In this week's Scene, Craig D. Lindsey lusts unabashedly after the cast of the Italian comedy The Salt of Life, opening today at The Belcourt:

In his modest 2008 first feature Mid-August Lunch, writer/director/star Gianni Di Gregorio played a bachelor who spent most of the movie in the company of some wily yet charming old ladies, most of whom were dropped off on his doorstep by vacationing friends and associates. Somebody must've told him that if he ever made another movie in his native Italy, he'd better nix the golden girls and pack it with some of the finest dime-pieces that boot-shaped country has to offer!

That he definitely does in his sophomore feature, The Salt of Life. Serving once again as the lead player (in every sense of the word), Di Gregorio plays a retired husband and father who gets the itch to have an affair. But which object of desire will he choose to engage in some adulterous action? Will it be his flighty, flirtatious downstairs neighbor (Aylin Prandi — damn!), whose dog he takes out for walks? Or how about the breathtaking caretaker (Kristina Cepraga — double damn!) who looks after Gianni's extravagant, subtly domineering mother (Valeria De Franciscis, who played Di Gregorio's mom in Lunch)? And we haven't even gotten to the cougarific old flame, the bosomy opera singer, the statuesque blond twins or the various boobalicious bit players and extras who keep bouncing into frame, taunting our boy at every turn. (Seriously, whoever was in charge of casting the women in this deserves a damn medal or something!)

Read the whole review here. And send Craig a cigarette and a towel.

Starting today in local theaters: the sunset-years ensemble piece The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, starring the PBS pledge-drive dream team of Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson (good luck getting a parking spot at Green Hills); radioactive shocker Chernobyl Diaries, not starring Anne Hathaway; the great James Cromwell in the family drama Cowgirls n' Angels, from the director of Wheels on the Bus: Mango and Papaya's Animal Adventures.

The reason people sometimes say “popular entertainment” as if it were something any factory line could produce is because Steven Spielberg makes it look so effortless. Trust the kids who spent their entire adolescence trying to re-create Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot: It ain’t.

Children of the Aughts, imagine walking cold into a sneak preview in 1981, seeing the Paramount logo replaced by a real mountain, and reading that title for the first time. Ten minutes later — 10 minutes of perforated skeletons, booby-trapped caves, runaway boulders and hair-breadth escapes — my brother and I were pretty much convinced we were watching the most awesome movie ever made.

Showing it to my own kids, I was delighted to see how well it stands up, from Harrison Ford’s surly bravado to Lawrence Kasdan’s snappy movie-movie dialogue (“Bad dates”). And the classic setpieces — the truck chase, the market chase, the anything chase — remain a wizard-level instruction in the assembly and pacing of action scenes.

For 1994’s Jurassic Park, Spielberg took a clever Michael Crichton idea — basically the author’s 1973 theme-park thriller Westworld with raptors instead of robots — and made the dinosaur movie every 10-year-old had been wanting to see since the dawn of Willis O’Brien. Raiders is playing Friday through Monday at The Belcourt in a new restoration that’s said to look spectacular; Jurassic Park’s there at midnight Friday and Saturday. See ’em both, for the popcorn-movie double feature of a lifetime.

Why doesn't anyone make NC-17 movies about good sex? After the cinematic saltpeter dosage of Shame, the French prostitution drama Elles, opening Friday at The Belcourt, is the latest movie to use the NC-17 like a three-star Michelin rating applied to an electrified dog bowl.

Juliette Binoche, using the international symbol for serious acting (little makeup), plays an Elle reporter investigating the sex trade among French college girls (represented by Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig). Though it's directed by Poland's Malgorzata Szumowska, it's as schematic and cliché-ridden as any hack American TV movie: When the more fresh-faced of Binoche's subjects says she rather enjoys her work but forbids sodomy, you can set your watch by her inevitable comeuppance.

Even in her dumb uptight-bourgeois role, however, Binoche comes closest to escaping the movie's narrow conception. While connoisseurs of fetish on film will be happy to see some checklist items well outside the mainstream — golden shower, anyone? — what's most interesting about Elles is its place on The Belcourt's schedule.

While the just-concluding Cannes Film Festival has taken lumps for the dearth of female directors in competition, The Belcourt has quietly programmed film after film this summer directed by women: Mia Hansen-Løve's beautiful Goodbye First Love through Thursday; Bess Kargman's hit dance documentary First Position, drawing ballet lovers for another week; and coming soon, Your Sister's Sister with Emily Blunt and Rosemarie Dewitt, from Humpday director Lynn Shelton. That's not to mention the cult thriller Sound of My Voice, produced and written by its rising star Brit Marling (Another Earth), which opens June 15.

Those are elles worth celebrating.

