Whether or not we want to admit it, fall is releasing its slumber. The summer is nearing its end no matter how warm it may feel outside. Teachers have made their lesson plans. The children are in school; students are preparing the dorm rooms, and parents either are lamenting yet another absence of their young adult from the fold or are rejoicing over one more year of peace and tranquility. Whatever the emotion or event, before fall fully awakens and pokes winter in the eye, celebrate this annual change in seasons with a trip to The Ross to see Magic in the Moonlight directed by none other than Woody Allen. It’s a sweet heart of a film, sprinkled with the confection of fine acting by Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Marcia Gay Harden, and Simon McBurney.

Set in the gay 1920s, Firth plays Stanley Crawford, a very bah-humbug Englishman, who parlays a persona as a celebrated Chinese magician named Wei Ling Soo. His friend, Howard Burkan (played by the lovable Simon McBurney), invites him to the fabulous Côte d’Azur mansion owned by the Catledge family. His mission: to expose Sophie as a charlatan. Played by Emma Stone, Sophie is an American who claims to be clairvoyant and that she can have conversations with the deceased. Stanley jumps at the chance given that he has no tolerance for that sort of poppycock, and thus, has made a reputation of being the most famous debunker of spiritualists. Upon his arrival, we meet Aunt Vanessa, played by the beloved English actress Eileen Atkins of Upstairs, Downstairs fame, as well as members of the Catledge family. What follows is a series of provocative conversations and meditations on evidence and proof vs. feelings and intuition between Stanley and Sophie. There is an amusing séance whereby Grace Catledge (played by Jacki Weaver) finds out if her husband Henry answers from over yonder if he was faithful to her over the entire course of their marriage. Hamish Linklater is superb as Brice, Sophie’s ukulele playing star-struck fiancé. Brice is rich, but after he sings a few bars of a song, you realize that’s just about all there is to him.

Woody Allen’s signature pulses throughout as the writer-director features a thickset of conversations —an art that is practically going the way of texting and checking facebook posts while in the company of others. Cinematographer Darius Khondji, who photographed Michael Haneke’s Amour, fine tunes the story with fabulous tight spaces and the glorious wide-open outdoors of the Cote d’Azur seen from a 1925 Alfa Romeo driven by Stanley. The interiors are made scrumptious by set designer Jille Azis. Sonia Grande’s costume designs are ethereal with characters dressed up in flapper glory with linens, cottons, furs, sequined headbands, and gowns. These film elements cast their own spell, and seduce you into what feels like Sunday twilight in a hammock.

But there is no ‘poof’ in the magic, and Stanley’s and Sophie’s interactions come off as this old curmudgeon trying to catch a child in a lie. Allen, however, settles on the usual romantic comedy cliché, and this turn in the end really undermined the story.

Still, viewing Magic in the Moonlight is worth closing out and welcoming the inevitable: the change in seasons, the empty nest, back-to-school, the start/end of romance, the completion of a project; the end of one; happiness, joy, a new job …

Magic in the Moonlight plays through September 4 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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Michael Pitt commendably plays Dr. Ian Gray, a brooding molecular biologist who researches the eye; more specific the iris and its one-of-a-kind design. He is so mesmerized by the eye, that he photographs those of his family and random people on the street. Science proves that no two persons have the same eye until Karen (Brit Marling), his eager but introspective research assistant, arrives and when he meets and photographs the eyes of Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) his irritating and childlike new-age spiritual love interest.

Karen and Sofi are like a pair of eyes, each viewing life in different shades and tones. Sofi sees the world through her own take on spirituality; this view shakes up Ian’s world … almost causing an identity crisis. In New York, they are all over each other in the hustle and bustle of the city so much that they get carried away into the courthouse intent on marrying. But they have to wait 24 hours. At that time, Karen interrupts with a scientific discovery, and in the lab, Karen meets Sofi, and each woman rightly sizes the other up. The marriage between the spiritual (Sofi) and the scientific (Ian) does not happen as tragedy strikes Sofi. Karen and Ian or “science and science” marry and start a family. It is a well-delivered pairing, and one that provides the shift from romance to a relationship of scientific inquiry: what if another person has the same set of eyes someone where out there? Is it possible? Ian travels to New Delhi, India to uncover the truth. What he finds will warm your heart.

Cahill’s I, Origins is an interesting tale, but Astrid Berges-Frisbey’s appearance is like hearing nails on a chalkboard; it was nice when she was offscreen. Brit Marling’s performance is like a spa treatment on a balmy Saturday morning as she inhabits a character who is grounded in her own confidence. The feeling of the movie, itself? Well, think of pouring molasses over a biscuit as you sit in an outside café in the winter … yes! It’s that slow!

I, Origins plays through August 14 at The Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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Only Lovers Left Alive is Jim Jarmusch’s latest film endeavor, and it is like watching acute depression in motion; and it is very very slow … slow as molasses in winter. It is a melancholic wallow in angst on the one hand; and anxiety on the other; and there’s blood, too, and it is thick and rich! Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston play Adam and Eve, two somber vampires who are in the vein of a mysterious space that would cause Edgar Allan Poe to shiver. Adam is a reclusive rock musician holed up in a gothic-like mansion on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. That was his music you just heard. He is a pack-rat

enveloped in obsolete technology such as a tube television and an 8-track tape player; he collects vintage guitars, one is a Gretsch Chet Atkins, supplied to him by Ian (Anton Yelchin), an unsuspecting lad in the music business. Eve lives in Tangiers, Morocco where she gets her precious supply of blood from another comrade in the Vampire fold, Christopher Marlowe—yes the Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s nemesis (played by a wizened John Hurt). Jeffrey Wright plays Dr. Watson, from whom Adam buys a fresh supply of the deep red liquid jewel. Adam and Eve are reunited when Eve returns to the U.S. What unfolds thereafter is a set of the moody blues plucked from a piano in a smoky café packed back up the way, and the only entry to it is to amble down a one-lane hard-scrabble road!

The filmmaker could not have chosen a place more complementary to the style and mood of the film than the city of Detroit. The visual of the city is filmed in the twilight hours, and through that lens, Yorick Le Saux’s cinematography produces a city that languishes in its mistreatment but awaits as does the phoenix to rise from the ashes. On a drive in the wee hours of the morning, Adam asks Eve if she would like to see the Motown museum but cautions her that there is nothing left of it really. He then takes her to the once glorious movie theater developed on the site of Henry Ford’s first automobile workshop in 1925, and it is heartbreaking to see its French-renaissance style décor having faded away and being used for a parking lot. It is a hollow grave of memory! But Eve, in all of her vampire wisdom, looks into the future and declares, and I paraphrase: “While the south burns, Detroit will rise again!”

Only Lovers Left Alive is also a story swathed in old world romance. What Jarmusch manages to reveal through Adam and Eve, these vampires in love is a weariness over what humans have become. They’ve lived for centuries; they’ve seen it all but their knowledge of the world has left them fragile. They really are the only lovers left alive. Adam laments the present that, in spite of all of its advances in technology, has produced humans whom Adam calls the Zombies.

Jarmusch’s film is a stylistic visual pleasure that, ironically, will leave you craving for more as do Adam and Eve lust after pure uncontaminated blood.

Only Lovers Left Alive plays through June 19 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

Also playing through June 19 is Nymphomaniac Volumes 1 and 2 directed by Lars van Trier and starring Charlotte Gainsburg, Uma Thurman, and Christian Slater and Shia La Beouf.

It is a shot in the dark made in an ordinary night in an ordinary town and the bullet hit its target. Jim Mickle’s film Cold in July is an engaging mystery that lends itself to the film noir genre. It works as Mickle weaves an intricate tale of suspense around the ordinary life of a husband and father named Richard Dane who reluctantly releases the shot in the dark on an intruder in his house. It’s 1989 in suburbia of East Texas, inhabited by law-abiding citizens with steady jobs who mind their business and find community at the local diner, but that murder, though carried out in self-defense, will turn Richard’s life upside down. Why? The intruder’s father returns to ask some questions. The answers will surprise even him!

The jewel of Cold in July is the lighting, and Cinematographer Ryan Samul selects cold and warm prisms to convey pain, dispassion, and confusion; and desaturated colors to establish firmly the time period. The performances by well-seasoned actors are forceful. Sam Shephard playing Russell, evokes how deep a father’s angst falls even though the son is wanted by the police; Michael C. Hall who so easily plays Richard Dane, walks the line between the man who yearns for the return of everyday routine and a husband/ father who has to protect his family. You will appreciate Vinessa Shaw as Anne Dane as she drives her character through the burden that has been thrown on her shoulders. Oh, I have to mention the suave Don Johnson, who is Jim Bob. He makes a pair of cowboy boots speak a foreign language! Yes, he is that good!

Cold in July plays through June 5 at The Ross.

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We all have found ourselves in the most insufferable circumstances wherein we hope against all hope that the fates will take pity on us mere mortals and make the way for an escape. We also have been in situations where we were made to feel unwelcomed, and thus we develop a yearning to belong. British film director Amma Asante’s Belle is a film inspired by the 1779 oil portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray. The portrait hangs at the Earl of Manchester’s ancestral home, Scone Palace in Scotland. Assante imagines the process of escape and belonging or, specifically, the methods a family uses to include a relative in the household all the while restricted by the socio-cultural mores of the time—that time is when the Atlantic slave trade was in full force … in Britain … in the eighteenth century.

Dido, played with unsettling restraint by British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is a mulatto whose British father, Sir John Lindsay, (played by Matthew Goode) searches for then rescues her from the possibility of the auction block when Belle’s mother, Maria Belle, an enslaved woman from a plantation in the West Indies, dies.

