At the movies: Taking Woodstock.

Director Ang Lee likes to tell stories about people making their way out of repressive lives and finding their own paths to liberation, and Taking Woodstock fits that theme perfectly. It’s a subtle, small film that nonetheless makes late-60s hippie ideology appealing, specifically because of how it shows the impact of those ideas on a lonely life.

In 1969, Elliot Tiber (The Daily Show’s Demetri Martin) is trying to keep himself afloat while helping keep his parent’s upstate New York hotel in business. When a fledgling rock ‘n roll festival finds themselves in need of a place to take over for a few weeks, Elliot decides to open up his small town to the Woodstock nation (as well as his own compartmentalized self to the possibility of genuine smalltown eroticism- "you smell good,like an apple fritter" possibly being the best pick-up line the cinema has given us so far this year), making history in the process.

It’s a strange world we live in right now, and despite a dismissive debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Taking Woodstock is the kind of film that feels like it has a place in the modern multiplex. It takes the abstraction of liberation that the peace and love moment offered up, then shows us that working on a person-by-person basis, with the end result of making the viewer feel a little bit better about humanity when the film ends. It’s a sweet trifle of a film with great performances from Martin and Liev Schreiber (as cross-dressing former marine Vilma), and its genial sense of warm-hearted community will win you over completely.

At the movies: Defiance.

After the 1941 Nazi invasion of Byelorussia results in the deaths and deportations of over fifty thousand people, the brothers Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell) Bielski must evade death squads and capture in the forests they have spent their whole lives learning and living in. Over time, they provide a refuge for Jews escaping the SS death machine, finding their own place and community in the process.

Daniel Craig, refining his Munich credentials and helping drive a Jews-with-guns film, again takes that little-used cinematic archetype and makes it his own. Similarly, here’s a WWII film that tells a different story than what we as audiences and observers of history are used to, and director Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall) is allowed to make another little-told tale of war come alive.

Zwick follows his Glory template here, and it still works. It seems disrespectful to ask for a bit more leavening humor (the line “we’re accountants” is dark humor at its finest), but touches like that allow more life into what, at times, feels a bit bound. The three brothers are each fascinating personae, and each of the lead actors comes at things from a different place; I find Bell’s Asael’s arc to be the most wrenching, but there’s nothing to stop viewers from finding their own way inside the film. Like the Bielskis' community, there are many different ways of achieving a similar goal.