Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the long-awaited feature film version of John le Carre's classic bestselling novel. The thriller is directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In). The screenplay adaptation is by the writing team of Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan. The time is 1973. The Cold War of the mid-20th Century continues to damage international relations. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), a.k.a. MI6 and code-named the Circus, is striving to keep pace with other countries' espionage efforts and to keep the U.K. secure. The head of the Circus, known as Control (John Hurt), personally sends dedicated operative Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) into Hungary. But Jim's mission goes bloodily awry, and Control is forced out of the Circus - as is his top lieutenant, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a career spy with razor-sharp senses. Estranged from his absent wife Ann, Smiley is soon called in to see undersecretary Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney); he is to be rehired in secret at the government's behest, as there is a gnawing fear that the Circus has long been compromised by a double agent, or mole, working for the Soviets and jeopardizing England. Supported by younger agent Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), Smiley parses Circus activities past and present. In trying to track and identify the mole, Smiley is haunted by his decades-earlier interaction with the shadowy Russian spy master Karla. The mole's trail remains cold until maverick field agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) unexpectedly contacts Lacon. While undercover in Turkey, Ricki has fallen for a betrayed married woman, Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova), who claims to possess crucial intelligence. Separately, Smiley learns that Control narrowed down the list of mole suspects to five men. They are the ambitious Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), whom he had code-named Tinker; suavely confident Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), dubbed Tailor; stalwart Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), called Soldier; officious Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), dubbed Poor Man; and - Smiley himself. Even before the startling truth is revealed, the emotional and physical tolls on the players enmeshed in the deadly international spy game will escalate...

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 Sexuality hasn't been the same since Sigmund Freud proposed it's the primary reason for anyone doing anything. Generations since have taken his suggestion to withhold repressing urges just about as far as they can. A movie about Freud's philosophies is right up the alley of director David Cronenberg, whose films often view sexuality as a clue to what hides beneath personalities.

A Dangerous Method, adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play The Talking Cure, doesn't make Freud the central character. That position goes to the professor's colleague Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), who is initially devoted to Freud's theories in his own practice but starts having doubts that sex is the reason for everything in human behavior. At the same time, Jung's libido is steering his life.

Jung has a patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), who arrived as severely hysterical, a condition the doctor uses Freud's "talking cure" procedure of psychoanalysis to identify as masochism learned in childhood. Jung hires Spielrein as a research assistant while continuing her therapy, a decision raising suspicion in his wife of convenience, Emma (Sarah Gadon). Nothing illicit happens at first, with Jung repressing his feelings for professional reasons.

Every urge needs a triggering effect, and Jung's is the arrival of another patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), a psychologist committed by his father after a deviant lifestyle. Otto perfectly reads the relationship between doctor and patient, prodding Jung to carry out his desire, and soon Jung begins fulfilling Spielrein's with spankings.

Meanwhile, Jung tries hiding his indiscretions from Freud (Viggo Mortensen), who doesn't appear often yet his rationalization of everything through sex hangs over each frame of Cronenberg's film. Mortensen plays him with the puffed-up authority of an expert in a science so new that nothing he says can be refuted. Jung's doubt and professional breach with Spielrein are revealed, and the resulting chasm between innovators reverberates among scholars today.

The pleasure of Cronenberg's movie is hearing these characters speak so eloquently on the subject of sex, and watching actors raise their game a bit for it. Cronenberg again dabbles in kinky behavior, but here it doesn't seem as forced as the automobile erotica of Crash, or the gynecological horrors of Dead Ringers. A Dangerous Method is a movie believing the most formidable sex organ really is the brain.

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 In the early summer of 1956, 23 year-old Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), just down from Oxford and determined to make his way in the film business, worked as a lowly assistant on the set of 'The Prince and the Showgirl'. The film that famously united Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), who was also on honeymoon with her new husband, the playwright Aurthur Miller (Dougray Scott). Nearly 40 years on, his diary account The Prince, the Showgirl and Me was published, but one week was missing and this was published some years later as My Week with Marilyn - this is the story of that week. When Arthur Miller leaves England, the coast is clear for Colin to introduce Marilyn to some of the pleasures of British life; an idyllic week in which he escorted a Monroe desperate to get away from her retinue of Hollywood hangers-on and the pressures of work.

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You probably know that Joe Haege is no stranger to dramatic performance if you've ever seen any of his various bands (31 Knots, Tu Fawning) or seen him perform solo. Or perhaps you caught his turn in Field Guide to November Days, where his fine acting was overshadowed by the fact that the movie was insufferably twee. But we did learn that Haege does a beautiful job of both kissing boys and crying while riding a bicycle, so I was eager to see him in his next leading role, in How the Fire Fell as Edmund Creffield, a Christian cult leader who during the turn of the 20th century founded the Bride of Christ Church in Corvallis. And thank the Bride of Christ, Haege's found a film that both demonstrates the absurd breadth of his talent (that soundtrack? co-written by Haege with John Askew) and is interesting in subject matter, execution, and is awesome enough for it to be surprising that it's director Edward P. Davee's first feature. Apparently one of Portland's most talented filmmakers has been hiding out in the AV department of Reed College.

The degree of Haege's responsibility in this role is hard to underestimate. Were there any flicker of hesitation in his delivery as a hysteria-inducing holy roller the whole thing would have come crashing down. In fact for most of the film he's the only actor who does much speaking at all.

The creepiness of the film is sustained by its ambient delivery, and nearly every uncanny shot makes the hairs on your neck twitch. Davee's choice of subject was well made, but of equal importance is his decision to be expository but not particularly biographical. The bones of the story are that Creffield built a following through fervent sermonizing, often in people's homes. He was convincing enough that he was able to claim a whole slew of wives (polygamy being the benchmark of success in patriarchal religious cults), naming one 17-year-old girl to be his "bride of Christ." He also emphasized nudity as a way to tap into that Garden of Eden feeling, cursed San Francisco on the night before an earthquake and widespread fires brought the city to its knees, was once tarred and feathered, and was eventually shot and killed by the brother of his Bride of Christ. (The brother was acquitted.) 

It's a lot more interesting than crying on a bicycle. See this one.

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"The Way" is an inspirational story about family, friends, and the challenges of navigating a complicated world. Martin Sheen plays Tom, an American doctor who comes to France to collect the remains of his adult son (played by Emilio Estevez), who died while walking the Camino de Santiago, also known as The Way of Saint James. Embarking on the historical pilgrimage to honor his s memory, Tom meets other pilgrims from around the world: a Dutchman (Yorick van Wageningen), a Canadian (Deborah Kara Unger) and an Irishman (James Nesbitt). Eventually, Tom discovers the difference between "the life we live and the life we choose." THE WAY, written and directed by Emilio Estevez, was filmed along the actual Camino de Santiago.

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It pains me to write this, perhaps proving I am caving into peer pressure, but you can follow us on FaceBook. https://www.facebook.com/DarksideCinema

Oh, that burns....