Movies: The New Yorker Openings Captain Phillips Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening Oct. 11. In wide release. A drama about the club at the center of the New York punk-rock scene of the seventies, starring Alan Rickman as Hilly Kristal, its founder. Directed by Randall Miller. In limited release. Escape from Tomorrow Reviewed below in Now Playing. Romeo and Juliet Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld play the star-crossed lovers in this adaptation of Shakespeare's play by the screenwriter Julian Fellowes and the director Carlo Carlei. Now Playing Boy Meets Girl The meteoric first film by the French director Leos Carax, from 1984, hurls Alex (Denis Lavant), an aspiring filmmaker Carax's own age, through a permanently nocturnal Parisian atmosphere of poetic coincidences and crazy risks, out of one desperately romantic relationship and into another. Living in a garret where he maps, on a wall, the urban sites of his initiation experiences, writing love letters on a typewriter and saving copies for his autobiography, shoplifting books and records and scuffling around pinball machines in downbeat cafés, Alex - on the eve of his departure for compulsory military service - crashes a party and meets a woman (Mireille Perrier) whose boyfriend has left her via intercom. Lucid, sardonic, cinemacentric asides (especially one set piece involving a movie technician from the silent-film era) adorn their all-night tangle of intimacy, which builds to a grungy, furiously self-deprecating Liebestod. Ecstatic cinema and ecstatic living join together in a pressurized promise of glory and misery, a flameout waiting to happen - and to be filmed. In French and English. - Richard Brody (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 9.) Don Jon Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote, directed, and starred in this satiric view of a self-confident Jersey stud who watches porn constantly and picks up any good-looking girl he can find at a local club. Gordon-Levitt gives Jon's life a ritualistic form, with repeated sequences - Jon at his computer porn station, at the club, at his church, at confession, at family dinners with his caricatured macho dad (Tony Danza) and hysterical mom (Glenne Headly) - which is easy to do when the material is as thin as it is here. The movie takes a roundhouse punch at male shallowness, but Jon, in and out of his clothes, is not an interesting enough man to be emblematic of anything. With Julianne Moore, as a super-sensitive older woman who tries to teach Jon the true facts of life. - David Denby (In wide release.) Enough Said The writer-director Nicole Holofcener has become a sharply perceptive chronicler of the sentimental side of upper-middle-class life. In her new comedy, set in Los Angeles, Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a divorced masseuse with an adored daughter who's about to go off to college, starts an affair with a divorced museum curator, Albert (James Gandolfini), who also has a daughter heading for school. The early stages of the affair between Eva and Albert, who are both around fifty, go well enough, but a small problem develops. Eva's new client, Marianne (Catherine Keener), is a flossy highbrow poet who, during and after massage sessions, endlessly bad-mouths her ex-husband's body and habits. By the time Eva realizes that Marianne is describing Albert, she's too embarrassed to say anything. For Louis-Dreyfus, Eva's tentativeness is something new; she's good at it, but she should stop chewing on her mouth after every line. Gandolfini, without bullying his way through scenes or hiding his need for love, makes Albert a proud man who knows that dignity is something you must hold on to if any relationship in life is going to work at all. - D.D. (Reviewed in our issue of 10/7/13.) Even without the knowledge that much of the director Randy Moore's eerie fantasy was filmed surreptitiously at Disney World and Disneyland, a viewer might shudder at the risqué leers with which Moore infuses this black-and-white, low-fi romp through a children's paradise. The vacation of a stereotypical white middle-class family (mother and father, boy and girl) takes a downturn: the father, Jim (Roy Abramsohn), loses his job during a cell-phone call, but keeps it to himself. The last grasp at happiness turns into a nightmare, prompted by a virus but manifested in Jim's hallucinations, which turn out to be erotic fantasies - centered, creepily, on a pair of teen-age French girls who drive him to ever wilder fits of frustrated desire. But the effects-heavy movie flies off into exotic yet inconsequential science-fiction visions; Moore's view of the macabre in the banal is a tepid successor to David Lynch's. Nonetheless, the filmmaker has a keen eye for the petty peculiarities and strange implications of a cheerfully disorienting order. - R.B. (In limited release.) Gravity Horror films are almost always propelled