The Messenger

Co-written by Oren Moverman and Alessandro Camon, THE MESSENGER is a powerful and tender story about a returned war hero making his first steps toward a normal life. In his first leading role, Ben Foster stars as Will Montgomery, a U.S. Army officer who has just returned home from a tour in Iraq and is assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service. Partnered with fellow officer Tony Stone (Harrelson) to bear the bad news to the loved ones of fallen soldiers, Will faces the challenge of completing his mission while seeking to find comfort and healing back on the home front. When he finds himself drawn to Olivia (Morton), to whom he has just delivered the news of her husband's death, Will’s emotional detachment begins to dissolve and the film reveals itself as a surprising, humorous, moving and very human portrait of grief, friendship and survival. Featuring tour-de-force performances from Foster, Harrelson and Morton, and a brilliant directorial debut by Moverman, THE MESSENGER brings us into the inner lives of these outwardly steely heroes to reveal their fragility with compassion and dignity.

Nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actor (Harrelson), and Best Original Screenplay. Also nominated for the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Woody Harrelson)!

At its center lie three accomplished performances, by Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton, that are not to be missed.  -- Rex Reed, New York Observer

This is a wholly different look at the fallout of the Iraq War and its effect on soldiers and civilians. It is also a gentle portrait of grief, friendship and solace. -- Claudia Puig, USA Today

Messengers with the worst possible message, they nonetheless manage to be human and alive .... In a film that itself bears sad tidings about the costs of war, that is an affirming, even an inspiring, gift. -- Bob Mondello, NPR

Official Site

North Face

A handful of men set aside their differences to conquer one of Europe's tallest mountains in this period drama inspired by a true story. In 1936, Nazi Germany is looking to shore up its reputation in the eyes of the world, and after a pair of German climbers died in an effort to climb the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, the state is looking to find another group who can succeed where the earlier team failed. Henry Arau (Ulrich Tukur), the publisher of one of Berlin's biggest newspapers, is a loyal son of the Third Reich, and when his editorial secretary, Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek), tells him she knows some climbers who would be willing to take on the Eiger, Tukur gives her a free hand to assemble a team and make this dream a reality. Close friends Toni Kurz (Benno Fuermann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) are serving in the German army when Fellner (who once dated Kurz) tries to persuade them to climb the Eiger; while Hinterstoisser is willing to take the risk in the name of patriotism, Kurz is cynical about the Third Reich and says he'll put his life on the line only for his own reasons and not to please Germany's leaders. Kurz and Hinterstoisser finally begin the climb in mid-summer, only to discover a pair of Austrians, Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz) and Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich), are now challenging them in a race to the top. NORTH FACE was an official selection at the 2009 Tacoma Film Festival!

In German, Italian and French with English subtitles.

Official Site 

The Last Station

Fact and fiction converge in this talent-driven drama based on Jay Parini's novel about Leo Tolstoy. THE LAST STATION focuses on the marriage between Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) and his wife Sofya (Helen Mirren) in its final years. James McAvoy stars as a young man who works for the couple, while Paul Giamatti plays an advisor to the writer who fights his wife over financial issues.

Nominated for two Academy Awards AND two Golden Globes: Best Actress (Helen Mirren) & Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Plummer)!

Every second Helen Mirren is on-screen in The Last Station is a study in peerless talent. -- Claudia Puig, USA Today

The arrival of a movie with as much intelligence and artistry as The Last Station should also be accompanied by the sound of trumpets. -- Rex Reed, New York Observer

Helen Mirren is a lusty, roaring wonder playing, of all things, the long-suffering wife of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer in peak form). -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Official Site

A Town Called Panic

Audience Award Winner at Fantastic Fest 2009 and the first stop-motion animated feature selected to Cannes, A Town Called Panic follows the wacky, hilarious and often surreal adventures of three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town which never fails to attract the weirdest events. Each speedy character is voiced—and animated—as if they are filled with laughing gas. With hysteria a permanent feature of life in this papier-mâché burg, will Horse and his equine paramour—flame-tressed music teacher Madame Longray (Jeanne Balibar)—ever find a quiet moment alone? A sort of Gallic Monty Python crossed with Art Clokey on acid, A Town Called Panic is zany, brainy and altogether insane-y!

Made with an anarchic, anything-goes spirit, this is truly a film, not to mention a town, where you never know what's going to happen next. -- Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times (Read the full review.)

