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Le Week-End
Le Week-End

Le Week-End,

directed by Roger Michell

(R, 99 minutes)

In Roger Michell's Le Week-End, aging British couple Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg (Lindsay Duncan) go to Paris to celebrate their anniversary. You might think that sounds like a nice premise for a movie, and if you know Michell's comedies like 1999's Notting Hill or 2010's Morning Glory, you might suspect something along the lines of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or Quartet, a sweet story that includes the challenges of growing old.

But Nick and Meg are not a cute elderly couple inspired to frolic in the City of Light. They are intelligent enough to understand their misery, and to understand that a holiday is at best a half-measure.

There's a wince-inducing realness to the interactions between the couple. Meg rebuffs Nick's shows of affection, saying that his hugs make her feel like she's being "arrested." When he trips and falls in the street, she laughs. She understands their lives are coming apart.

Meg makes it clear she's disappointed at the accommodations he has booked for their getaway, so she moves them into a luxury place on the Rue George V. They hole up there in a room that's far too dear, alternately snarling and flailing and trying to make some sense of their empty-nested lives. They go to an expensive restaurant. They run out on the bill. They pretend to be footloose and bohemian. They watch Godard's Band of Outsiders on TV. They know the Madison dance scene well. They say hurtful words to each other.

Not everyone will like this film. There is a drop or two of hope mixed in with the resignation, but these people are doomed. They're not cute or cuddly and whatever happiness they come by they will have to work for -- just like the rest of us.

The Raid 2 (R, 150 minutes) It's hard to imagine anyone being left unimpressed by the sheer ingenuity of Welsh director Gareth Evans' The Raid 2, the sequel to his similarly beautiful, similarly savage but far lower budget 2011 film The Raid: Redemption.

Though this is more ambitious, it offers the same sort of kinetic pleasures and visceral jolts. The plot of this Indonesian actioner is pretty dispensable, but it basically picks up where the last movie ended, with the hero cop Rama (pencak silat champion Iko Uwais) going undercover in prison to win the confidence of Ucok (Arifin Putra), a mob boss' son.

He does so by eliminating hundreds of would-be assassins in increasingly inventive and remarkably athletic ways. Beginning with a dozen-against-one throwdown in a prison bathroom stall, progressing to a battle royale in a muddy prison courtyard and a precise face-off in a restaurant kitchen, Evans and his cinematographers Dimas Imam Subhono and Matt Flannery frame the mayhem with loving attention. The effect is thrilling and makes almost every other recent action movie feel unimaginative and stale. The Raid 2 may be the chopsocky movie for people who think they don't like martial arts movies. It's the best representative of the genre since the original Raid. Subtitled.

Bad Words (R, 89 minutes) Jason Bateman makes his directing debut in Bad Words, a not-quite-satirical-enough comedy in which he plays 40-year-old Guy Trilby, who, for unknown reasons, finds a way to enter a junior high school national spelling bee. Just to be obnoxious, and cruel, and abusive, he takes on the competition -- eighth-graders -- and shows them no mercy. But why? With Kathryn Hahn, Philip Baker Hall, Allison Janney, Rohan Chand.

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (R, 92 minutes) The latest in Johnny Knoxville's raunchy, not-for-everybody Jackass franchise -- which cons ordinary people into thinking what they're seeing is really happening and isn't being staged to make fools of them -- follows 86-year-old Irving Zisman (played by Knoxville) on a journey across America with his 8-year-old grandson Billy (Jackson Nicoll). With Spike Jonze, Georgina Cates; directed by Jeff Tremaine.

MovieStyle on 07/11/2014

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