by fear of the unspeakable thing that's out there in the woods or on the other side of the wall. The ghost, the demon, the zombie, sooner or later, materializes. What if the ghost were just nothing? In Alfonso Cuarón's frightening and beautiful science-fiction thriller, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a nervous medical engineer who has never visited space before, gets cut loose after her space shuttle is destroyed by flying debris. She is adrift, tumbling over and over, and cast into the mother of all panics. A veteran astronaut, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), calms her down and tries to rescue her, and the two of them scramble for safety somewhere - anywhere. This adventure film presents an existential challenge: what makes life worth living when there is nothingness all around? Ed Harris provides the voice from Houston. Jonás Cuarón worked with his father on the script. Emmanuel Lubezki did the cinematography, aided by an army of tech guys who invented everything they needed to evoke the film's sense of reality and its commitment to physical magnificence. - D.D. (10/7/13) (In wide release.) I Used to Be Darker The director Matt Porterfield's new feature is a lyrical ballad that is intimate in scale but international in scope. Taryn (Deragh Campbell), a lissome young woman from Northern Ireland, pregnant and alone, flees a summer job on the Maryland shore for her aunt and uncle's Baltimore home, which she finds in turmoil. Kim (Kim Taylor), her mother's sister, a respected local singer-songwriter, is in the process of leaving her husband, Bill (Ned Oldham) - who has traded his musical dreams for a solid office job - and their daughter, Abby (Hannah Gross), is in crisis. Taryn's triangular drift among her relatives exerts just enough quiet pressure to blast open long-concealed fissures of family history, but Porterfield finds the melody in melodrama: with performances by Taylor and Oldham, a punk band, and a pianist, the movie is a virtual musical. The shimmery, luminous images create a kind of music, too; the glow of a swimming pool, the rustic warmth of a touch-football field, and a revelatory angle upward through a windshield suggest the deep and resonant continuities amid the chaos. - R.B. (IFC Center.) OF NOTE The Immigrant The ambient fury of the director James Gray's teeming historical drama is built into the very fabric of his tensely unbalanced wide-screen images. From the start, longing looks offscreen conjure the dark side of the American paradigm: Ewa (Marion Cotillard), a Polish immigrant, arrives at Ellis Island in 1921 with her sister (Angela Sarafyan), who is quarantined with tuberculosis and threatened with deportation. A mysterious benefactor takes Ewa in hand: Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who claims to be an aid worker and turns out to be a sex-show impresario and a pimp. Unable to escape his clutches, she turns to his cousin, Emil (Jeremy Renner), a small-time magician whose intentions are pure. Gray (who co-wrote the script with the late Ric Menello) unfolds an intricate, involuted panorama of the degradation and corruption of the Lower East Side's roiling tenements. Cotillard's tightly controlled performance and Phoenix's explosive one lend the period décor a flayed immediacy. With a high-tension stillness of psychic violence bursting into bloodshed, the director breaks through naturalism to find the living nightmares underneath national and urban mythologies. - R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 9.) Prisoners Like "Mystic River" and "Zodiac," this sombrely impressive thriller digs into the dark cellars of American paranoia and aggression. Two friendly couples, one African-American (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and one white (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello), are celebrating Thanksgiving when their two young daughters leave the house to play and immediately vanish. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the ace of the local police force, arrests a feebleminded, seemingly hapless young man (Paul Dano) as a suspect, but one of the fathers, Keller Dover (Jackman), insists that the detective isn't doing enough, and he rampages through town. Here, Jackman, with a hunter-trapper Vandyke, is a frightening actor. For once, he has something genuine to sink his claws into - the narrow, ignorant righteousness of American macho at its most extreme. The violence isn't fun; it's actually horrifying. Written by an American, Aaron Guzikowski, and directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve, who never loosen their grip throughout the complicated plot. The great Roger Deakins did the eloquently bleak cinematography. - D.D. (9/23/13) (In wide release.) Redemption This canny, wildly audacious short film by the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes extends the radical reflections on personal and