A Town Called Panic is an adventure story as fast-paced and exciting as any currently in theaters. -- Mike Hale, New York Times

So this is what deadpan slapstick surrealist Belgian stop-motion animation looks like. I like it! -- Michael Philips, Chicago Tribune

Official Site

The White Ribbon

Controversy-courting director Michael Haneke (CACHé) earned the Palm d’Or at Cannes in 2009 for this arresting drama set just before World War I. In a small German village, a number of unexplained accidents beset the schoolchildren and their parents. Though they at first appear coincidental, it begins to seem that they are not, in fact, accidents at all.

Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film! Nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Foreign Film, and Best Cinematography!

In German, Polish, Italian and Latin with English Subtitles.

Immaculately crafted in beautiful black-and-white and entirely absorbing... -- Todd McCarthy, Variety

This is among the most luminous and painterly of black-and-white films, but what's portrayed will shock or numb you. -- TIME Magazine

Official Site

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

“First, I didn’t like their decision, unbelievable, wasn’t it? You know those clowns we got on there. I tell you, I hope I outlive the bastards.” – President Richard M. Nixon (in conversation with J. Edgar Hoover, on the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the ongoing publication of the Pentagon Papers, July 1, 1971) “I just say that we’ve got to keep our eye on the main ball. The main ball is Ellsberg. We’ve got to get this son-of-a-bitch.” – Nixon (in conversation with Attorney General John Mitchell, June 29, 1971) In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a high-level Pentagon official and Vietnam War strategist, concludes that the war is based on decades of lies and leaks 7,000 pages of top secret documents to The New York Times, making headlines around the world. A riveting story of how one man’s profound change of heart creates a landmark struggle involving America’s newspapers, its president and Supreme Court. A political thriller whose events lead directly to Watergate, Nixon’s resignation and the end of the Vietnam War.  

Don't miss your chance to engage in a discussion with the film's director, Rick Goldsmith at the Grand on Saturday, March 13th! More details to come.

So many people risked their livelihoods to put the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers out there -- although its most tangible result was the creation of Nixon’s plumbers unit. We have not celebrated Daniel Ellsberg enough. Let’s begin. -- David Edelstein, New York Magazine

The movie is an act of hero worship, but it inadvertently suggests that, without a necessary touch of grandiosity, Ellsberg might never have acted as bravely as he did. -- David Denby, New Yorker 

It's a professional job, standing above the crowd of politico documentaries that proliferate like kudzu over arthouse screens. -- Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

Official Site

A Prophet

At age 18, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is just beginning a six-year prison sentence in this drama from THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED director Jacques Audiard. Though he cannot read or write, Malik soon figures out the politics of the prison system, giving him a prime spot in the power struggle between two battling groups of prisoners. THE PROPHET reunites Audiard with two of his stars from THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, Niels Arestrup and Gilles Cohen, as well as that film’s director of photography, Stéphane Fontaine, and its composer, Alexandre Desplat.

Nominated for the Academy Award AND the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film!

In French, Arabic and Corsican with English subtitles.

Audiard's sensationally directed set pieces and the quietly compelling performance by Rahim hold interest throughout. -- Liam Lacey, Globe & Mail

Official Site

Sweetgrass

A paean to the Old West: SWEETGRASS captures modern cowboys’ overland journey, wrangling thousands of sheep, as they move across Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains, amid sweepingly dramatic vistas and endless skies. Ronnie Scheib in Variety describes the film as “a mad cross between Howard Hawks’s RED RIVER” and an anthropological account of vanishing nomadic traditions, with “a dash of Tex Avery’s DRAG-ALONG DROOPY.” Twenty-first century cowboys call their mothers on cell phones and complain about rainy weather, ornery sheep and exhausted horses. A strikingly beautiful film, SWEETGRASS is at once funny, awe-inspiring and endearing. At first the passive, fuzzy sheep seem utterly adorable; over time we come to understand the exasperated cowboy who screams profanities at this sea of stubborn, bleating beasts over which he struggles to reign.

The first essential movie of this young year. - Manohla Dargis, New York Times

The filmmakers' motivation couldn't be clearer: They needed to capture a way of life that may soon exist only on film and in memory. -- Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

Castaing-Taylor's lensing -- from sheep staring into a camera to panoramic views of the gorgeous landscape -- is pleasing to the eye. -- V.A. Musetto, New York Post

Official Site