GO HOT TUB TIME MACHINE A fundamentally lazy comedy that will probably make you laugh like an idiot, Hot Tub Time Machine was ostensibly directed by Steve Pink. But it was really born from the collective unconscious of the 34-to-45 demographic — the viewers for whom the movie will deliver the most reliable pleasure, as they tease out the embedded references to Sixteen Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, Better Off Dead. Though the sweetness and cheer of its inspirations are, by the strictures of contemporary R-rated comedy, supplemented with violence, barfing and hate-fucking, it's still a funny, worthwhile tribute to an era of filmmaking that will not live long in the annals of cinema. Sad-sack friends Lou (Rob Corddry), Nick (a standout Craig Robinson) and Adam (John Cusack) head to the mountains, where, 24 years earlier, they spent an epic weekend. Soon, via the eponymous plot device, they're young again at Winterfest '86, an absurd wonderland of lime-green ski suits, casual sex and Nagel prints. Hot Tub Time Machine pays homage to the essential disposability of '80s entertainment, while also using its own faithful cruddiness as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Important plot points get glossed over; scenes are cut together clumsily; it features the least-convincing skiing shots ever committed to film. But as long as you're the sort of viewer who will derive pleasure from the simple on-screen credit "and introducing William Zabka," it'll work. (Dan Kois) (Citywide)
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON The 3-D wasn't working at the screening I attended, but, honestly, it would take several more dimensions to craft something special out of this adequate but unremarkable animated tale of a skinny Viking nerd-boy (voiced by Jay Baruchel) named Hiccup who befriends fire-breathing dragons, hoping to impress his father (Gerard Butler), a beefy Norseman with a Glasgow accent and triceps like tree trunks. Based on a children's novel by Cressida Cowell and directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, How to Train Your Dragon struggles to rise to the challenge of hitching a red-blooded fantasy action-adventure to a huggy-kissy message that covers all antiwar and eco bases. Father and son, though inevitably scheduled for reciprocal self-actualization (brain, say hello to brawn, and vice versa), spend much of the movie at loggerheads because junior would rather fly around on, instead of slay, his newfound scaly friend, whose cute, big poonim bears an incongruous resemblance to the critter from Lilo & Stitch. Intentionally or not, all of the dragons are built more for stand-up comedy than for terror, which means that aside from two fine battle scenes that bookend the movie, we have to make do in the drama department with the wan love that blossoms between Hiccup and a feisty young Vikingette voiced by America Ferrera. Better is some funny business when fledgling killers-in-training meet baby dragons-in-training, supervised by the deliciously hectoring voice of Craig Ferguson. (Ella Taylor) (Citywide)
GO SWEETGRASS Though the breathtaking vistas of Big Sky Country in Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's unforgettable sheep-herding documentary come close to heaven, it's telling that AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" can be faintly heard over the sound of the electronic contraptions that hired hands yield to shear the docile creatures, one of the preparatory stages before the roundup begins. A record of the last time, in the early aughts, that cowboys led their flocks up into Montana's Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains for summer pasture, Sweetgrass captures the arduousness and the awe (not awww) of a vanishing way of life. Animals strike curious poses: One of the white, fluffy sheep stares right into Castaing-Taylor's camera as the film begins, a moment played not for critter cuteness but for ovine empathy, immediately setting the patient, unsentimental, observational tone. Just as you begin to distinguish the sounds of different bleats, you witness the absurd force of the sheep en masse as they run past a Radio Shack on a small-town street. High up in the mountains, they become unwieldy, leading enraged herder Pat Connolly to string together the most inspired blue streak ever uttered against ewes. Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting — beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties — while never letting us forget its formidable perils. (Melissa Anderson) (Nuart)
GO VINCERE According to Marco Bellocchio's Vincere, Mussolini was nearly as much of a bully in the bedroom as he was in office. Il Duce would eventually get busy with the Pope, but in the mid-1910s, he screwed — and screwed over — one Ida Dalser, who becomes this epic melodrama's nobly suffering Jeanne d'Arc. Bearing Mussolini a son, Dalser was banished to an insane asylum for the rest of her days. Hell hath no fury, indeed: Complete with thunder and lightning, sex and street riots, booming music and fascist slogans splayed across the screen, Bellocchio's immodestly mounted production is an operatic critique of the violent force with which a woman was written out of His Story. This is nothing new for Bellocchio, whose best films of the past five decades — beginning with Fist in His Pocket in 1965 — have trafficked at the intersection of history and family. Vincere, though, is his stylistic knockout. In the hands of the fiercely committed Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Dalser goes from being the recipient of Il Duce's thrusts (and a funder of his fascist paper) to a towering figure of sorts, tough as nails even when incarcerated. Its title translating as "win," Vincere is a victory for the doomed Dalser in the sense that she's finally gotten a camera's attention. "You're my woman," Il Duce (Filippo Timi) tells his secret lover early on in the movie. "So be quiet." Her refusal to do so is Bellocchio's cause for celebration — and our good fortune. (Rob Nelson) (Playhouse 7, Royal, Town Center)
