Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie
PHOENIX
The premise seems too convoluted to work, and yet it does: Concentration-camp survivor Nelly is tortured beyond recognition in World War II; plastic surgery gives her a brand-new face. When she returns home, her husband Johnny (who may have sold her out to the Nazis) doesn’t recognize this new Nelly, but nevertheless asks her to impersonate the “dead” Nelly so that they can receive her large inheritance. It’s a mess of deceit and willful ignorance in the blighted landscape of post-WWII Germany, of broken people coping with what little they can — and it is mesmerizing to behold.
Plays at 7:30 p.m. March 19 at Doris Duke Theatre
’71
Wet-behind-the-ears British soldier Gary Hook (Unbroken‘s Jack O’Connell, thrust into yet another hellish military landscape) is dropped right in the middle of a riot in the Troubles of Northern Ireland in 1971 — and then abandoned by his command. The panicked Hook ends up bouncing between rivaling, violent factions that want to kill him or capture him, with little sparks of humanity and horror from both sides as he tries to survive the night. The pacing of the film is uneven, with some sequences tense and harrowing, and others meandering and not tonally right, but the blend of politics and the people behind them is spot on.
Opens March 20 at Kahala Theatre
THE PHYSICIAN
It may be helpful to know that this two-hour film was originally a four-hour miniseries. That may explain the lumpy, wham-bam-done story of The Physician, which follows Rob Cole, a prodigy medical man in the Dark Ages who just wants to be a good doctor, though racism, religion and the willful ignorance that marked this era of history get in his way. The costumes and scenery is lush and vibrant — a callback to the sweeping epic movies of old — but the script can’t carry the weight of three Abrahamic religions, Middle Ages medical practices and an obligatory romance subplot. Plays at 1:45 and 6:15 p.m. March 20, 1:45 and 8 p.m. March 21, and noon March 22 at the Movie Museum
