Wait, is it too late to go back and re-open the Oscar nominations?

The Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve made her film debut back in 2011, but only achieved international recognition with her acclaimed performance in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World. After making an appearance last year in the award-nominated American drama A Different Man and on the AppleTV+ series Presumed Innocent, she’s back on home turf in the drama Armand, delivering a quietly shattering portrayal of a complicated woman who finds herself on the defensive after her young son is accused of heinous behavior.

Armand takes place over the course of a single day, and the action doesn’t leave the grounds of an elementary school until the film’s final shot. Elisabeth (Reinsve) has been called in by a teacher and a pair of administrators to discuss six-year-old Armand’s behavior. There, in a room with the parents of Armand’s classmate Jon, Elisabeth learns that her child has been accused of—well, it’s not exactly clear, but it could be anything from overzealous playground games to sexual assault. The kids are not present, so Jon’s testimony comes primarily from his mother Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Peterson), who, we learn, is also the sister of Elisabeth’s recently deceased husband.

In a startling moment, Elisabeth’s initial reaction to these allegations is to burst into uncontrollable laughter.  It’s clear that she’s something of a spectacle in the community, especially since the car accident that made her a widow. Armand, too, has been acting out since then, and the ways that adults and children react to trauma is a primary focus. But what exactly happened in the school bathroom between Jon and Armand remains frustratingly unknowable, and the strands of resentment and grief that run through Armand only complicate the issue. At times, writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel (making his first feature), veers into surreal territory, most effectively during a spastic, marionette-style dance Elisabeth performs in a hallway. Those touches bring her subjective emotional experience to life, even if they seem abrupt and out of place.

Reinsve adeptly weaves through the ambiguity at Elisabeth’s core, allowing both her resentment at the situation and her vulnerability, and Peterson is every bit her equal in a showdown of potent, restrained performances. The ground trod is in some ways familiar, but Armand navigates its melodramatic route with maturity and culminates in a rain-soaked release. I’m not sure Reinsve would have edged out any of my personal picks for the best female performances of the year, but it would have complicated the decision for sure. (Opens Fri., Feb. 14, at Regal Fox Tower and other locations)

This year’s programs of Oscar-nominated short films hit theaters this weekend, and while there honestly aren’t any truly jaw-dropping efforts in the batch of fifteen titles, there is, as you might expect, a little something for everyone. In both the live-action narrative and documentary categories, the films frequently focus on social or political concerns, but, perhaps from outrage fatigue, I favor the ones that take a darkly surreal approach to modern problems. The documentaries, in particular, fall into two categories: the films that tell inspiring stories about the power of music, whether played by Japanese schoolchildren or the first female member of the New York Philharmonic, and those that wrestle with the consequences of school shootings, the death penalty, or homicidal policing. The most inventive and powerful centers on the latter: Incident uses nothing but footage from police body cameras and nearby security cameras to interrogate the fatal shooting of Harith Augustus on July 14, 2018 by a Chicago probationary police officer. It’s a masterful piece of editing, and represents the first Oscar nomination for director (and onetime Reed College student) Bill Morrison, whose works of assemblage and archivism usually repurpose decades-old material.

The live-action narrative nominees come from places as far afield as India, South Africa, and Croatia, and have powerful things to say about child labor, wildlife protection, and the importance of disobeying tyranny. The American effort A Lien shines a light on a horrific practice by which undocumented immigrants who have come to a government office to file paperwork related to remedying their status are rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and deported for their trouble. Compared to those, the Dutch entry I’m Not a Robot tackles a much less urgent issue. A woman finds herself thrown into a surreal identity crisis after she fails a Captcha test on her computer at work and starts to doubt her own humanity. It’s darkly hilarious, visually inventive, and completely relatable.