Let's set aside the sure-to-be-common question of whether anyone actually wanted another Men in Black sequel in the first place. The answer is, "No, they didn't," but No. 3 is here, and funnily enough, it's mostly painless. Of course, the MIB franchise was never much more than that: painless, and somewhat better for it. For all the gazillions spent on their elaborate CGI effects, the films never really demanded your attention; they were just kind of there, more tolerated than beloved. But in an age when every wannabe tentpole indulges in expansive running times and self-important grabs at seizing the cultural spotlight, the idea of a movie that feels like a breezy afterthought is strangely welcome.

Maybe that's because MIB3 actually manages to capture the playful inconsequentiality of the earlier films. This time out, intergalactic invasion-prevention specialists Agents K (Tommy Lee Jones) and J (Will Smith) are faced with an unspeakably ruthless and powerful being named Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement). This supervillain breaks out of a prison on the moon and travels back in time to 1969 to kill the younger Agent K (Josh Brolin, doing an uncanny Tommy Lee Jones imitation), preparing Earth to be overrun and devoured by an alien race.

Read the whole review here.

• Photo: Shelly Justiss/NaFF
• Nicole Kidman at the 2012 Nashville Film Festival

And according to a release sent out today, NaFF has added another key staff member — development director Debra Pringer. Executive director Ted Crockett says Pinger's experience in "helping nonprofits grow" will be key to the festival's ongoing success. Pinger, we are told, "will lead all marketing, communications, and donor-related efforts."

Full release below.

“This film is not for everybody. This film is not even for most people. … Some of y'all may not be here by the time this film is done.”

That's how Jason, our sherpa through the Belcourt's midnight movie series, chose to introduce Possession, a 1981 horror-drama that is ostensibly about a couple's dissolving marriage and subsequent nervous breakdowns. When Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a clandestine mission, he discovers that Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is no longer interested in pursuing their marriage. At first it seems like she's flitted away to Heinrich, a buff German zen master, but then she stabs a dude in the neck with a broken wine bottle, has sex with an octopus and wait — what the what?

Possession is like what would happen if the deformed baby from Eraserhead grew up in David Cronenberg's Videodrome. It's about as unsettling as it is incomprehensible, and boy is it incomprehensible. But more on that in a moment.

Watch the trailer for Goodbye First Love, opening tonight at The Belcourt, and tell us this doesn't look like the guiltless romantic wallow we've been awaiting. (It reminds us of nothing so much as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg without the music.) James Cathcart falls in love with it himself in this week's Scene:

When movies try to portray how people fall in love, or out of it, they typically erect a scaffolding of contrivances that bears little relationship to what really happens. Think of Scarlett O'Hara's passions, fanned by wartime deprivation and burning hotter than Atlanta; the chain of coincidences that brings Bogie and Bergman back together, then just as quickly apart; or all the maneuvering required to rig up a chance encounter between a society girl and a destitute artist aboard the Titanic's ill-fated maiden voyage. Less dramatic, maybe, but no less a phenomenon is the commonplace miracle of love — a process whose universal simplicity, yet individual complexity, is too mysterious to wind up neatly by the third act. By inflating it with artificial drama, while losing sight of its humble power, the cinema betrays love.

That can't be said of Goodbye First Love, the sublime third feature by French actress turned filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve (The Father of My Children). It's even more of a triumph because movies about love between young people are so often false and sentimental, compounded by a patronizing treatment of adolescent emotion as a precious whim. The questions Hansen-Løve asks of her young protagonists, by comparison, cut to the heart: Are longing and heartache any less real for being born from naivete? Is teenage infatuation something we grow out of, or a prolonged condition we carry into our adult lives?

The movie introduces 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton, from Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard) in 1999, at the height of her infatuation with her charming yet preoccupied older boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). Though Sullivan seems to reciprocate Camille's love, his extra years put him closer to adulthood than his lover, and distracted by the world now at his feet. In the spirit of the titular character from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (after which we may assume he was named), he hastily drops his college courses, sells an heirloom, and departs for a 10-month trek through South America. Neither he, she, nor we know it will become indefinite. ...

Read the whole review here.

Battleship, the latest two-hour-plus movie based on a Hasbro toy, is predictably a movie assembled by creative committee. At the same time, based on the movie the committee delivered, the members of that imaginary brain trust are more thoughtfully eccentric than one might expect.

Imagine, if you will, a meeting of the minds headed by the world's biggest Michael Bay fan and chaired by a gawky scientist with a thing for Billy Bob Thornton. This confab gathers retirees from a veterans' home, fans of R&B and Tadanobu Asano (the Johnny Depp of Japan!), a toy-company executive who also happens to be the 12-year-old M. Night Shyamalan, and a guy who saw J.J. Abrams' last two movies and dug their extended use of lens flares.

If Battleship is any indication, the only pop culture mavens missing from this coalition of the willing were the Village People and Frankenberry. It isn't a personal, smart or especially clever popcorn movie: In fact, it's dumb as dirt and monumentally contrived. But somehow, the unsung dream team that put it together got the job done.

Read the full review here.