Reel-View Ratings: The Bigger The Beard, The Better The Movie

45 YEARS

An aging, devoted couple is on the cusp of celebrating their 45th anniversary when a ghost from the past returns — Geoff’s long-dead fiance, Katya, has been discovered perfectly preserved in ice, as beautiful as the day he lost her 50 years before, to the consternation of his wife Kate. Idyllic golden years give way to simmering discontent. Neither partner is vilified, but 45 years has a way of wearing on even the most passionate of loves. Still, the pot never boils over. The performances reflect the steady tug of time in their subtlety, full of restrained frustrations and quiet grief that is very nearly too restrained and quiet to have enough impact on audiences. Such is the intimacy of marriage. OpensFeb. 19 at Kahala Theatre

THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION

The incendiary militant activists of the 1960s are never far from historical memory, it seems, but this documentary fails to truly capitalize on the continued relevance of the Black Panthers to #BlackLivesMatter today. Instead, we have a PBS-ready primer to the rise and fall of the group, with few dramatic or artistic flourishes in its Point-A-to-B retelling. Interviews with surviving members are insightful in their retrospection but paint an inconsistent picture of the story (worsened by the unacknowledged exclusion of co-founder Bobby Seale) and have nothing to say about contemporary race struggles. The result is an interesting film, but hardly one that will have the staying power of its subject. Plays at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 19 and 1 p.m. Feb. 26 at Doris Duke Theatre

SON OF SAUL

There are no happy endings to be found in this depiction of the Holocaust from the perspective of Saul, a Jewish Sonderkommando (a prisoner who prepares and cleans the gas chambers before and after mass executions), who finds the body of a boy he believes is his son and becomes obsessed with giving him a proper Jewish burial. Focused on his mission, Saul is numb to the horrors around him, and so the camera blurs them appropriately, alluding to but rarely showing the atrocities of Auschwitz. Saul is also indifferent to the machinations of his peers and captors, and so much of the film blurs away into unexplained and unremarked chaos. It captures the bleak despair of his circumstances in brutal realism, but it’s none too easy for viewers to keep track of the action. Opens Feb. 19 at Kahala Theatre