Movies for adults? Check out the Magic Lantern

Above: "The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52" opens Friday at the Magic Lantern Theatre. (Photo/Bleeker Street Media)

In an era when movies mostly mean cars exploding, alien creatures, fashionable femme fatales, paranormal adventures or children’s fare, it’s nice to know that Spokane has a theater – the Magic Lantern – that screens films aimed at adults.

That’s the case this week, too, when the Lantern will add two new films to its slate, a documentary feature titled “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” and a Korean-language drama titled “The Woman Who Ran.”

“The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52”: Anthropomorphism is when we humans attribute our own ways of being to animals. Dubbing the so-called “52 Hertz Whale” as the “loneliest whale” is what adds poignancy to this documentary feature about a whale that calls out at 52 hertz – which is a frequency considered unrecognizable by other whales. Thus, the creature is thought to have “lived its life in complete solitude.” Directed by Joshua Zeman, the film explores the search for this solo mammal.

Mark Jenkins, Slant magazine: “Zeman punctuates the at-sea scenes with sequences about the brutal history of whaling, the growing danger of ship strikes, and the huge effect of the 1970 album ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale,’ which inspired many to think for the first time about saving whales.”

Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews: “(T)he work is very informative, not only about 52, but about the whale songs that engaged human interest in their fates and the perils facing them in today's oceans.”

“The Woman Who Ran”: Written and directed by Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, this narrative film – Hong’s 24th – explores the life of a woman (played by Hong’s real-life wife Kim Min-hee) who meets up with three friends while her husband is on a business trip. Each visit results in an ever-evolving sense of … well, what it means to be human?

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: “Pretty much all the way through, nothing very sensational seems to be happening. And yet the movie's sensational meaning is hiding in plain sight: in the title.”

Jessica Klang, Variety: “Hong made a feature called ‘Woman is the Future of Man,’ but it's the delightfully slight, slightly delightful ‘The Woman Who Ran’ that assumes that that future is now.”

That’s it for now. I’ll tackle the scheduled mainstream offerings tomorrow.