Battle of the Bands

Vanessa Hudgens and Jack White plug in their amps while Miyazaki rocks the multiplex in other ways.

“It Might Get Loud”
In what was no doubt a calculated ploy to appeal to the widest audience possible while at the same time not offending anyone’s tastes, Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim’s aurally arresting roundtable on the history and cultural significance of the electric guitar gathers together a trio of superstars each emblematic of a different rock ‘n’ roll era. An odd group perhaps on paper, U2’s The Edge, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and White Stripes frontman Jack White come together to share their insights and experience amidst a multitude of impromptu jams, dissecting the finer points of musicianship.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

“My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler”
It takes a certain kind of audacity to construct a farcical comedy around Germany’s greatest monster and then unveil to the notoriously humorless crowds at the Berlin Film Festival, but that’s just what Swiss writer/director Dani Levi went and did with this effort back in 2007. With German author and actor Helge Schneider in the titular role, Levi paints a disarmingly absurdist portrait of a demoralized and depressed dictator afraid to face his people. Opposite him is Germany’s greatest teacher Adolf Grunbaum (the late Ulrich Mühe), plucked from a concentration camp and tasked with coaching the other Adolf back to form. In German with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

“My Neighbor, My Killer”
Having already devoted the better part of a decade to the noble endeavor of bringing international awareness to the still tenuous and volatile relationship between Tutsis and Hutus in the aftermath of the horrific 1994 Rwandan genocide, French documentarian Anne Aghion returns once more to the troubled nation. Focusing this time on a series of public tribunals set up by the new regime for the purpose of letting victims put their assailants on trial, Aghion offers a typically measured account of an embittered people’s long and arguably fruitless search for closure. In English and Kinyarwanda with subtitles.
Opens in Los Angeles.

“Ponyo”
An international titan of the animation genre and a stalwart disciple of the school of traditional hand-drawn animation, Oscar-winning Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s latest offers a beautifully anthropomorphized waltz beneath the waves replete with his trademark childlike wonder. Part-prophetic warning as to the unbalancing effect we’re having on our oceans, part-dreamlike fairytale, “Ponyo” tells the story of the titular Ponyo (voiced by Miley’s little sis Noah Cyrus) whose curiosity about the world above leads her to misuse her sorcerer father’s magic to make her human, resulting in a devastating ecological imbalance.
Opens wide.

“Spread”
Having carved out a respectable career in his native England as a helmer of solidly engaging if somewhat downbeat stories of (explicit) love won and lost (“Young Adam,” “Hallam Foe”), director David Mackenzie shuffles his stylistic deck and deals out a few life lessons across the pond under the bright lights of Los Angeles. Ashton Kutcher, sporting a chiseled new look, stars as vapid serial lothario who beds and discards women willy-nilly as the plaything of Anne Heche’s wealthy cougar, before getting a taste of his own when he meets an attractive younger woman (Margarita Levieva) who casually toys with his affections.
Opens in limited release.

“Taxidermia”
Based on author Lajos Parti Nagy’s collection of short stories, this 2006 effort from Hungarian director György Pálfi is a darkly comic, oddly surrealist romp through the 20th century informed by the visual panache of Terry Gilliam and the playful grotesquery of early Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A triple-headed tale encompassing three generations of men carrying a morbid fascination with all things disgustingly biological, Pálfi’s stomach-churning story begins with a World War I soldier (István Gyuricza) in the trenches, before moving onto an Olympic champion speed eater (Gergely Trócsányi) at the height of the Cold War, and concludes with a gaunt taxidermist (Marc Bischoff) in the present day. In English, Hungarian and Russian with subtitles.
Opens in New York and Los Angeles.

“The Time Traveler’s Wife”
No stranger to true love torn asunder by tragic circumstance, “Ghost” screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin would seem like the appropriate choice to script Audrey Niffenegger’s emotional rollercoaster of a novel, which is realized on-screen by “Flightplan” director Robert Schwentke and stars Rachel McAdams as an artist who maintains a constant and painful vigil for her husband (Eric Bana), a librarian who drifts intermittently in and out of her life and through the space-time continuum in general.
Opens wide.

“Yasukuni”
Chinese documentarian Li Ying casts a curious eye over neighboring Japan and the uncomfortable love/hate relationship the country maintains with its own history of bloody militaristic imperialism. Abandoning any and all conventional filmmaking technique in favor of absolutely authentic imagery, Li Ying attempts to penetrate the swirling enigma that surrounds the controversial titular Yasukuni (translating to peaceful country), a gigantic military shrine housing more than 2.5 million Japanese war dead, from soldiers dating back to the Maiji Restoration to convicted war criminals from World War II. In Japanese with subtitles.
Opens in New York.

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