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Among the animations, the clear winner in my book is Wander to Wonder, a stop-motion nightmare about the characters left behind after the children’s TV host who gave them life dies. It’s got a smartly depraved, Adult Swim vibe, and a dollop of genuine human pathos. Similarly absurd is the stop-motion Beautiful Men, in which three Belgian brothers travel to Istanbul for hair transplants and end up dealing with their own insecurities and midlife crises. It reminded me of Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa. (All three programs open Fri., Feb. 14, at the Hollywood Theatre, Cinema 21, Living Room Theaters, Salem Cinema, and Bridgeport Village)

Senegalese director Moussa Sène Absa will be in attendance on Friday night for the screening of his 2022 film Xalé as the Centerpiece of this year’s Cascade Festival of African Films. The film is the third in an unofficial trilogy of Absa’s focusing on the lives of women in contemporary West Africa. In the film’s opening scenes, a provocatively dressed woman lures a drunken older man from a bar back to a hotel room, where she promptly and furiously stabs him to death. It then flashes back ten years and introduces fifteen-year-old Awa and her twin brother Adama. After the death of their grandmother, Awa’s uncle ends up in an arranged marriage with an unwilling bride. While Adama tries to raise money as a street vendor to pay for his emigration to Europe, Awa chafes under the increasingly oppressive and violent thumb of her patriarchal family members. Employing a Greek (or rather African) chorus to narrate and emphasize events, Absa crafts a long-awaited follow-up to 1996’s Tableau Ferraille and 2002’s Madame Brouette, both of which played CFAF and return this year to screen the day after Xalé, Feb. 15. (Fri., Feb. 14, Hollywood Theatre, free)

What married heterosexual couple hasn’t wondered if their increasingly humdrum sex life and strained relationship wouldn’t benefit from a threesome? Very few, to judge by the number of films that tease just that scenario, the latest of which is the forthrightly titled You, Me & Her. Written by and starring Selina Ringel and directed by her husband Dan Levy Dagerman, this familiar, safe-playing domestic comedy finds squabbling new parents Magdalena (Ringel), a corporate type-A, and Ash (Ritesh Rajan), a less ambitious marijuana entrepreneur, on a long-planned vacation to Mexico. There they meet Angela (Syndey Park), a yoga instructor and “digital nomad” who represents and offers a freedom, both sexual and otherwise, our rut-inhabiting couple proves desperate to acquire. The leads are all attractive and game for the (relatively tame) proceedings, but the ultimate resolution is one that doesn’t dare to upset the apple cart of monogamy for more than a brief nooner. Happy Valentine’s Day, I guess. (Opens Fri., Feb. 14, at Regal Fox Tower, Living Room Theaters, and other locations)

STREAMING

The Gorge: You know how some people (present company included) complain that the streaming revolution has robbed us of the opportunity to see movie stars strut their stuff on the big screen? Yeah, well, you’ll get no gripes from me that this awful excuse for a film is making its way straight to AppleTV+. And to be clear, I’m using the term “movie stars” very loosely here: the lead, and virtually only, roles in The Gorge are played by the perpetually punchable Miles Teller and the placidly porcelain Anya Taylor-Joy. Each of them has had a role or two of note (The Spectacular Now and The Queen’s Gambit, to be precise) but neither seems destined for a fertile, high-quality career, mostly because (whisper voice) they can’t act. To be fair, they’re not even really asked to in this high-concept shitshow. He’s a former Marine sniper, she’s his Russian-accented counterpart, and they’re stationed on opposite sides of the titular canyon in a remote forest to guard it for a year. There’s nasty stuff down there, you see, so nasty that it’s referred to as a gate to hell. The ultimately revealed truth is much more prosaic and uninteresting, although at least it distracts from the embarrassing meet-cute-ness of the Love, Actually-style signs the two use to communicate before eventually one of them (yes, it’s the dude) breaks protocol to zipline across for a little cliffside canoodling. Director Scott Derrickson got his start in cheesy horror flicks, and there’s no shame in that. But after being elevated into the director’s chair for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, he seems to have regressed hard. The screenplay is by Zach Dean, whose career peak remains the dumb Chris Pratt sci-fi vehicle The Tomorrow War. I almost forgot that Sigourney Weaver has a couple of scenes as Teller’s superior. I bet she wishes she could too. (Streaming on Apple TV+)

