet realization that life for these young (and occasionally juvenile) men has essentially peaked. (FREE admission.)
Sunday
Lonely Are the Brave (2:00p — Chazen Art Museum)
Kirk Douglas as a cowboy grappling with life in contemporary society sounds like a weighty metaphor on its own. Now consider that Lonely Are the Brave‘s screenwriter Dalton Trumbo spent time on the Hollywood blacklist, and the thought of Douglas (who turns 100 later this year) getting himself tossed in the clink on behalf of undocumented immigrants might as well be cinematic martyrdom. (FREE admission.)
Tuesday
The Age of Love (1:30p — Central Library, Rms 301 + 302)
(FREE admission.)