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Lambert & Stamp, directed by James D. Cooper
Lambert & Stamp, directed by James D. Cooper

Lambert & Stamp, directed by James D. Cooper

(R, 117 minutes)

James D. Cooper's Lambert & Stamp is a documentary about Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, two mismatched impresarios who oversaw the first stage of The Who's astonishing rock-star career. Their original plan was to use the band as a way to break into the movie business. What Lambert and Stamp really wanted to do was direct.

The Who's success was directly attributable to the willfulness of working-class Stamp (brother of actor Terence Stamp) and aristocratic Lambert, the son of composer/conductor Constant Lambert. The two found each other while they were aspiring filmmakers working as gofers at Shepperton Studios. They shared a love for French new wave film and hit on a plan to find a promising rock band and manage them to fame and fortune while documenting the effort on film.

Don't get the idea that Lambert & Stamp is a history lesson. It's a blast, a perfect complement to the other great films about The Who, 1979's The Kids Are Alright and 2007's Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, the one in which singer Roger Daltrey sheepishly confessed "I like to fight."

Lambert & Stamp makes no attempt to be definitive; there are only nine interviewees and there's no mention of the landmark album The Who Sell Out. Yet it is a remarkably illuminating film that explains a lot of The Who's early appeal and the design behind the apparent onstage chaos. Lambert influenced guitarist Pete Townshend's songwriting; he groomed him to think along the lines of classical composers such as Henry Purcell and articulated what was the band's most prominent quality: its ability to reflect its audience onstage.

Because of Lambert and Stamp's preoccupation with film, there's some outstanding archival footage of the band and its managers, most of it in snappy black and white. But the film's most touching moment has the intellectual Townshend -- one of the more articulate and interesting figures to emerge from rock 'n' roll -- tenderly discussing Keith Moon's decline with Daltrey, visibly remorseful that he couldn't show the band's manic drummer a bit more patience.

Lambert emerges as the hero, an urbane mod with an Oxford education, fluent in French and German, who was as much a musical mentor as string-puller. Lambert and Townshend differ on how much Lambert contributed to Tommy, the rock opera that freed the band and its agents from financial worries, but even the songwriter concedes he helped a lot. Townshend remembers him as a frustrated composer, but in retrospect it's clear Lambert's instrument was The Who itself, a scruffy, ugly quartet of rough boys given to doing violence to their instruments.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (R, 115 minutes) This goofy, high-spirited Swedish comic fable is the story of Allan Karlsson (Robert Gustafsson) who, after an eventful and unpredictable life, is horrified at the thought of spending his 100th birthday in the nursing home where he lives. So he jumps out a window, gets on a bus, and has an amazing adventure that involves a suitcase filled with cash, a biker gang, and a circus elephant. Directed and written by Felix Herngren. In English and Swedish with subtitles. Blu-ray bonus features including a making-of featurette, interview with Gustafsson and the director, and the theatrical trailer.

Little Boy (PG-13, 100 minutes) Clumsy, sentimental and outrageously manipulative, this faith-based drama concerns 8-year-old Pepper Flynt Busbee (Jakob Salvati) who is determined to bring his soldier father James (Michael Rapaport) home to coastal California from a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II. With Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin James, Ben Chaplin; directed by Alejandro Gomez Monteverde.

Strangerland (R, 112 minutes) A difficult-to-decipher and melodramatic thriller in which Matthew and Catherine Parker (Joseph Fiennes and Nicole Kidman), unpopular newcomers to the remote Australian outback desert town of Nathgari, are thrown into chaos when their teenage children Lily (Maddison Brown) and Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton) vanish in a massive dust storm. Amid dust, darkness, and unnerving aboriginal legends, a search party heads out to find them. In the meantime, the family structure, shaky to begin with, commences to seriously fall apart. With Hugo Weaving, Lisa Flanagan; directed by Kim Farrant.

The Riot Club (R, 107 minutes) Everybody loves to hate privileged kids who've done nothing to deserve their luxe lifestyles. This brutal satire of money, sex and power in the elite environs of Oxford University takes advantage of that love/hate reaction with a story of first-year student Miles (Max Irons, son of Jeremy Irons) who is recruited to join one of the school's most exclusive fraternities, where he soon gets a close-up view of how ugly entitlement can be. Based on Laura Wade's 2010 play Posh. With Olly Alexander, Freddie Fox, Sam Reid, Sam Claflin, Holliday Grainger; directed by Lone Scherfig.

Vendetta (R, 90 minutes) A scrappy, bare-bones revenge thriller in which tough detective Mason Danvers (Dean Cain), whose wife Jocelyn (Kyra Zagorsky) is murdered by criminal Victor Abbott (Paul Wight), embarks on a desperate quest for vengeance within the confines of Stonewall Prison. With Michael Eklund; directed by Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska.

MovieStyle on 08/21/2015

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