Indie Picks: At The Movies This Weekend

As we wait for the flood of Oscar bait (which starts to really kick up next week), we get one more week that has its fair share of niche releases. The Drafthouse has some more popular 2011 Fantastic Fest titles to screen at the Alamo South Lamar, while the Violet Crown brings us an acclaimed French film fresh off a held over month-long run at New York's Film Forum.

Jeanne Disson & Zoe Heran star in Tomboy (Rocket Releasing)

Tomboy (Violet Crown Cinema)
The sophomore effort from director Céline Sciamma tells the story of Laure, a 10-year-old girl who creates a new identity for herself as a boy after her family moves during the summer. The new kids begin to know her as Mikael and she continues to hide the truth even knowing that the summer will come to an end and going to school will reveal her big secret. On the festival circuit, this one earned lofty comparisons to the naturalism of Truffaut's The 400 Blows and the work of Steven Spielberg.

Coming straight from a successful run at Film Forum, this is exactly the kind of booking that Austin needs to champion to ensure we continue to get some of the world's finest films on area screens. We're looking forward to checking this one out over the weekend.

Project Nim (Violet Crown Cinema)
This movie played at the Regal Arbor back in July, but now it's made the Oscar documentary shortlist and the Violet Crown have teamed up with the Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary for another one week run. It holds a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Nim Chimpsky was the basis of an extended research project at Columbia University examining the capacity of animal communication. Once Nim was two weeks old, the young chimp started to live 24 hours a day with a human family and was raised to learn American Sign Language.

Director James Marsh (Man On Wire) has made a documentary about the experiment using large amounts of archived footage which looks at the ethical and emotional experiences between Nim and his human trainers.

Primatologist Bob Ingersoll, featured in the film, will be IN ATTENDANCE for the 4:40, 7:00 & 9:20 shows on Friday (12/9) & Saturday (12/10).

Also this weekend:
- Mozart's Sister opens at the Regal Arbor almost five months after it opened in New York and Los Angeles. Not exactly a timely booking, but classical music lovers and fans of historical dramas may still be intrigued. The Hollywood Reporter called it a "handsome and achingly sad period piece."

- One documentary that we missed as opening last week at the Cinemark Tinseltown 17 is Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey. It continues there for another week of showtimes. Our own Elizabeth Stoddard reported that there "were few dry eyes in the house" when she saw it screened at SXSW earlier this year.

- Alamo South Lamar will be screening Fantastic Fest favorites Knuckle (read our Fantastic Fest review) and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within for one week only. Brazil has submitted the latter as their official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards.

- The Alamo Ritz brings National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation back to the big screen tonight & tomorrow night. There is also a Video Hate Squad screening of the never-on-DVD flick Elves on Sunday night at 10pm.