Experimenter
⋆⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars • Rating: PG-13 for thematic material and brief strong language • Theater: Uptown
"Experimenter" is a dramatic feature about the life and work of Stanley Milgram, whose Yale study is the 20th century's best known psychological experiment. You know, the one with the fake electric shocks? In 1961, Milgram wanted to study obedience and authority, but he told his subjects he was testing something else, whether punishment helped people learn.
He put a "teacher" in one room in front of a console that supposedly administered painful electric shocks, and a "learner" in the other, hooked up to wires. Every time the learner answered a question wrong, the teacher had to administer an electric shock. With each wrong answer, the shock level was increased.
Milgram found, to his horror, that in many cases the teachers went ahead and completed the full round of shocks, despite the learner's screaming. They obeyed, not because they were forced, but because someone in authority told them to proceed.
The beauty of director Michael Almereyda's approach is that he acknowledges, just in the way he films the story, that Milgram's research revealed something unsettling within human nature. As Milgram, Peter Sarsgaard narrates his own story on camera, sometimes walking down a corridor with an elephant following him. Often, in the midst of a scene, he will turn to the camera and start addressing the audience.
Seemingly free-associative in style, "Experimenter" makes a sober and chilling point. Maybe it's not just a matter of people feeling they must follow orders. Maybe people want to follow orders because they crave permission to be cruel. In wartime, this impulse, when let loose, can be catastrophic, but even just on a day-to-day basis — the cop who gives you an unjust ticket, the person behind the counter who won't cooperate — it has a way of souring life.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Bone Tomahawk
⋆⋆⋆ out of four stars • Rating: Unrated (grisly violence, sex) • Theater: Eden Prairie
On the list of things the world needs, a mash-up of "The Searchers" and "Hannibal" is pretty far down there. But if there is going to be such a thing, the smartly cast and well-crafted "Bone Tomahawk" fills the bill nicely.
Kurt Russell is flinty Franklin Hunt, the sheriff of a small, sunburnt town on the edge of the Western frontier who leads a posse into hostile territory to rescue his deputy (Evan Jonigkeit), the town doctor (Lili Simmons) and a strange drifter (David Arquette) from the clutches of a tribe of renegade American Indians. Now, this isn't just any tribe but one that has turned into a clan of cave-dwelling cannibals called troglodytes. (Seemingly added to blunt charges of racism, an Indian character named the Professor arrives early on to explain that these guys are no longer Indian and are just evil.)
Rounding out Franklin's group is a strong cast that includes Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins and Patrick Wilson.