ONE DAY YOU’LL UNDERSTAND Jeanne Moreau’s remarkable face has been carrying movies both great and not for the past 60 years. Amos Gitai’s latest falls into the second category, though the blame can hardly be placed on its octogenarian star. Moreau plays Rivka, a World War II survivor waiting out her final years in a Parisian apartment. Rivka is not inclined to think about the past, but her son, Victor (Hippolyte Girardot), starts to prod her after discovering that his father made a declaration of Aryan heritage — a revelation with the sort of troubling implications that are ideally unraveled in flashbacks over the course of a stolid, fest-circuit-baiting international co-production. One Day You’ll Understand represents Gitai’s most restrained work in sometime (there’s little of the rafter-reaching hysteria that marked Free Zone), but if anything, the film may be too controlled: The decision to frame much of the action in long, prowling tracking shots creates a feeling of remove that doesn’t quite fit with the material’s emotionally explosive quality. It doesn’t help that Girardot gives a grating lead performance and that a terrific performer like Emmanuelle Devos (as his let-sleeping-dogs-lie sister) is given so little to do. Moreau, meanwhile, is smart enough to let her magnificent countenance do the heavy lifting — the moments where Gitai simply focuses on her face do more to suggest the weight of a full, complicated life lived than all of the script’s carefully manicured machinations. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Adam Nayman)
PUNISHER WAR ZONE It really shouldn’t have been so hard to make a decent Punisher movie; after all, the character is basically just Death Wish’s Paul Kersey on steroids, in spandex. How come it took Hollywood so long to figure that out? Following a direct-to-video ’80s version starring Dolph Lundgren, and an unfortunately campy 2004 reboot with Thomas Jane, Lionsgate has gotten back to basics with Punisher: War Zone. Rome’s Ray Stevenson plays the skull-clad Frank Castle like a cross between Steven Seagal and Jason Voorhees. Early on, he fixes his own broken nose by jamming a pencil up his nostril; nobody else in the movie gets off quite so easily, as blood, brains, intestines, and chunks of flayed skin fly. (It’s not technically a horror movie, but nobody told the effects guys that.) The plot, such as it is, involves Castle second-guessing his life as a vigilante after accidentally killing an undercover fed, while fighting off a mobster (Dominic West) who has fallen into a giant glass-crusher and been recycled as a lethal Leatherface lookalike called Jigsaw. But the script isn’t what matters here: This is a slasher movie with guns, and, uh, huh-huh, that’s pretty cool. (Citywide) (Luke Y. Thompson)
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Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands
Ralph Nelson
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REACH FOR ME LeVar Burton’s odd yet progressive-minded career indeed has its roots in Kunta Kinte, the 1977 Emmy-nominated role that launched him into the ubiquitous-TV-personality stratosphere (Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes 2, The Muppets Go Hollywood, et al.). In the ’80s, Burton began a 25-year stint teaching literacy to kids on PBS’s Reading Rainbow, and brought amiable nerdiness and eleventh-hour crisis sensibility to Star Trek: The Next Generation without ever playing the Magical Negro. He also directed episodes of that show and three subsequent Trek spin-offs, and it’s behind the camera that you’ll more often experience the former seminary student’s wholesome values today. Alas, Reach for Me, Burton’s characteristically earnest new melodramedy about terminally ill hospice patients learning to embrace their final days and each other, is weepy TV-grade goo (and without a bucket list in sight). Seymour Cassel stars as a bedridden, cantankerous old coot who can’t stomach his new roomie (Johnny Whitworth), a rapidly deteriorating pretty-boy too young and sensitive to die. Alfre Woodard is the no-bullshit caretaker, Burton the toe-painting queer nurse, and Adrienne Barbeau the silver-haired (and tongued) love interest who allows Cassel a sexy peek at her mastectomy. Yes, it’s as tender as it is disturbing, such as when Cassel has to clear Whitworth’s colostomy tube to save his life. Seniors may find relatable depth in such geriatric gestalt, but for my money, I’d rather be torn apart by Synecdoche’s bleak existential crises. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)
TENNESSEE Fourteen years after they fled their abusive father, brothers Carter (Adam Rothenberg) and Ellis (Ethan Peck) decide to drive from New Mexico to Tennessee to contact him in the hopes that he’s a bone-marrow match for the leukemia-stricken Ellis. If you’re wondering why the guys don’t save time by calling first, you’re not on the wavelength of director Aaron Woodley’s contemplative, pokey road movie/sibling drama, which exists in an antiquated, slow-motion world of pay phones, smoky roadhouses and kindhearted waitresses who dream of becoming country singers. Screenwriter Russell Schaumburg has a knack for subtly unrolling his script’s themes of forgiveness and second chances, but while the road trip contains several nice moments — and an unexpectedly empathetic performance from pop superstar Mariah Carey as said waitress — Tennessee just doesn’t add up to much. Despite the inclusion of an ill-advised chase-thriller element midway through, and a shockeroo surprise at the end, Woodley’s film mostly floats along on its melancholy drift, so well-attuned to the low-key rhythms of its beaten-down characters that it never quite summons up enough energy for the rest of us, who are along for the ride. (Music Hall) (Tim Grierson)
