Hi, friends. Here's some movie stuff for you!

Opening today:

David Schmader loves Gomorrah:

The Cannes-dazzling Italian mob movie Gomorrah begins with a blank screen, upon which appear the film's credits, underscored by a piercing industrial hiss. Emanating from a film that identifies itself as a gritty mob movie, this violent, mysterious hiss fuels dreadful mental images: Is someone's face being removed with an electric sander? Is a corpse being fed into a shredder? As the hiss continued, I found myself taking a mental tour through every scene of crime-related cinematic sadism I'd ever witnessed, from the car-trunk stabbing of Good- Fellas' Billy Batts to the cramming of Steve Buscemi into Fargo's wood chipper. At last, the source of the hiss is revealed: the UV lamps of a tanning bed, beating down upon a male member of the Naples crime syndicate known as the Camorra, in a Neapolitan tanning salon that soon enough becomes a scene of carnage. It's a dazzling bait and switch and switch again, and one that perfectly encapsulates Gomorrah, a mafia movie in which every hint of glamour is killed.

I feel so-so about Two Lovers:

A broken engagement sends Leonard—the sad, spazzy, but inescapably likable heir to a Brighton Beach dry-cleaning business—on a few long walks off a few short piers, then to a mental hospital, then back to his parents' humble two-bedroom apartment where, round-shouldered, he shuffles around the neighborhood taking pictures of human-less storefronts. He strikes up a romance with sweet, reliable Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), while at the same time becoming obsessed with his flighty, manipulative neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow—are you interested in seeing one of her boobs? Because congrats...), the luminous life-ruiner described above.

Ballerina, says Jen Graves, tries to do too much and winds up saying very little:

In the overly broad documentary Ballerina are the beginnings of five or six separate great documentaries. For instance: a movie obsessively devoted to the legendarily expressive arms of Russian ballerinas. Just the arms. Or a movie that compares two great living primas, say, the lusty Diana Vishneva and the ethereal Uliana Lopatkina. Or an opinionated ranking of primas going back to the 19th century. Or a portrait of brand-new budding ballerinas—their little shirtless bodies (they wear only underwear) bent every which way by old men and women teachers—and the primas they idolize. Or a portrait in the middle: of the aspirers, the dancers on the verge.

And in Concessions, I had just a few more teeny tiny small thoughts about the Oscars:

The "Isn't It Kind of Rude to Repeatedly Bring Up That Time When Your Friend Had a Decades-Long Career-Ending Meltdown and Wound Up an Orange, Scarred Wreck Who Creeps Out Dogs, Women, Children, and Most Men?" Award

Goes to: everyone at that fucking thing. Seriously, every two seconds it was "Mickey Rourke's fucked-up face" this and "you look like a zombie potato in a wig" that. You guys. Maybe dude doesn't want to talk about it right now.

As always, all of our limited runs and movie times are searchable HERE.

Happy weekend!