Mountains May Depart
⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars
Unrated: In subtitled Mandarin, Cantonese and English.
Theater: St. Anthony Main.
Director Jia Zhangke offers a work of poetic prophecy in this romantic and political melodrama. It is an episodic journey, moving through three Pacific Rim chapters set in 1999, 2014 and 2025, and follows relationships through the yearnings that maintain them and the impulses that threaten them.
Opening in rural Shaanxi, it follows a good-souled mine worker (Liang Jin Dong) competing with a self-absorbed entrepreneur (Zhang Li) for the heart of their childhood crush, a shop girl (Zhao Tao). Her choice, reflecting changing social values, collapses the triangle of their friendship, and her resulting marriage, too.
In the next installment, her son Dollar (Dong Zijian) has moved to Shanghai with his prosperous father; in the third he is a young man living in future-modernist luxury in Australia, and has all but forgotten his isolated mother. The film is shot in retro and new age cinema forms for each slice of the fast-evolving new century. Personal and national upheavals transform each character.
The film is bookended by the 1993 Pet Shop Boys version of "Go West." The first pulls a stage full of laughing youngsters into a dance train. That moment of happiness shrinks as the movie pushes its characters ahead in repeated train rides, each carrying them to a new kind of empty happiness. The final dance puts the pop tune in a dark context, one orphan thinking of another. As the characters lose the places that created them and try to reform themselves, the song feels like a warning and the frequent fireworks resemble danger signal flares.
COLIN COVERT
Only Yesterday
⋆⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: PG for thematic elements, smoking.
Theater: Uptown.
This is sometimes referred to as the "lost" Studio Ghibli film. The only one of the Japanese animation giant's features to have never been released in the United States, the 1991 film has a new English voice cast starring Daisy Ridley and Dev Patel. It was worth the wait.
The film is a poetic yet lucidly rendered meditation on memory and maturity. Centering on Taeko (Ridley), a 27-year-old Tokyo office worker with no significant other and (apparently) not much of a life, the movie jumps between the present day and Taeko's recollections of her fifth-grade self, triggered by a visit to a rural farm belonging to relatives of her married sister.
"Only Yesterday" is not exactly a kids' film. An air of grown-up melancholy will render the film a bit inscrutable for young viewers, who will almost certainly identify with Taeko's younger self rather than her moody, older incarnation. Small moments take on larger meaning in this exquisite memoir.
Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post
Trapped
⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars
Rated: Unrated, contains mature thematic material.
Theater: Edina.
Dawn Porter's sobering, gracefully constructed documentary about the tide of laws restricting abortion that have swept the country provides an intimate, deeply felt primer for viewers interested in the legal and ethical principles at play.
The title derives from so-called TRAP laws (for "targeted regulation of abortion providers"), hundreds of which have been passed over the past six years, especially in the South. Following clinics in Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, the film looks behind the curbside protests and legislative fights to examine the effect of these laws on the daily lives of medical professionals and their patients. "Trapped" makes no pretense of balance. This is an abortion-rights advocacy film. It is lucid, illuminating and brimming with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women.
At one point, a 13-year-old rape victim is told that she won't be able to get an abortion in her state, meaning she would have to get the time, money, family support and resources together to travel thousands of miles. As the clinic worker says, she's basically been "sentenced to motherhood." Porter leaves viewers with the haunting question of what happened to that girl, where she is now, and what we did to get her there.
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
Songs My Brothers Taught Me
⋆⋆⋆½ out of four stars
Rated: Unrated, suitable for all audiences.
Theater: Walker Art Center, 7:30 p.m. Fri., 2 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.
Beijing-born director Chloe Zhao's feature debut is a clear-eyed and touching portrait of life among Oglala Lakota youth in South Dakota's Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The leading characters are high schoolers whose experiences are presented without a touch of fictitious soap opera. Their family lives, school challenges, yearning for relatives serving time in prison, and plans for futures at colleges far away from the rez are captured with a sense of realism discovered on the spot. The cast, composed almost entirely of first-time performers, shows that the most delightful talents don't always belong to lifelong actors.
Zhao's story is a coming-of-age tale set in a beautifully timeless natural landscape (thanks to Joshua James Richards' camerawork), a place where children grow up feeling free but ignored by the society beyond their border.
C.C.