ON DISC

Ah, the 1950s. When men were men and women were women, at least as far as anyone knew. Hollywood films of the decade are primarily remembered as stout pillars undergirding the patriarchal status quo, reflecting American culture, society, and religion back at itself and instructing viewers how to live and think. And yet, even in some of the least likely places, glimmers of nonconformity often manage to catch the eye, like a piece of polished beach glass sitting in a pile of wet sand. Three new Blu-ray releases from Kino Lorber (all available to rent at Movie Madness) offer up, in their own way, insight into the subcutaneous shenanigans of that white-bread decade, especially when guided by the audio commentary tracks on each disc.

One venerable, if problematic, trope in Hollywood cinema that has yet to be fully extinguished is the romantic pairing of a male lead with a much younger female character. (For recent evidence, see—or, rather, don’t—Love Hurts, in which the 34-year-old Ariana DeBose is smitten with the 53-year-old Ke Huy Quan.) In 1958’s Houseboat, a widower played by Cary Grant (b. 1904) hires the daughter of an Italian conductor played by Sophia Loren (b. 1934) as governess for his three children. They live together on a rickety houseboat after their planned residence is destroyed by a locomotive, and (spoiler alert) love eventually blossoms between them. This despite the fact that Grant’s attorney character is a real jerk who takes custody of his and his ex-wife’s offspring seemingly out of pure spite against her family, including the kids’ slightly more appropriately-aged aunt played by Martha Hyer (b. 1924). Houseboat is a real relic, full of lines and situations that will, or at least should, produce groans from a 2025 audience. But the experience is enlivened by the commentary provided by Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff. This pair of films historians and writers is responsible for audio tracks on several Kino Lorber releases, and here they banter amiably, reminiscence about the glory that was Cary Grant, and point out brief appearances from Victor Klemperer (aka Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes) and Murray Hamilton (aka Mayor Vaughn in Jaws). They also discuss the interesting fact that the original screenplay for Houseboat was written by Grant’s wife at the time, Betsy Drake (b. 1923), with the expectation that she would star in it. However, Grant had begun an affair with Loren (again, despite their thirty-year age difference) while filming The Pride and the Passion the previous year, and it was arranged that not only would Loren get Drake’s role in Houseboat, but the script would be rewritten enough that the Writer’s Guild would deny Drake any final credit. As a final insult, the film’s only Oscar nomination was for its screenplay.

In Teacher’s Pet, released the same year, another venerable Hollywood icon of masculinity, Clark Gable (b. 1901), appeared in his penultimate picture as a curmudgeonly newspaperman who falls for a journalism teacher played by Doris Day (b. 1922). Despite a similar age gap issue, this is a much more entertaining picture than Houseboat. Day is at her fittest and finest, and gives Gable all he can handle, while the old guy takes various digs at his age and infirmity with good humor. The black-and-white VistaVision cinematography is crisp and appealing, with some scenes in Gable’s newspaper’s office precursors to the deep-focus shots of similar environments in The Apartment and All the President’s Men. Gig Young co-stars as Gable’s ostensible rival, which allows Kirgo and Hankoff, in their commentary here, to relate the sad tale of Young’s later career and tragic death. (There’s a sequence with Young’s character comically drunk and then horribly hungover the next morning that’s hilarious but also poignant considering the actor’s disabling alcoholism). They also point out that the film’s theme song is used by Parker Posey’s character for her audition in Waiting for Guffman, that Clark Gable wore full dentures during most of his acting career, and that (despite this fact) Adolf Hitler ordered him captured alive rather than killed during WWII because he was such a fan.

