Smoke gets in your eyes

It's great to be old M4

Guess what?! Senior discount kicks in at 62 at IFC: 10 bucks instead of 14! And at Cinema Village I discovered that I've apparently been wasting money for two years: 8 bucks instead of 11 at 60! God, I love slouching toward senescence!

Hitchcock/Truffaut

VE

Wonderful nerdfest of a documentary about a book about two people talking. I need that book.

45 Years

IFC

An unconventional mystery/ghost story about unconventional infidelity, and I really don't want to say much more than that, except that it's a contender for my favorite film of the year. OK, I'll say one more thing: did it never occur to them when they chose the song for the first dance at their wedding reception that it's less a love song than it is a love-gone-all-to-hell song?

The Hateful Eight 70mm

VE

Worth twenty bucks? Absolutely: gorgeous Morricone score behind a gorgeous panoramic Colorado (standing in for Wyoming) screened in my favorite Manhattan theater, the palace in thirteenth-century Córdoba Moorish and Jewish décor that somehow survived the multiplexization of the rest of the building. Smart, funny Tarantino script, treated skillfully by members of his repertory company.

Great filmmaking, but I think maybe I'm getting too old for repetition of the n-word and physical abuse of a prisoner (never mind a woman) to work for me as running jokes. Now the running joke that did work for me--and, as it turned out, the one integral to the plot--was the need to kick in the front door and nail it shut again whenever anyone needs to enter Minnie's Haberdashery.

By the way, I expect intermission comes only in the 70mm Roadshow screenings, but if there's a break at about 1:50 (the fastest almost 2 hours imaginable, by the way) and you think, "There's hasn't been much violence yet," trust me: you won't feel cheated in the next hour.

TransFatty Lives

CV

Patrick O'Brien was just another maker of goofy trash films until he was diagnosed with ALS, whereupon he became a documentor of disease, determination, love, fatherhood, lost love, death, and life. An astonishing, queasymaking film that will never come to your town unless your town is Manhattan or Los Angeles, and judging from attendance at my screening and the one before it (total: 2), it's not going to be in either of those towns come Friday. Eminently worth renting.

Trailers

• Moonwalkers--Yeah, maybe: based on the myth that the moonlanding was a myth and that NASA tried to hire Kubrick to fake it. Do I need to say "a comedy"?
• Rolling Papers--Another story of newspaper intrepidity, this one a documentary about the Denver Post's symbiotic relationship with legalized recreational pot.
• The Boy--No, come on: no one is stupid enough to agree to be nanny for a ceramic doll modeled on an elderly couple's dead son.
• Anesthesia--Danger! Looks like another of those many-stories-connected-by-auteristic-pretense. Oh, but that's interesting: just noticed that the auteur in question is Tim Blake Nelson, in whom pretense would be a disappointing surprise for me.
• The Treasure--Yes, please: post-Ceaușescu comedy by Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective).
• Omhide poro poro (Only yesterday)--Part of IFC's Ghiblifest, wonderful, I'm sure, but I've gotten kinda Ghiblijaded.
• Yosemite--Even the trailer admits what's you'd been thinking: this is Stand by Me.