NOW IN THEATERS

ARRIVAL

Rising director Denis Villeneuve, adapting Ted Chiang’s story about large spacecrafts that have landed all over Earth, offers a quiet thriller that plays like an arthouse version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Amy Adams stars as a brilliant linguist who, along with a physicist (Jeremy Renner), is charged by an Army colonel (Forest Whitaker) to communicate with the aliens. This thematically rich story unfolds slowly, often without music, but never feels slow. It offers philosophical questions about how we experience life and emphasizes the importance of language and togetherness — the story’s biggest barriers are not between people and aliens but between Earth’s nations. Expect a few big plot twists, which not only dazzle you with their cleverness but also add renewed emotional heft to everything that has come before. Rated PG-13. 116 minutes. Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)

AWAKENING IN TAOS

Using rare photographs, archival footage, and voiceovers based on Mabel Dodge Luhan’s own correspondences, tells the story of the art patron’s early years as a socialite in Buffalo through to her establishment of a Taos haven for modernist artists and writers including D.H. Lawrence, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The film, narrated by Ali MacGraw with Leslie Harrell Dillen as Mabel Dodge Luhan, chronicles Luhan’s several marriages, the deep spiritual connection she felt with her last husband Tony Lujan, and her struggle to find a place to express her independent nature. Not rated. 63 minutes. Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Not reviewed)

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS

Training golden eagles to aid the Kazakh hunters of Mongolia has been a traditional skill, handed down from father to son, for generations. The Eagle

Huntress tells the dramatic story of one girl, thirteen-year-old Aisholpan Nurgaiv, who trains with her father to be the first female eagle hunter in her family. This moving documentary by director Otto Bell, narrated by Daisy Ridley, balances a portrait of Kazakh family life and culture with breathtaking aerial footage of the Altai Mountains by cinematographer Simon Niblett. Aisholpan inhabits a harsh, unforgiving terrain, where the Kazakhs live in symbiotic relationship with their environment and hunt out of necessity. An intimate look at the relationship between father and daughter, the film is a feelgood, inspirational story for all ages, especially for young girls. Rated G. 87 minutes. In Kazakh with subtitles. Regal DeVargas. (Michael Abatemarco) FENCES It’s taken 30 years for August Wilson’s prizewinning drama, Fences, to make it from Broadway to the screen. Fences is about words, hopes and dreams, pride and anger — and about songs from the heart. Much of the film takes place in the backyard of a house in a rundown black neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The house belongs to Troy Maxson, a fifty-three-year-old former Negro League ballplayer whose best years are behind him. Denzel Washington, who plays Troy, also directs, and matching him stroke for stroke is the great Viola Davis as Rose, Troy’s long-suffering wife, who provides wisdom and ballast to his larger-than-life mood swings. The apartheid that robs the dignity of a black man in America is the focus of Wilson’s story, but in Davis’ Rose we see another rung down the ladder: a black woman. Washington’s direction honors his fine cast, and celebrates the words of the playwright, which seem to have survived almost intact from the stage. Rated PG-13. 138 minutes. Regal DeVargas; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards) HIDDEN FIGURES This movie tells the story of three AfricanAmerican women, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), brilliant mathematicians who were employed in NASA’s program in the early ‘60s. Their jobs carried a secondclass status that was defined by color and exacerbated by gender. Director and co-screenwriter Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) uses a traditional structure in adapting (with co-writer Allison Shroeder) Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book about these pioneering women in the American space program. There’s nothing gritty or groundbreaking in his storytelling techniques, but the comfortable, movie-moment-strewn approach seems to suit the tale, and moves it along in a way that’s accessible, satisfying, and extremely effective. Rated PG. 127 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown; DreamCatcher. (Jonathan Richards) JACKIE Pablo Larraín’s Jackie focuses on three days in 1963, from that fateful Nov. 22 motorcade in Dallas through the state funeral for the slain president on the 25th. Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy, and she makes piercingly real the anguish, the disorientation, and the determination of this young woman coping with tragedy. Decisions had to be made quickly, from the planning of the funeral to the rushed removal from the White House. Portman hits convincing notes in conveying the human drama, and there are stretches where she succeeds in inhabiting the young widow — but there is also a sense of impersonation. Larraín, the gifted Chilean director, makes his American movie debut here, and takes a decent stab at humanizing the person we have mythologized beyond recognition. But a real connection remains elusive. Rated R. 100 minutes. Regal DeVargas; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards) LA LA LAND The Great Depression of the 1930s gave rise to one of the great American art forms, the movie musical. When the going got desperate, the desperate got escapist, and found another reality to live in, at least for 90 or so magical minutes at a time. And now here comes Damien Chazelle, the director of Whiplash, to salve the wounds of a bruised and riven country with a movie that’s a throwback and an homage to the movies, especially the musicals, of an earlier age. La La Land, like so many stories before it, pays tribute to the young artist with a dream. Here the young hopefuls are Mia (Emma Stone), an aspiring actress, and Seb (Ryan Gosling), a jazz pianist. La La Land wears its movie influences lovingly, from the opening Cinemascope credit to the Technicolor pastels and brights that bathe its scenes in nostalgia. The story moves through love and loss, triumphs and disappointments. Seb’s dream of a jazz club gets beaten down, and Mia loses heart, abandons her quest, and goes home. That’s not the end of it, of course, and there are plenty of highs to come, but it’s a warning: Things don’t always work out the way you think, or hope, or dream. Rated PG-13. 128 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards) LION A five-year-old boy named Saroo (Sunny Pawar) falls asleep on an out-of-service train in a smalltown station in central India, and when he wakes, it’s taken him a thousand miles from home. He winds up in a Calcutta orphanage, and is eventually adopted by an Australian couple (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and raised in Hobart, Tasmania. Twenty years later he’s played by Dev Patel, and determined to find his way back to his mother and siblings. He relies on childhood memories and Google Earth to find his home. Lion is a true story, adapted by director Garth Davis from the autobiographical tale by Saroo Brierley. The first half is wonderful, with Greig Fraser’s cinematography framing the tiny kid against the enormity of the world in which he is lost. The second half loses steam. But the ending will wring tears out of a turnip. Rated PG-13. 118 minutes. In English, Bengali, and Hindi with subtitles. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards) MANCHESTER BY THE SEA Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan tells a tale steeped in a coastal New England winter, and in the permafrost anguish of terrible personal tragedy. Casey Affleck is remarkable as Lee Chandler, living as a super in an apartment complex in Boston when he gets the news that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of a heart attack. Returning to his hometown, Lee discovers that Joe has left him with the responsibility for his sixteen-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges, excellent, among a cast of equally fine performers). But it’s old demons that torment Lee’s soul, and running into former friends and acquaintances, as well as his ex-wife Randy (Michelle Williams), bring them unbearably to the surface. Lonergan moves back and forth in time seamlessly through flashbacks, keeping the story compelling, sometimes very funny, filled with subtlety, and always real. Rated R. 137 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards) MIFUNE: THE LAST SAMURAI Director Steven Okazaki’s tribute to actor Toshirô Mifune is a look at one of cinema’s most enduring figures, the feudal samurai, most powerfully on display in the films of Akira Kurosawa and other Japanese directors. A handsome man with a commanding voice, Mifune was a natural for the screen, but as the filmmakers focus more on the legends he brought to life than on his personal history, he remains abstract. Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Mifune’s sons, along with Japanese actors, film technicians, and

Silence, at Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown