“Let the Right One In”
*** RATING | Has there ever been as pale a child as the lonesome tween of “Let the Right One In,” a beautifully brooding vampire tale from Sweden? Staring out the window of a modest apartment, Oskar looks like he’s already been bled. He certainly has been tormented — by schoolyard bullies. One night he meets new neighbor Eli, whom Oskar notes is not vulnerable to the cold and, well, has a strange odor. What might have been the sort of meeting that leads to more familiar mayhem — two outcasts angry at the world and their uncomfortable place in it — becomes a surprisingly tender crush story, mixing the romance of friendship with the tentativeness of deep love. Tomas Alfredson’s moody beauty, based on screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist’s best-selling novel, is rife with aching melancholy and existential crises. In Swedish with English subtitles. R. 1 hour, 54 minutes. Lisa Kennedy
“Synecdoche, New York”
*** 1/2 RATING | This play within a play is set in New York, which is re-created with an army of actors on a life-size set inside a vast warehouse. Then a second warehouse must be built inside the first, with more actors impersonating the original cast, and a performer must be hired to play the director of that production; soon we’re tumbling down a very convoluted rabbit hole. Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a pudgy, alienated, sexually insecure stand-in for all humankind, fussing over projects that come to nothing as time ticks away. The film opens with the buzzing of Caden’s alarm clock and ends with him drifting into unconsciousness again. Depending on how you read the film’s deftly smudged time scheme, either 50 years have passed, or five minutes. Caden has lived, or hallucinated, a sprawling lifetime. R. 2 hours, 5 minutes. Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“I’ve Loved You So Long”
*** RATING | Kristin Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a doctor by training who has just been released from a 15-year prison sentence. Her crime: killing her 6-year-old son. Readjusting to life outside prison walls, searching for employment, she moves in with her younger sister, Lea, a literature professor married to a man not thrilled with Juliette’s presence. The interactions between Juliette and the couple’s adopted Vietnamese daughters are closely watched. PG. 1 hour, 53 minutes. Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
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