“The Wonders”: Italian coming-of-age drama is the bees’ knees

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“The Wonders” has its Madison premiere on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 227 State St. FREE for members, $7 for non-members. Not rated, 1:51, three and a half stars out of four.

“The family who best represents our traditional values will win a bag of money.” If Alice Rohrwacher’s “The Wonders” was just a satire of reality televiison, it would be pretty good for that line alone, niftily summing up the yawning gap between the professed goals and “journeys” of such shows and the greedy underpinnings beneath.

But “The Wonders,” which won the Grand Prix at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, uses its reality-TV satire as a minor ingredient in a luminous and keenly observed coming-of-age story. As Rohrwacher did with her previous film “Corpe Celeste,” she sinks so deep into the life of a pre-teen girl and her flawed but loving family that we feel like we’re immersed in a novel as much as a film.

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“Run Free”: The story of an ultramarathoner who was born to run, and never stopped

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“Run Free” has its Madison premiere on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Barrymore Theatre, 2090 Atwood Ave. Tickets are $12 in advance through barrymorelive.com and $15 at the door.

The alarm goes off before the sun goes up, and, begrudgingly, you haul yourself out of bed and into your workout clothes. While your neighbors are asleep, you hit the pavement for your morning run. It’s a pain, but once you get moving, you start to feel better.

Now imagine if the hard part wasn’t starting to run, but stopping.

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“Coming Home”: Memories become a victim of China’s Cultural Revolution

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“Coming Home” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas, PG-13, 1:51, three stars out of four. I’ll be doing a post-show Q&A after the 7:15 p.m. show on Tuesday, Nov. 10.

Totalitarian regimes don’t just tell the people they oppress what to say and do. They tell them what to think and feel, what to remember and to forget. That point gets driven home in “Coming Home,” a mournful romantic drama from acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

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“Spectre”: The shadow of “Skyfall” falls over the new Bond film

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“Spectre” opens Friday in Point, Palace, AMC Fitchburg and Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 2:28, three stars out of four.

In the Daniel Craig era, we’ve seen two of the best James Bond films ever (“Casino Royale” and “Skyfall”) and one of the worst (“Quantum of Solace”). But we’ve never seen a middle-of-the-pack, conventional James Bond film yet.

Until “Spectre.” Don’t get me wrong — the pleasures of middle-of-the-pack Bond have been vast and enduring to me over the years, the essential stuff of ABC Sunday Night at the Movies and weekend matinees with Dad. And so it is in “Spectre,” which contains clever action sequences, spectacular locales, colorful baddies, and another assured performance by Craig in his fourth outing as 007. It’s just that the suit seems to fit him maybe a little too well this time.

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“Seymour: An Introduction”: Visiting a pianist in harmony with his world

“Seymour: An Introduction” opens with 87-year-old pianist Seymour Bernstein figuring out a difficult passage of music. Playing the same few bars over and over, he has to strategize, figure out where he needs to put his fingers and when, to make the difficult transition from this chord to that. Finally, after a lot of trial and error, he gets it right.
To the casual listener of the final performance, of course, it might sound like the music just flows out of Bernstein’s fingers. But, of course, it takes thousands of hours of practice to make that music “flow.” The documentary “Seymour” makes a powerful and poignant case for the hard, unglamorous work that goes into making great art, and that making that your life’s work makes for a life well-lived.

“Seymour” was directed by actor Ethan Hawke, who befriended Bernstein after the two were placed next to each other at a dinner party. As Hawke explains it on-camera, he confided to Bernstein that he was having a mid-career bout of stage fright, and couldn’t figure out how to stop being nervous. Bernstein replied wryly that most performers ought to be more nervous when they go on stage.

Bernstein would know. A talented concert pianist who received great reviews from the New York Times and others, he was so anxious about being on stage that he finally walked away from performing at the age of 50, devoting his life to teaching music. Challenged by one of his former students if he had a responsibility to continue performing, Bernstein responds, “I poured it into you.”

The film is structured almost exclusively around interviews with Bernstein, whether he’s talking with Hawke, talking to his current and former students, or looking directly into the camera. His music and his life seem completely integrated with each other; he even speaks like he plays: thoughtfully, calmly, compassionately, perceptively.

“Seymour” moves around in time, shifting from Bernstein’s interactions with young students today to his memories of growing up and serving in the Army, where he would play concerts on the front lines in South Korea for soldiers who had never heard classical music before.