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The most curious and remarkable of the three is The Spiral Road, which avoids outmoded gender dynamics and features a number of unique, or at least unusual, aspects for a Hollywood film in 1962. Most startlingly, the lead character, one played by Rock Hudson at the peak of his popularity, is an out-and-out atheist. He’s a doctor who’s arrived in the Dutch West Indies (today’s Indonesia) in 1936, in order to help combat an outbreak of leprosy, and he quickly and brashly clashes with the other colonists, most notably Burl Ives’s veteran (and Christian) researcher. Hudson’s love interest is embodied by the late, great Gena Rowlands, in just her second sizable role, and it’s fascinating to see her talent and integrity shine through a typically underwritten role. The film was directed by Robert Mulligan, who had a much bigger and longer-lasting impact via his other 1962 release, To Kill a Mockingbird. The Spiral Road is overlong, oddly cast, nicely shot in Eastmancolor, and ultimately a copout (yes, Hudson’s character ends up converting to Christianity). But it’s never boring, and the commentary track by film historian Samm Deighan is informative and engaging. She explains the film’s place in both cinema and world history, and provides illuminating background on its cast and its politics.

ALSO THIS WEEK

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round: Presented as part of the 2025 Portland Jewish Film Festival, this documentary unearths the history of an early civil rights protest, and American Nazi Party counter-protests, at an amusement park in suburban Washington, D.C., in 1960. (Sunday 2/16, Tomorrow Theater)

Death: Out of the Shadows: The husband-and-wife filmmaking team of Russell and Genia Stemper, who are based in southwest Washington, collaborated on this documentary that examines the evolving approach to death and dying that Western society is in the midst of. Interviews with death doulas and others who promote an open, accepting attitude toward mortality highlight a film that’s serious but never morbid. (Sunday 2/16, Clinton Street Theater)

Born Innocent: The Red Kross Story: The story of the durable power-pop band started by the McDonald brothers in 1978 California gets the feature documentary treatment. (Monday 2/17, Hollywood Theatre)

Grief Stick: Oregon filmmaker Brian Padian chronicles a love story cut short by terminal illness through the use of the couple’s own photographs, voicemails, and videos. (Thursday 2/20, Tomorrow Theater)

ALSO OPENING

Captain America: Brave New World: “Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident and must discover the motive behind a nefarious global plan.” (wide)

Paddington in Peru: “Paddington returns to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey.” (wide)

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REPERTORY

Friday 2/14

• Boyz n the Hood [1991] (Academy Theater)
• Bride of Frankenstein [1935] (Academy Theater)
• Bye Bye Birdie [1963] (Kiggins Theatre)
• Love & Basketball [2000] (5th Avenue Cinema, through 2/16)
• Mannequin (was filmed at Woolworth’s) [1987] (Tomorrow Theater)
• The Philadelphia Story [1940] (Salem Cinema)
• Rose [2024] (Kiggins Theatre)
• Star Wars: A New Hope [1977] (Cinemagic, also 2/15 & 2/17)
• Tromeo and Juliet [1996] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Wild at Heart [1990] (Cinema 21; also Academy Theater, through 2/20)

Saturday 2/15

• Fear City [1984] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Harold and Maude [1971] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Hundreds of Beavers [2022] (Hollywood Theatre, also 2/16)
• If Beale Street Could Talk [2018] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Lost Highway [1997] (Cinema 21)
• Moonstruck [1987] (Tomorrow Theater)
• Natural Born Killers [1994] (Salem Cinema)
• The Night of the Hunter [1955] (Cinema 21)
• Star Wars: Return of the Jedi [1983] (Cinemagic, also 2/16 & 2/19)
• Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back [1980] (Cinemagic, also 2/18)

Sunday 2/16

• Ray [2004] (Clinton St. Theater)
• To Have and Have Not [1944] (Salem Cinema)
• Uncle Buck [1989] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Wild Zero [1990] (Hollywood Theatre)

Monday 2/17

• It Came from Japan (Hollywood Theatre)
• John Lewis: Good Trouble [2020] (Salem Cinema)

Tuesday 2/18

• Emma Mae [1976] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Woman of the Year [1942] (Salem Cinema)

Wednesday 2/19

• Dig! [2005] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Scenes from an Occupation: Films of the Palestinian Film Unit (Clinton St. Theater)