NOW IN THEATERS

BOMBSHELL: THE HEDY LAMARR STORY

The “bombshell” in this documentary’s title is twofold. One is Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born screen siren from Algiers and Samson and Delilah. The other is Hedy Kiesler Markey, the married name Lamarr used on the 1942 patent for her frequency-hopping technology, which was designed to keep Allied torpedoes on course in World War II and later led to the development of Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi. Writer-director Alexandra Dean’s aim is to reconcile the two

Hedys, telling the significant story of Lamarr’s greatest invention as well as the multiple iterations of the actress’s persona. Through interviews with subjects like author Richard Rhodes and directors Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, the documentary casts Lamarr as a prodigy whose innovation changed the course of technology over the 20th century and beyond. If the film’s pace seems too frenetic at times — hopping as it does from the actress’s movies to inventions to husbands (Lamarr had six), with perhaps too little time allowed in between for reflection — we might bear in mind the unrelenting drive of the wonder woman herself. Not rated. 90 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Molly Boyle)

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

Nothing happens very fast in this sun-drenched, languorous love story adapted by director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter James Ivory from André Aciman’s much-acclaimed novel of sexual awakening. Seventeenyear-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) whiles away his summers in the early 1980s at the vacation villa of his parents in northern Italy. He reads voraciously, plays piano, swims, dallies with girls, and waits for something important to happen in his life. Then Oliver (Armie Hammer), a tall, blond Adonis of an American graduate student, arrives to fill a summer internship with Elio’s father, an American classics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg). The young men circle each other warily. When they finally come together, it is the teenager who makes the decisive move. The filming is discreet, but the combustion is intense. And there is a scene with a peach that may change forever the way you look at that fruit. Rated R. 130 minutes. In English, and French and Italian with subtitles. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)

COCO

Pixar Animation heads south of the border to tell a story about a boy in rural Mexico named Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) who dreams of becoming a famous musician like his hero, the deceased Ernesto de la Cruz. Miguel’s family forbids any member from pursuing a career in music, however, because of an ancestor who left the clan for those very reasons. During a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration, Miguel crosses over to the Land of the Dead to seek out de la Cruz and reverse this rule. Pixar populates this afterlife with a faithful imagining of Mexican folk art that includes bright colors, lively skeletons, and spirit animals that seem to glow. As with Pixar’s best work, it’s the script that shines brightest — and this airtight example includes a number of satisfying plot twists and a helping of heart. Rated R. 109 minutes. Screens in 2-D only at Regal Stadium 14. (Robert Ker)

THE COMMUTER

In what is now a regular routine in his latter-day career, Liam Neeson plays a man who discovers that his family is in danger and finds himself shouting threats to villains over a cell phone. He’s Michael MacCauley, a salesman who is contacted by a mysterious caller on his commute home and told he will be given $100,000 if he discovers a hidden passenger on the train. Thus begins a complex game in which he finds himself embroiled in a criminal conspiracy. Vera Farmiga also stars. Rated PG-13. 104 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)

DARKEST HOUR

Gary Oldman is extraordinary as Winston Churchill. Wreathed in fat, lumbering through the halls of Parliament or the rooms of his own sumptuous residence with a cigar lodged firmly in his mouth, the actor disappears and the legendary British wartime prime minister is all there is to see. Director Joe Wright gives us Britain at her darkest hour, with Adolf Hitler running roughshod over Europe and poised to cross the channel. King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn), with considerable reluctance, invites Churchill to form a cabinet. The movie shows us a man isolated and with the burden of his country’s survival squarely on his shoulders. But despite the stakes, Darkest Hour struggles to get us involved. At the end of it all, despite Oldman’s bravura performance, we are not as enlightened as we would like to be about the many contradictions of the man whose bulldog determination saved Britain. Rated PG-13. 125 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)

DJANGO

The Third Reich frowned on jazz, but there was a toetapping infectiousness to the music that overcame racist ideology. It was this that kept the great guitarist Django Reinhardt from harm during the German occupation of France, and it is this that provides the basis for Étienne Comar’s loosely based biographical thriller. Reinhardt (Reda Kateb) was under a double whammy with the Reich: He was a jazz musician, and he was a Gypsy. But there are music lovers among the occupying forces, and Django feels his fame makes him untouchable. An old flame, Louise (Cécile de France), convinces him otherwise. He and his family slip away from Paris and join a contingent of fellow Romany asylum seekers near the Swiss border, where Reinhardt finally must grips with the horror of the Nazi’s extermination of his people. Comar provides a workmanlike if not sparkling pace to this mostly fictionalized effort. But the music is good and plentiful, and whether it’s your introduction or return to Django Reinhardt’s wizardry, the movie provides a decent package for it. Not rated. 117 minutes. In French with subtitles. The Screen. (Jonathan Richards)

THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

Hugh Jackman plays P.T. Barnum, professional showman and a founder of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, in this musical based on the man’s life and career. Zac Efron plays actor Phillip Carlyle and Zendaya is trapeze performer Anne Wheeler, two of the people drawn into Barnum’s orbit to become entertainers in what Barnum dubbed the Greatest Show on Earth. Rated PG. 139 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

I, TONYA

The odds were stacked high against tabloid pariah and former Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) from the start, as director Craig Gillespie (Lars

and the Real Girl) demonstrates in this quick-witted, if uneven, take on Harding’s stranger-than-fiction saga. Her hell of a mother, LaVona (Allison Janney), was the driving force behind the bluecollar skater’s unlikely rise to the top of a sport designed for rich girls. The wacky plot to handicap Harding’s rival Nancy Kerrigan, dreamed up by Harding’s (now ex) husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), is the movie’s bread and butter, and there’s a lot of fun in the retelling. But the flippancy of the film’s Goodfellasstyle packaging overshadows its depiction of the darker side of Harding’s life: the domestic violence she suffered at the hands of first her mother, then Gillooly. I, Tonya relies heavily on Harding’s sass to give a too-often bizarrely lighthearted account of the tragic circumstances that led to her notoriety. As with the blaring headlines that heralded Harding’s descent into scandal, one can’t help but feel that the real story seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. Rated R. 120 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Molly Boyle)

INSIDIOUS: THE LAST KEY

A haunted house in a fictional New Mexico town is the setting for this horror movie, the fourth in the Insidious franchise and the second prequel. Lin Shaye stars as Elise Rainier, a medium who travels to her childhood home to investigate the supernatural activity there. What she finds is an evil presence that has been waiting to draw her into the dark realm that the franchise refers to as “The Further.” Rated PG-13. 103 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

JANE

Brett Morgen’s remarkable documentary is built on a culling of some 100 hours of recently rediscovered National Geographic footage of Jane Goodall’s early days with the chimpanzees in Africa. In 1960, at the behest of the great paleontologist Louis Leakey, she arrived in Tanzania to make a firsthand study of the behavior of chimps in the wild and explore a possible link of kinship to early humans. Chimps, she discovered, gather in social groups, experience humanlike emotions of love, compassion, and jealousy, and are even capable of employing rudimentary tools. She also found that life among the chimpanzees is not paradise, with feuds and rages, the tragedy of a disease epidemic, and even war. But the overwhelming impact of this documentary is one of awe, wonder, and discovery. Morgen ties his portrait together with an interview with Goodall today, in which the eighty-threeyear-old legend looks back and reflects, on camera and in voiceover, on the adventure she began over a half-century ago. Jane is a gift. Rated PG. 90 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Jonathan Richards)

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

This sequel to the 1995 Robin Williams-led adventure film Jumanji finds the board game of the original transformed to a video game for modern audiences. Four teenagers stumble into this game while serving detention, and when they press “start,” they’re sucked into its world. Now finding themselves embodied by the avatars they selected (played by Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan), they must find a way to survive the dangers of the jungle and return to their normal lives. Whereas the 1995 film stacked disparate perils and goofy jokes atop each other to whip up a frenzy of cartoonish chaos, this update escorts viewers from one action sequence to the next at a sluggish pace, stopping for character development when the heroes aren’t running from rhinos or staring down snakes. The cast is lively, charismatic, and ideal for the scenes of bonding and blossoming romances, but these moments are not staged with enough zip to keep up with the actors’ wit. Rated PG-13. 119 minutes. Screens in 2-D only at Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)

LADY BIRD

Greta Gerwig’s extraordinary coming-of-age solo directorial debut feels intimately autobiographical. Not so, says Gerwig. Like her title character (Saoirse Ronan), she grew up in Sacramento and went to a Catholic school, but she was not the slacker rebel with dyed hair and an invented name she has created for Ronan to play. The film takes Lady Bird through the tribulations of senior year and partying and friendship and first love and the dream of heading East to college despite grades that make her college counselor burst out laughing. The heart of the movie is Lady Bird’s contentious relationship with her mother, played to intense, loving, passiveaggressive perfection by the great Laurie Metcalf. Gerwig has