Sir John sends Belle to live with her great Uncle, William Murray, The Earl of Manchester (played by Tom Wilkinson) and her great Aunt, Lady Murray played by Emily Watson. Dido grows up with her sister/cousin Lady Elizabeth (played by Sarah Gordon), and is indulged with almost every privilege accorded a young woman of English aristocracy. What follows are the usual performances of the strictest notions of gentility and social manners that govern the behavior of the British aristocracy—all elements of a Jane Austen novel; but when race is added to that setting of opulence and grandeur at Kenwood House in Hampstead, London, you can cut the tension with a knife!

What is lovely about Amma Asante’s characterization of Dido, is not only the young woman’s confidence; also, Asante’s Belle showcases the Belle’s indirect association with Mabel, an African female domestic servant (played by Beth-Ann Mary James), who waits on her when she travels with the family away from Kenwood. These silent interactions via eye contact and smiles suggest Dido Belle never forgets her own heritage even as she swims in the pleasure of affluence.

Belle is a gracious movie and 18th century England is well-attended by its costumes and landscapes. Yet, Amma Asante’s film refrains from an emotional depth; Dido does not ache for her mother, for example. Instead, Asante focuses on the strong cross-currents of change about to occur in England, the country that abolished slavery in 1807.

Belle plays through June 5 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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Harlem Renaissance Poet Langston Hughes asks in his poem of the same name, what happens to a dream deferred? Film Director Frank Pavich offers one answer in his documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune.

In his film, Pavich uncovers the sheer pleasure and excitement in going for our dreams. His interview with cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky who made films such as El Topo in 1970 followed by his irreverent film The Holy Mountain in 1973, brings to relief what we will do to stretch our artistic muscle not for glory nor capital gain but for the sheer wonder in where our imaginations can take us.

Without cinematic restraint Pavich curries patience in his exploration of Jodorowsky’s dream to bring to the big screen Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune in the turbulent times of the 1970s. Oh, it was a grand endeavor! The cast and technicians and illustrators made up a magnificent roster of talent Jodorowsky named “spiritual warriors”: We know them all: David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dali; screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, sci-fi paperback artist Chris Foss, and the artist genius of the late H.R. Giger of Alien fame. Brontis, Jodorowsky’s son, trained for two years in martial arts to prepare for his role.

Jodorowsky assembled all of his storyboard illustrations and bound them into what became a collossal book of source material! In the film Pavich animates those images to give audiences a glimpse of what could have been. Jodorowsky left no stone unturned to realize his dream.

Jodorowsky, of course is the star of the show, and at 84 years old, he still conveys his intense passion for Dune via a most engaging and entertaining personality. “I wanted to make the most important picture in the history of humanity […] one that would connect to God!” Jodorowsky proclaims! His fervor, even today, still hovers over this most ambitious venture, and he is not alone! Pavich’s interviews with Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky’s director and producer tapped for Dune; H.R. Giger; Diane, Dan O’Bannon’s widow, among others, all coalesce to reflect on a project that attracted the best talents in Hollywood! Yes, it was a grand endeavor!

… and Hollywood looked at all that he had created and said it was not good. So what happened to the dream deferred? Hmmmm …

Jodorowsky’s Dune plays through May 22 at the Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.

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What’s in your attic? What’s in your basement? Things you no longer care about? Or things you don’t want people to see? Well, let me ask you this: what would you do with those intimate artifacts? Chicago historian and photographer John Maloof explores the world of American street photographer and Nanny Vivian Maier in his documentary Finding Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier was born in 1926 in New York city and died in a nursing home in Chicago in 2009 at the age of 83 after a slip and fall on the ice. She hid things in her bathroom—a space she turned into a dark room wherein she developed many of her photographs; she dared any of her charges or employers to step foot therein. In another home, she told her employers “I come with my life, and my life is in boxes,” and those boxes filled up their garage. Those are the boxes Maloof bought for $400.00 at an auction in 2007, and what he found were 30,000 negatives he began to scan onto his computer. During this process, Maloof realizes that he has come across pictures of artistic value that document street life from the 1950s-1970s. He went back bought the remaining boxes, which totaled some 100,000 negatives.

For all of the sensationalism about the new discovery of a natural talent, the exhibitions in London, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Maier’s spectacular photographs she took with her Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera—Maloof has that too—or opinions that she was eccentric, Finding Vivian Maier is a story about privacy and the extreme lengths a woman will go to keep it.

Maier photographed the world around her, but declined to let anyone see the product from her efforts, except for one family with whom she was employed. She refused to satisfy the curiosity of her employers by declining to answer any questions about her life nor did she offer any information about same. Those interviewed, then, could only offer to the public their observations of her.

The documentary, however, goes a step further. What seeps out is a tale about a woman who felt her business—her life–belonged only to her, and she kept that business in boxes and boxes of things in the attic or in the basement. Perhaps, in such a rapidly changing world, the rolls of film and negatives in her boxes let her know she existed, and she did not seek the world out to affirm that for her.

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