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. 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 actress’s multiple personae. 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 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. Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) whiles away his summers in the early 1980s at his parents’ vacation villa 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. Call Me By
Your Name has garnered three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Chalamet), and Best Adapted Screenplay. Rated R. 130 minutes. In English, French, and Italian with subtitles. 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 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. The film is Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Feature. Rated R. 109 minutes. Screens in 2-D only at Regal Stadium 14. (Robert Ker)
DARKEST HOUR
Gary Oldman, up for an Academy Award for this role, is extraordinary as Winston Churchill. Wreathed in fat, lumbering through the halls of Parliament or the rooms of his private 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. The movie is also nominated this year for Best Picture. Rated PG-13. 125 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
FOREVER MY GIRL
Alex Roe plays Liam Page, a country singer who left his girlfriend Josie (Jessica Rothe) behind to pursue fame and fortune. When he returns to his hometown eight years later, he finds Josie owning a coffee shop and raising a girl (Abby Ryder Fortson) who just happens to be eight years old. Liam then sets about returning to his roots and reinventing himself as the stable man and father that he never was. Rated PG. 104 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
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)
HAPPY END
This film begins with a narrow vertical video image shot on a cellphone camera. The impact of that footage lingers, making us uncomfortably aware that we’re voyeurs of all that follows. The story centers on the dysfunctional household of the Laurent family, which includes patriarch Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a crusty old tyrant with incipient dementia and a death wish; his daughter Anne (Isabelle Huppert), who runs the family business; her surgeon brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) and his new wife and child; and his thirteen-year-old daughter Eve (Fantine Harduin), who moves in after the apparent suicide attempt of her mother. Director Michael Haneke scatters hints that this film may contain elements of a sequel to his Oscar-winning Amour (2012), but the heartbreaking tenderness of that touching story is nowhere to be seen. This is Haneke cutting with cold steel. Not rated. 107 minutes. In French with subtitles. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Jonathan Richards)
HOSTILES
Writer and director Scott Cooper’s Western plays fast and loose with the facts, but its three protagonists are vibrantly brought to life in a story of hope, redemption, and survival. Christian Bale is terrific as a soon-to-retire Army officer given the job of escorting a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi, also giving a powerful turn) from New Mexico to Wyoming. Also on this journey is a widow (the excellent Rosamund Pike) who witnessed the massacre of her husband and children. The film paints the West as it once was: wild, uncompromising, beautiful, yet forgiving — just like we all want to be, maybe. Rated R. 133 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Robert Nott)
I, TONYA
From the start, the odds were stacked high against figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie, up for a Best Actress Oscar), as director Craig Gillespie demonstrates in this quick-witted, if uneven, take on Harding’s strangerthan-fiction tabloid saga. Her hell of a mother, LaVona (Allison Janney, nominated for her supporting role), was the driving force behind the blue-collar 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 Goodfellas-style packaging overshadows its depiction of the darker side of Harding’s life: the domestic violence she suffered at the hands of first her mother and then Gillooly. I, Tonya relies heavily on Harding’s sass to give a toooften 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. Violet Crown. (Molly Boyle)
JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
This sequel to the 1995 Robin Williams-led adventure film Jumanji finds the board game of the original transformed into a video game for modern audiences. Four teenagers stumble upon the 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 — Oscar-nominated for both Best Picture and Best Director — feels intimately autobiographical. Not so, says Gerwig. Like her title character (Saoirse Ronan, up for Best Actress), she grew up in Sacramento and went to a Catholic school, but she was not the slacker rebel with dyed hair that 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, passive-aggressive perfection by the great Laurie Metcalf, who is a contender for Best Supporting Actress. Gerwig has enlisted superb actors with theater backgrounds, including actor/playwright Tracy Letts as the dad, and the wonderful Lois Smith as an understanding nun. Rated R. 93 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
LOVING VINCENT
Vincent van Gogh was a brilliant artist who was also a bit mad. That might apply as well to Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, the creators of Loving Vincent, a movie that is being billed as the world’s first fully hand-painted feature. The story follows a vaguely Citizen Kane-like template, with a dead letter serving as this film’s Rosebud. The letter, from Vincent (Robert Gulaczyk) to his brother Theo (Cezary Łukaszewicz), is discovered by Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), the postmaster at Arles, two years after the painter’s death. Roulin dispatches his son Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver it. The story, which raises questions about Vincent’s suicide, is serviceable, but the real appeal of Loving Vincent is in its extravagant visuals of van Gogh paintings brought to animated life and used as armatures for movie scenes. Nominated for Best Animated Feature Oscar. Rated PG-13. 94 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Jonathan Richards)
MARY AND THE WITCH’S FLOWER
Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World
of Arrietty) left Japan’s renowned animation studio Ghibli to create this, the debut film for the new Studio Ponoc. The studio features many Ghibli alumni, and this film bears all of Ghibli’s trademarks, from the expressive, colorful animation to the singular way of rendering familiar fantasy tropes in fresh ways that somehow feel both grounded and fanciful. The story centers on a young witch named Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill) who is invited to an academy for witchcraft. That may sound familiar, but the plot takes turns that fans of the Harry Potter series won’t expect. It might unfold too slowly for some viewers, but Yonebayashi takes the Ghibli approach of showing the world the way children experience it: full of wonder, uncertainty, and unexpected transformations, where allies can seem evil and villains can be alluring. Rated PG. 102 minutes. Dubbed in English. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Robert Ker)
MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE