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“(T)ERROR”: Meet the Keystone Kops of counterterrorism

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“(T)ERROR” has its Madison premiere Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 227 State St. FREE for museum members, $7 for all others. Not rated, 1:33, three stars out of four.

If the consequences weren’t so dire, the ham-fisted FBI “counterterrorism” operation chronicled in the documentary “(T)ERROR” would be comical. You could see the Coen Brothers or Christopher Guest take a whack at this sort of material — an FBI informant and would-be cupcake chef with delusions of grandeur (he’s a big fan of “Homeland”) ensnares completely innocent Muslims in terrorism investigations. And lets a documentary crew follow him around for the whole thing.

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Instant Gratification: “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part I” and four other good movies on Amazon and Netflix

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“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part I” (Amazon Prime/Hulu) — My full review is here. It’s all setup for “Mockingjay — Part 2,” coming Nov. 20, but it’s effective setup, with Katniss Everdeen and the rebels on the run, planning, waiting, hoping. Those hoping for action in this film will be disappointed — Katniss fires exactly one arrow in the film — but those looking for mood will be swayed, especially as Jennifer Lawrence sings the haunting “The Hanging Tree.” Part 2 better pay off, though.

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“Truth”: All the president’s documents undo Robert Redford’s Dan Rather

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“Truth” opens Friday at Sundance and Marcus Palace Cinemas. R, 2:05, two and a half stars out of four.

James Vanderbilt is a screenwriter who revels in ambiguity. He wrote one of the best films of the ’00s, David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” in which the notorious San Francisco serial killer was maybe-not-quite revealed, but certainly not caught, at the end of the film.

There’s a similar uncertainty as to what’s really going on in the perhaps ironically titled “Truth,” Vanderbilt’s dramatization of the 2004 scandal at CBS over possibly forged documents suggesting that President George W. Bush had used family connections to get out of going to Vietnam. The evidence remains inconclusive either way as to their veracity, but longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather resigned, and his producer Mary Mapes was fired.

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“In the Courtyard”: Parisian apartment for rent, oddball preferred

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Pierre Salvadori makes the sort of light French comedies that you enjoy and then can’t remember if you ever saw or not. I had to check my review database to see if I had seen “Priceless,” with Audrey Tautou as a golddigger who falls for a bartender (I hadn’t), or “Apres Vous,” in which Daniel Auteuil plays a restaurant manager who tries to help out a sad sack (I had. I think.)

So it is with “In the Courtyard,” his pleasant and bittersweet new film starring the great Catherine Deneuve, which didn’t get much of a release at all in the United States and is now available on DVD from Cohen Media. I enjoyed it, and I probably won’t ever think of it again five minutes from when I finish this review.

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Gone in an Instant: Five great movies leaving Netflix at the end of October

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Each week, the Instant Gratification column runs down five good movies new to Netflix that you ought to check out. But the news isn’t all good. As the streaming site adds more and more movies and TV shows each week to its lineup, it quietly drops others, usually at the end of the month.

So “Gone in an Instant” is a monthly column highlighting a few good movies that you’ve only got a few days left to see before they disappear from sight. Don’t dilly-dally.

“Fargo” — Netflix and chill (get it, because it’s winter in Minnesota) with the Coen Brothers’ upper Midwestern noir masterpiece, starring Oscar winner Francis McDormand as a good-hearted small-town police chief unraveling a kidnapping that a shifty car dealer (William H. Macy) is somehow entangled in. The FX show is good, but can’t compete with the original.

“Changing Lanes” — I think this 2002 drama is tremendously underrated, as Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson give some career-high performances as motorists whose highway feud escalates into a dangerous game of tit-for-tat.

“House of Flying Daggers” — Zhang Zimou’s absolutely gorgeous take on the martial arts genre features some beautifully staged wuxia action, including a climactic duel that conjures up a raging snowstorm.

“Stand by Me” — Ooh, just got a little lump in my throat typing that title, as Rob Reiner turns Stephen King’s “The Body” into an achingly moving film about childhood, friendship and loss.

“The Blues Brothers” — There’s almost too much movie in John Landis’ overstuffed ode to Chicago and the blues — too many musical numbers, too many cameos, too many car chases — but what’s there is classic, and Jake and Elwood Blues remain indelible comic creations.