political memory from his feature "Tabu." Its four sections link diverse archival footage to four monologues of intimate recollections - in Portuguese, Italian, French, and German. The Portuguese episode, centered on the independence of Mozambique and a return to the mainland, segues into revolution - the hanging of Mussolini. The Italian monologue joins a man's musings on boyhood political resistance with a lachrymose tale of first love with the daughter of Fascists; the speaker's speculation about whether she voted for him gives a hint of Gomes's daring twist. A French man recites a letter to his daughter lamenting his absence during her childhood as he laments his place in the polls, and - in the longest and most striking scene - a German woman recalls her wedding and her youthful dreams of freedom, which are paired with an intricate yet turbulent montage showing the square pleasures of socialist paradise, humble domestic routines, and ecstatic scientific imagery, and set to music by Wagner. The hidden side of history has rarely been brought to life onscreen with such coruscating wit. - R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 11.) Rush Until recently, Formula One racing drew scant attention from filmmakers, not least because of its fitful popularity in America. Interest was re-sparked in 2010 by an excellent documentary on the Brazilian ace Ayrton Senna, and now Ron Howard has directed a movie about the rivalry between James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) for the World Championship of 1976. The screenplay, by Peter Morgan, ramps up the contrast between the two men - the tight-nerved, almost puritan Austrian versus the bacchanalian Brit - to the verge of parody, and to a point where we all but forget the existence of other competitors. The result is a certain stiffness in the dramatic conceit; Howard tries to stoke things by having his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, shoot each race not as a procession, as it often seems on TV, but as a deafening trip, spitting with fiery details. If you don't already know the story of that season, lucky you; even now, it exerts a ridiculous thrill. With Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, as the heroes" worried wives. - Anthony Lane (9/30/13) (In wide release.) Sandra The vast yet stifling, luxurious yet menacing confines of a rural Italian villa are the stagelike setting for this frenzied family drama by Luchino Visconti, from 1965. The story involves a newlywed couple - Sandra (Claudia Cardinale), a smoldering young heiress, and her bluff American husband, Andrew (Michael Craig) - who met and married in Geneva. Visconti films their nuptial trip by sports car, from Switzerland to her estate in Volterra, with the kinetic thrill of a chase; but what Sandra is fleeing, it turns out, is the past - into which, nonetheless, she leaps again, with a tragic obsession. The couple had been working on an investigation of Auschwitz, where Sandra's father, a Jewish scientist, was killed; a ceremony in his memory is the proximate cause of her return home. There's also the matter of her brother, Gianni (Jean Sorel), a lacerating playboy with literary ambitions, whose novel is a tale of brother-sister incest. With its hard edges and dark shadows, crashing zooms and feline rages, Visconti's tale is, in effect, a work of Gothic modernism, in which history replaces mythology and madness evokes the blocked-out light of therapy. In Italian. - R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; Oct. 11.) A Song Is Born This is the director Howard Hawks's 1948 remake of his own 1941 comedy, "Ball of Fire," about a professor who leaves the mansion where he and his colleagues have been holed up for years and, in search of the vernacular, meets and falls for a showgirl. Hawks didn't just replace Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo and swap black-and-white for Technicolor. Crucially, he changed the central metaphor, from the writing of an encyclopedia to the recording of a set of records of musical history; this allowed him to trade the original's excess verbiage for lively performance numbers by Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and a host of other jazz stars. It also gave rise to the greatest comic set piece of Hawks's career, a sixteen-minute poker-faced musical romp through cultural politics, starting with Brahms's Clarinet Quintet, moving to a ribald anthropological sendup - a "Polynesian love chant" in which Professor Frisbee (Kaye) dances with his old-maid benefactor in "the native position" - and ending with boogie-woogie. Though the plot can't do much for an encore, Hawks at least rushes through the duller parts with a mandarin indifference. - R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image; Oct. 13.) Wadjda This is not just the first feature by Haifaa Al Mansour but the first feature to be directed by a woman from Saudi Arabia. That is