It’s always a delight to see crowds lined up in Hillsboro Village for an arthouse blockbuster like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood — currently the second-biggest grosser in Belcourt history, and gaining on Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. But it’s when the theater takes on movies it knows will have a limited audience that it most proves its necessity — as in 2006, when it was the only theater in the Southeast to play Bela Tarr’s 435-minute Hungarian masterwork Satantango. This year, the conversation piece was Norte, the End of History, Phillippine filmmaker Lav Diaz’s billowing four-hour reworking of Crime and Punishment, a movie that maddened some critics and left others convinced they’d seen one of the movies of the decade. I was curious but expected it to be a chore; instead, I was entranced — by Diaz’s liquid long takes, invitations to a searching eye, and by his elemental consideration of the persistence of good and evil. What’s more important than how few people saw it was the passion of those who did. In a two-day run, one of the city’s most hardcore cinephiles, Kin Cosner, managed to see it twice. Thanks, Belcourt.
