Grrl Haus Cinema, the great Cambridge-founded collective dedicated to work by women, trans, nonbinary and genderqueer filmmakers, returns to The Brattle Theatre on Thursday with perhaps its most inventive showcase yet. In “Experimental Echoes,” the curators at Grrl Haus have compiled a two-part program exploring the intersection of film and music. In the first portion, Maine electroacoustic composer Annie Dodson takes the stage and performs live scores for a pair of silent experimental films by Hogan Seidel and Malic Amalya. The program continues with nine additional shorts that draw power from music, dance and rhythmic editing. No art form exists in a vacuum, as these films and performances ably demonstrate.
Few directors in the history of cinema have had a hot streak as intense as the first phase of Jean-Luc Godard’s career: In the years between 1960 and 1967, Godard released a staggering 15 feature films that, collectively, altered the course of the form. While the films Godard made during this stretch remain revered and beloved, the sheer volume of this body of work means some are bound to be overlooked. Released less than a year after Godard’s incendiary debut “Breathless” and less than a year before his masterpiece “Vivre Sa Vie,” “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961), which screens at The Brattle in a new 4K restoration Friday through Monday, was largely dismissed at the time as a trifling effort – which is a shame, because it’s one of the director’s most infectiously joyous films. If nothing else, it is notable as the film that introduced the world to Godard’s most famous muse, the great Anna Karina, who radiates charisma from her very first frames. The plot is pure sex farce as Karina’s Angela, desperate for a baby, must choose between her schlubby boyfriend (Jean-Claude Brialy) and his loutish buddy (Jean-Paul Belmondo). But Godard, naturally, uses the form to stretch the very limits of narrative film, dropping Michel Legrand’s score on and off of the soundtrack at random and having his actors break the fourth wall and perform little skits. The film is a candy-colored delight, and while it is perhaps not as revolutionary as some of Godard’s other films, few are nearly as fun.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and while the holiday is for many a time of celebration, the Harvard Film Archive understands motherhood can be messy and complicated. To that end, the HFA presents a weekendlong Mother’s Day Mini-Marathon, collecting more than half a dozen films that present a warts-and-all look at some of cinema’s most memorable matriarchs. Films on display range from the classic Hollywood melodrama of “Mildred Pierce” (1945, screening Saturday), in which Joan Crawford plays a divorced working mother driven to wits’ end by a cruel world and an ungrateful daughter, to the new-wave essay of “News From Home” (1976, screening Sunday), in which filmmaker Chantal Akerman recites actual letters from her own mother over footage of vintage Manhattan. In between are works from masters ranging from John Cassavetes (“A Woman Under the Influence,” 1974) and Martin Scorsese (“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” 1974) to Pedro Almodóvar (“All About My Mother,” 1999) and Bong Joon Ho (“Mother,” 2009). By the end of the weekend you’ll either want to call your own mother or give her some much-needed space.
The Brattle’s series in tribute to the late Val Kilmer continues, including two of the actor’s most idiosyncratic films. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2005), which plays Tuesday, is best remembered as a comeback vehicle for Robert Downey Jr., here playing a small-time crook who stumbles first into an audition to play a detective in a movie and then into an actual murder mystery, as well as for the great action screenwriter Shane Black. But Kilmer is just as good as Downey’s straight man – so to speak – a hard-boiled yet flamboyantly gay L.A. private eye. “Kiss” is, objectively, a much better film than “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996), which screens Thursday, but the latter might just be my favorite of Kilmer’s career. The troubled production history of that film is the stuff of Hollywood legend – maverick director Richard Stanley was fired halfway through and replaced by John Frankenheimer, and neither could begin to control star Marlon Brando – but it’s such a bizarre, perverse spectacle that it’s difficult to look away. In the middle of it all is Kilmer in a wonderfully breezy, don’t-give-a-fuck performance for the ages as the good doctor’s assistant, riffing on lines that were presumably meant to be read seriously, and at one point even launching into a spot-on Brando impression. It’s probably not the movie Kilmer would most like to be remembered for, but few who see “Dr. Moreau” will forget it.
For reasons which, I’m sure, have absolutely nothing to do with current world events, the Somerville Theatre has launched a season of its recurring repertory series titled “F**k the Nazis,” gathering another round of films in which followers of Hitler are righteously vanquished, outsmarted and/or all-around walloped. The series begins, naturally, with one of cinema’s all-time great Nazi-punchers in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989), which screens on 35 mm Wednesday. This time around, the famed archaeologist is called into action when the Nazis kidnap his father (Sean Connery, in a sublime bit of stunt casting) in their pursuit of the Holy Grail. I do not consider it a spoiler to reveal that Indy both beats the Nazis to the artifact and beats them senseless; the joy, as always, is in seeing Harrison Ford bound through another set of Steven Spielberg’s thrilling action sequences to the strains of John Williams’ iconic score. Oh, and punching Nazis. Punching so many Nazis.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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