Opening next week
Double Lover (Wednesday) Black Panther (Friday) Detective Chinatown 2 (Friday) Early Man (Friday) In Between (Friday) Den of Thieves A complete mess, the film attempts to involve audiences in both a cop’s effort to track down murderous thieves and the thieves’ attempt to steal millions from the federal reserve. The result instead is an uninvolving, 140-minute ordeal, with an unkempt Gerard Butler as the detective looking like he’s auditioning to play Steve Bannon. Rated R. 140 minutes.
— M. LaSalle
A Fantastic Woman Chilean trans actress Daniela Vega delivers a stunning performance as a trans singer named Marina Vidal whose older lover (Francisco Reyes) dies suddenly. She battles grief, but more to the point, hatred from her lover’s family out to erase her from their late husband and father’s memory. Director Sebastián Lelio does a solid job with a somewhat predictable script, but Vega elevates the film to fantastic heights. Rated R. 103 minutes. — D. Wiegand
15:17 to Paris Director Clint Eastwood overwhelms the extraordinary with the mundane in this fact-based tale of three young men from the Sacramento area who in 2015 helped thwart a gun attack on a Paris-bound train. The train-attack scenes thrill and fascinate but take up only a fraction of the film’s run time. The rest is all lead-up, filled with banal dialogue and familiar tourist spots revisited for Eastwood’s cameras by the real train heroes, who play themselves. Rated PG-13. 94 minutes. — C. Meyer
Fifty Shades Freed The third film in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy of
romantic dramas based on books by E.L. James. With Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan. Rated R. 105 minutes.
The Final Year If you love Obama, you will find this documentary — about the Obama foreign policy team’s last year in office — seriously depressing. And if you don’t like Obama, you won’t want to see it. Still, it’s a good documentary and will be even more interesting in a decade. Not rated. 89 minutes.
— M. LaSalle The Greatest Showman It’s huge(ly awful)! It’s colossal(ly) lousy! It’s the story of P.T. Barnum (except it’s fictionalized), with Hugh Jackman heading a magnificently idiotic musical, featuring bad Pasek & Paul songs. It’s a conspicuously bad mix of old and modern. Rated PG. 105 minutes. — M. LaSalle
Hostiles Director Scott Cooper infuses this Western tale, set in 1892, with so much reverence that the film is weighed down by long, long pauses and excessive gravity given to every encounter. This makes the film a long slog, despite the intelligence and thought behind one or two strong scenes. Rated R. 133 minutes. — M. LaSalle
I, Tonya Craig Gillespie delvers a tonally brilliant mix of caustic comedy and genuine pathos in this uncompromising story of Tonya Harding, an Olympic skater implicated in a conspiracy to maim her chief rival. Featuring standout performances from Robbie, as Harding, and Allison Janney, as Tonya’s terrifying mother, this is one of the best of 2017. Rated R. 121 minutes. — M. LaSalle
Insidious: The Last Key The latest installment in the “Insidious” horror franchise is serviceable, thanks to a stellar performance by Lin Shaye, who plays a demonologist with guts, guile and good humor. Rated PG-13. 103 minutes. — D. Lewis
The Insult A minor dispute between a Christian Lebanese man and a Palestinian construction worker spirals into a court case with national implications, in this tense, wellobserved and intelligent film, nominated for a foreign-film Oscar. Rated R. 112 minutes. In Arabic with English subtitles.
— M. LaSalle
Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle A nominal sequel to the 1995
Robin Williams movie, this fun film is more like a mashup of ’80s John Hughes teen films and wrong-body comedies like “Big” and “All of Me.” Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan play avatar versions of four detentiondoing teens who get sucked into a video game. The action scenes are decent, but the film’s entertainment value comes from seeing adult stars playing teens very different from themselves. Rated PG-13. 119 minutes. — C. Meyer
Lady Bird Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo writer-director is this unconventional coming-of-age tale about an extroverted high school senior (Saoirse Ronan), clashing with her mother and wanting to leave her native Sacramento. This is a warm, good-hearted, intuitive movie that could be the start of an exceptional filmmaking career. Rated R. 94 minutes.
— M. LaSalle
Molly’s Game Jessica Chastain is superb in this fact-based account of a young woman who becomes rich by hosting high-stakes poker games. But at well over two hours, the unimportance of the story, the essential emptiness of the central character and writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to steamroll over plot problems with dialogue make this a break-even proposition at best. Rated R. 141 minutes. — M. LaSalle
Oscar Shorts: Live
Action Five films -- four of them dramatic and about 20 minutes each, one a palate-cleansing 12-minute British comedy -- represent Britain, the United States and Kenya via Germany. The best is Britain’s “The Silent Girl,” about a deaf girl just entering elementary school and her dysfunctional family situation; Emmett Till, terrorism and school shootings are also covered. (Not rated. 95 minutes.) .
— G.A. Johnson
Paddington 2 A sequel to the charming 2015 children’s live-action film featuring a computeranimated bear (lent sweet voice by Ben Whishaw) lacks some of its predecessor’s spark. But it is so warmhearted and well-acted (and animated) that a slight drop in quality hardly matters. Plus, the sequel features a delightful goof of a performance by Hugh Grant as a vain thespian. Rated PG. 103 minutes. — C. Meyer
Peter Rabbit Beatrix Potter would undoubtedly hate this sarcastic/ slapstick-filled update of her classic picture books. But if you’re mandated to update early 20th century children’s literature for short-attentionspanned 2018 families, “Peter Rabbit” is a pretty good template. The film is clever. It has a brisk pace. And the physical comedy, involving live action and animated characters, is well-executed. Rated PG. 94 minutes. — P. Hartlaub Phantom Thread Daniel Day-Lewis stars as a dress designer in 1950s London, whose obsessive work habits distort every relationship. This film, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, traces the trajectory of one such relationship — with a waitress (Vicky Krieps), who comes into his life wanting something more. One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s best films, his first success in a while. Rated R. 130 minutes.
— M. LaSalle
Pitch Perfect 3 The second sequel to the a cappella choir comedy feels less like a movie than a bunch of deleted scenes strung together in the guise of a plot. Anna Kendrick leads a cast that is still committed and some of the performances (“Let Me Ride,” “Freedom! ’90”) still soar. But the script is rushed and lazy, and the singing often feels like an afterthought. Rated PG-13. 94 minutes.
but it is emphatically a comedy — Milton’s fourth in seven years for the company, where she’s the resident playwright. If you’re the sort who believes that no play set in the South is complete without a bevy of colorful expressions, you’ll get your fill from this one. Sample line, as of a January draft, from Savannah (Chelsea Bearce), who’s part of Abby’s legal team: “You’re as conflicted as a hen chompin’ on a drumstick.”
(For more sassy, playful Milton humor, follow @PatriciaMilton on Twitter. She’s among the most rewarding handles to follow in Bay Area theater, not least for her posts featuring obscure photos of celebrities with cats. She hashtags them all #catlady.)
In all Milton’s comedies, she strives to create “vibrant roles for women.” That’s what she calls her “artistic statement.” Often, the plays are all-female; “the men are offstage or in the past or somewhere else and have nothing to do with it,” she says with a laugh. “Of course, when we have talkbacks, some people are like, ‘What about the dad?’ ”
But going back to race, Milton says, “I don’t want to write about white women only. The impetus to write more about women is to write more stories that have not been told.”