quite a burden, and yet by some miracle the movie bears it with lightness and grace. Waad Mohammed plays the girl of the title, aged ten or eleven, who lives in Riyadh with her mother (Reem Abdullah) and father (Sultan Al Assaf), although he is seldom at home, and we realize, as the mother's anxiety deepens, that he is seeking a second wife. Their daughter, perhaps in response to this tension, seeks what freedom she can; time and again, she bumps against its limits, whether at school, under the scalding gaze of the principal (Ahd), or on the streets, where her hopes of buying and riding a bicycle, through a world of men, seem forlorn. There is no burst of fury in the film, and the moments of rebellion are subtle and few, yet our sense of society as a cage - or as a never-ending school, where grown women are ruled and restricted like children - is unstinting. Without the heroine's cheer and charm, it might have proved too much to endure. In Arabic. - A.L. (In limited release.) Also Playing Baggage Claim: In wide release. Let the Fire Burn: Film Forum. A Touch of Sin: In limited release. Revivals and Festivals Titles in bold are reviewed. Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave., at 2nd St. (212-505-5181) - Special events. Oct. 14 at 7:30: "Celebrating 25 Years in the Second Avenue Courthouse Building!," featuring film clips and archival footage. • Oct. 15 at 7: "Flaherty NYC," including "What Farocki Taught" (1997, Jill Godmilow). BAM Cinématek 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn (718-636-4100) - The films of John Cassavetes. Oct. 9 at 6:45 and 9:30: "Love Streams" (1984). • Special screenings. Oct. 11-17 (call for showtimes): "Trouble Every Day" (2001, Claire Denis). Film Forum W. Houston St. west of Sixth Ave. (212-727-8110) - The films of Jacques Demy. All films are in French. Oct. 9 at 1:30, 3:20, 5:10, and 9:20 and Oct. 12 at 5:20: "Une Chambre en Ville" (1982). • Oct. 9 at 7: "Jacquot de Nantes" (1990, Agnès Varda). • Oct. 10 at 1, 2:50, 4:40, 8:20, and 10:10: "Bay of Angels" (1963). • Oct. 11 at 1:20, 3:20, 5:20, and 9:30 and Oct. 12 at 1:20, 3:20, 7:20, and 9:20: "Model Shop" (1969). Film Society of Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - New York Film Festival: Main Slate. Oct. 9 at noon: "The Immigrant." • Oct. 9 and Oct. 13 at 3: "Bastards" (2013, Claire Denis). • Oct. 9 at 6: "Abuse of Weakness" (2013, Catherine Breillat). • Oct. 10 at 6 and Oct. 12 at 3: "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013, Jim Jarmusch). • Oct. 11 and Oct. 13 at 8:30: "Blue Is the Warmest Color" (2013, Abdellatif Kechiche). • Oct. 12 at noon: "Nebraska" (2013, Alexander Payne). • The films of Jean-Luc Godard. Oct. 9 at 6 and Oct. 12 at 12:30: "Hail Mary" (1985). • Oct. 9 at 9: "Alphaville" (1965). • Oct. 11 at 6 and Oct. 12 at 3:30: "For Ever Mozart" (1996). • Oct. 14 at 1 and Oct. 15 at 5: "Every Man for Himself" (1980). • Oct. 14 at 6: Short video and digital works, including "Liberté et Patrie" (2002). • Oct. 15 at 1 and 9: "First Name: Carmen" (1983) and "Armide" (1987). • Oct. 15 at 3:20 and Oct. 16 at 4:30: "In Praise of Love" (2001). • Revivals. Oct. 9 at 6: "Boy Meets Girl." • Oct. 11 at 6: "Sandra." • Short films. Oct. 10 at 9: Program 3, including "The Man Who Came Out Only at Night" (2013, Michael Almereyda) and "Aujourd'hui" (2013, Nicolas Saada). • Oct. 11 at 8: Program 4, including "Redemption," "The King's Body" (2013, João Pedro Rodrigues), and "Prologue to the Great Desaparecido" (2013, Lav Diaz). French Institute Alliance Française 55 E. 59th St. (212-355-6160) - The films of Sandrine Bonnaire. Oct. 15 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "La Cérémonie" (1995, Claude Chabrol). Museum of Modern Art Roy and Niuta Titus Theatres, 11 W. 53rd St. (212-708-9480) - "Dante Ferretti: Designing for the Big Screen." Oct. 9 at 7 and Oct. 11 at 4:30: "Arabian Nights" (1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini). • Oct. 10 at 7: "Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom" (1975, Pasolini). • Oct. 12 at 2: "Kundun" (1997, Martin Scorsese). • "To Save and Project." Oct. 10 at 7: "Stark Love" (1927, Karl Brown; silent). • Oct. 11 at 4:15: "I Am Suzanne!" (1933, Rowland V. Lee). • Oct. 11 at 7: "Smile" (1975, Michael Ritchie), introduced by Bruce Dern. • Oct. 12 at 1:30 and Oct. 14 at 4: "Nightmare Alley" (1947, Edmund Goulding). • Oct. 12 at 6:30 and Oct. 15 at 4:30: "Goha" (1958, Jacques Baratier). The Oct. 12 screening will be introduced by the director's daughter, the cinematographer Diane Baratier. • Oct. 15-20 (call for showtimes): "Eight Deadly Shots" (1972, Mikko Niskanen; in Finnish). Museum of the Moving Image 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - The films of Howard Hawks. Oct. 11 at 7: "Red River" (1948). • Oct. 12 at 2: "Ball of Fire" (1941). • Oct. 12 at 4:30: "Sergeant York" (1941). • Oct. 13 at 2: "His Girl Friday" (1940). • Oct. 13 at 4:30: "A Song Is Born."