The third and final film in the Maze Runner saga finds Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) having to solve the most difficult labyrinth yet in order to break into the fabled Last City. If he and his friends can get to the city, they’ll find the headquarters to the evil organization WCKD and acquire a cure for the Flare virus that has infected the Earth’s population. Rated PG-13. 142 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
PADDINGTON 2
No matter how strong you think your defenses are against cute, cuddly, and whimsical fare, director Paul King’s Paddington films aim to force you to surrender. The overcoat-wearing, marmalade-munching bear Paddington is back for more London adventures: this time, he is framed in the theft of a rare book and must break free from jail and prove his innocence. Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins return as the parents of Paddington’s adopted family, who work on the outside to clear his name, while Hugh Grant appears as the villain and seems to savor every second of his performance. As with the first film, King adds visual touches far more inventive than the minimum of what the story requires, and the special effects, particularly of Paddington’s fur, are delightful. Even the
climactic action sequence — which is so often a noisy, overlong bore in family films — is brilliant and thrilling, involving two trains running parallel to each other. This sequel shows how to treat a beloved, decades-old character properly. Rated PG. 103 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Robert Ker)
PHANTOM THREAD
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, many things hang from a slender thread — creativity, stability, reputation, love, even life itself. The slightest jolt could send things crashing down. Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel DayLewis) is a famous couturier in ‘50s London. At a country inn he meets a waitress, a lissome wench named Alma (Vicky Krieps), and before you can say Balenciaga, she has become his mistress, model, and muse. Alma recognizes that she is only the latest in Woodcock’s string of companions, but she is determined to also be the last. He’s an obsessive-compulsive tyrant; but, she discovers, he can be a sweet, cuddly lad when he’s under the weather. The love potion that she dreams up to keep him close adds the spice of intrigue and suspense to the film’s second half. The three stars are riveting. Day-Lewis in particular commands our attention every moment he’s on screen. Woodcock’s phantom signature device is to sew hidden messages into the hems and linings of his creations. The message we have from Day-Lewis is all too stark: This, he says, is his farewell to film. Say it ain’t so. The movie has received Oscar nominations that include Best Picture, Actor, and Director. Rated R. 130 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
THE POST
This is the story of Katharine “Kay” Graham and her reluctant stewardship of her family newspaper, The Washington Post, following the suicide of her husband, Post publisher Philip Graham. Directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep as Graham and Tom Hanks as Post editor Ben Bradlee, the movie has two fish to fry. One is feminism. The other is the role of a free press in a democracy. The Post arrives at a time when both of these issues resonate with a particular force. But it’s the press issue that must have galvanized Spielberg. The script landed on his desk last fall at a time of national shock and trauma, and the prospect of a movie celebrating honest, fearless, fact-based reporting must have seemed a moral mandate. Unfortunately, despite its powerhouse acting, the movie too often moves forward by the numbers. It’s not bad, but it lacks the power to grab you. Journalism movies in which we know the outcome of the story, like Spotlight and All the President’s Men, still manage to gin up inspired suspense. The Post aspires to this level but can’t quite pull it off. Academy Award-nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress (Streep). Rated PG-13. 105 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
THE SHAPE OF WATER
Elisa (a magical Sally Hawkins) is a mute janitor who works the night shift at a mysterious government facility where a heavily guarded package is delivered. It’s a tank containing a humanoid amphibian (Doug Jones) that Strickland (a malevolent Michael Shannon), the facility’s brutal head of security, has captured. Elisa finds herself drawn to the creature, and gradually her feelings ripen into a fullfledged Beauty and the Beast attraction. Meanwhile, Strickland decides to cut the creature up for study. This is resisted by one of the facility’s top scientists, Dr. Hoffstetler (a soulful Michael Stuhlbarg), who turns out to have secrets of his own. Del Toro has created a story that moves effortlessly forward through multiple genres, encompassing gothic romance, fairy tale, Cold War spy thriller, and fantasy, with other bits and pieces strewn in. The sumptuous visuals are dominated by water themes. By itself, water has no shape. It adapts itself to the contours of any vessel that it fills. The same is true of love. The film is up for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture, Actress (Hawkins), Supporting Actor (Richard Jenkins), Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer), and Director. Rated R. 123 minutes. Regal Stadium 14; Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI
Filmmaker Martin McDonagh is like a mad chemist, throwing together elements that have no business being in the same pot except to fizz and explode. In this tale of revenge, violence and humor rub shoulders with tragedy and pathos like angry commuters at rush hour, knit together with the rawest of language and a script that scatters loose ends like birdseed. But it’s a tour de force, riveting from start to finish. Frances McDormand is extraordinary as the embittered Mildred, who hires three derelict billboards along a lonely road in a Burma-Shave-like sequence to protest the police’s inability to solve her daughter’s rape and murder. Woody Harrelson brings a gentle nobility to Chief Willoughby, and Sam Rockwell is a racist deputy with the subtlety and intellect of a blunt instrument. Like Tarantino at his best, McDonagh creates movie scenes that land like wild cinematic haymakers. The film has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (McDormand), and Supporting Actor (Harrelson and Rockwell). Rated R. 115 minutes. Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
WALK WITH ME
This documentary offers a closer look at Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhat Hanh and his mindfulness practice. Filmed over the course of three years, the movie shows him in his monastery in rural France and also follows him around the world, spending significant time not only with him, but with his many followers and devotees as well. Benedict Cumberbatch narrates. Not rated. 94 minutes. In English, French, and Vietnamese with subtitles. Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Not reviewed)
WINCHESTER
Helen Mirren takes the horror genre for a spin, playing Sarah Winchester, the wife of gun manufacturer William Winchester. Very loosely based on Sarah’s real life, this movie follows Sarah in the years after William’s death as she becomes increasingly convinced that the ghosts of those who were killed by Winchester weapons are haunting her. She builds a strange, sprawling house in San Jose, California — known today as the Winchester Mystery House — to escape the spirits. Rated PG-13. 99 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)