“The Loneliest Whale,” a cinematic quest to find a leviathan that scientists believe has spent its entire life in solitude, calling out at a frequency different from any other whale, is opening Sept. 10 at Nebraska’s Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center. Also continuing to show is “The Evening Hour.”
“The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52” explores human-sized efforts to understand our large aquatic counterparts. The documentary explores the whale’s lonely plight and what it can teach about our changing relationship to the oceans. The documentary is directed by Joshua Zeman and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and Adrian Grenier.
Showing through Sept. 23, “The Loneliest Whale” is rated PG for brief smoking, unsettling whaling imagery and language.
In “The Evening Hour,” the autumnal mountains of southern Appalachia hold a haunting power within which Cole Freeman (Philip Ettinger of “First Reformed”), maintains an uneasy equilibrium, looking after the old and infirm in the community while selling their excess painkillers to local addicts to help make ends meet. When an old friend, Terry Rose (Cosmo Jarvis, “Lady Macbeth”), returns with dangerous new plans that threaten the fragile balance Cole has crafted amidst the addiction, economic stress and environmental devastation that have his declining mining town in a stranglehold, his world and identity are thrown into deep disarray. Life is pushed even further out of balance by the sudden homecoming of Cole’s estranged mother, Ruby (Lili Taylor, “The Conjuring”), increasing conflict with the region’s true drug dealer, Everett (Marc Menchaca, “Ozark”) and shifting relationships with two local women. Faced with an impossible set of choices and intensifying pressure from all sides, Cole soon decides that he has to take action to save the tight-knit fabric of family, friendship, land and history that binds everything and everyone he loves.
“The Evening Hour” is showing at the Ross through Sept. 16. It is not rated.
Show times are available online or by calling the Ross film information line at 402-472-5353.
