THE GREAT WALL
H1/2 PG-13, 103 minutes. Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “Tell the world what you have seen,” a character exclaims in “The Great Wall,” ‘‘and what is coming!” The warning is about the mythical mass of marauding monsters that are sweeping down northern China but it could just as easily be for the kind of Hollywood-China collaboration that is “The Great Wall.” The first English language feature shot entirely in China, it’s the biggest-budget attempt yet to straddle both sides of the Pacific, plucking a movie star (Matt Damon) from the West for a production in the East. In a movie industry where the two biggest markets are North America and China, it’s Hollywood’s version of having your cake and eating it, too. But if “The Great Wall” is a forerunner to the cross-cultural blockbustering to come, we may have just as much reason to flee as those being hounded in the film by the Taotie. Those are the four-legged, man-eating creatures of ancient Chinese folklore that are here attacking the Great Wall and the armies that defend it, as the Taotie are said to do every 60 years. They’re the Halley’s Comet of demons. With acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou directing and Damon starring, “The Great Wall” would seem to at least promise to be an intriguing artifact, a movie that would, even in failure, illustrate something interesting about the culture clash it’s predicated on. But it turns out to be little more than a monster movie (and a poor one at that) that says more about corporate-driven global moviemaking than anything about either culture. — Jake Coyle, Associated Press
THE FOUNDER
PG-13, 115 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas. The title “The Founder” is in some ways a perplexing descriptor for a biopic of Ray Kroc, the man who took the McDonald’s burger restaurant from a local favorite to a global behemoth. Truth be told, he’s not the founder of McDonald’s. But the title fits Kroc’s specific approach to success, a version of the American Dream that states, if you want something, go out and take it — even if it belongs to someone else. Michael Keaton stars as Kroc, a salesman peddling multi-spindle milkshake mixers out of the trunk of his car. After hitting almost every drive-in burger joint in the land, he knows a good idea when he sees one, and he appreciates the efficiency he discovers at the McDonald’s hamburger bar in San Bernadino, where the brothers Mac and Dick McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman) have devised a cleverly “speedee” system for delivering burgers from grill to customer, mapping and choreographing and modifying as they’ve gone along. They’re all too proud to share their tricks with Ray, though they have no idea what they’re in for, his cheery demeanor masking the fact that there is no ethical limit to his ambition. Their trust is Ray’s ascension to the top and their downfall. It’s the age-old story of corporate capitalism: One man’s success is another’s exploitation. Director John Lee Hancock is known for his more saccharine, uplifting fare, but writer Robert D. Siegel brings an undercurrent of satirical acid to the story of the brothers who started a burger stand and the man who wrestled their restaurant, system, and name away from them and turned it into an institution. Keaton gives a twitchy, oddball performance, but he’s still charmingly Keaton-esque. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
HIDDEN FIGURES
PG, 127 minutes. Niantic, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. One of the most gratifying qualities of “Hidden Figures” is how it bursts onto the screen like a shot of distilled, exhilarating joy. This bracing movie, about a group of brilliant African-American women whose scientific and mathematical skills helped NASA launch its space exploration program in the 1950s and 1960s, gets off to a spirited start and rarely lets up, sharing with viewers a little-known chapter of history as inspiring as it is intriguing. After a brief prologue, when we meet Katherine Johnson as a teenage math prodigy, the film catches up with her in 1961, when she’s a young widow working at NASA’s Langley facility in Hampton, Virginia, as a “computer,” sharing a ride to work with her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. The fact that these gifted women are played by the equally gifted Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, respectively, says all you need to know about a movie propelled by their alternately salty and affecting performances. Far from a dry scientific tutorial or historical treatise, “Hidden Figures” is a warm, lively, often funny depiction of women whose brains and work ethics were indefatigable, even in the face of racism and sexism at their most oppressive. — Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
PG-13, 95 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Novelist, playwright, poet and cultural critic James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent in 1979, describing a book he planned to write, based on his years involved in the U.S. civil rights movement. It was to explore the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He wanted to explore the ways in which these activists’ lives banged against and informed each other. There were only 30 pages of manuscript when Baldwin died in 1987, and now Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck has breathed new life into Baldwin’s work in the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Baldwin served as a witness to the civil rights movement, alongside Medgar, Malcolm and Martin, returning to the U.S. from ex-pat life in Paris. He was called to action by the photographs of a young Dorothy Counts attempting to desegregate a high school in North Carolina, surrounded by a jeering mob of young white men. Baldwin served as witness and scribe for the movement. Had Baldwin finished the book, it would no doubt have been a work of massive cultural import. Peck does more than just revive the manuscript, with the help of Samuel L. Jackson’s narration. He brings it alive with photographs, archival news footage, Hollywood films and Baldwin himself, enhancing the words he wrote with his TV appearances and filmed debates. Peck goes even further than that, stitching together a film that is completely contemporary; he liberates the text from Baldwin’s era to show that his ideas are timeless, and that the battles have not been won. Through careful yet bold editing choices, Peck applies Baldwin’s words to events such as the Rodney King beating and the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Mo. It’s bracing, invigorating stuff, the editing keeping pace with Baldwin’s words, from the self-reflective, sensitive manuscript informed by his personal history, to his fiery orations at the Cambridge debates or on the Dick Cavett show. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
JACKIE
R, 100 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s mesmerizing “Jackie” is an intimate and existential exploration of one of the 20th century’s most iconic figures, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The spiritual, somber and deeply intellectual script by Noah Oppenheim delves into Jackie’s experience during and immediately after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963. Larrain weaves a mesmerizing cinematic spell hand-in-hand with star Natalie Portman, cinematographer Stephane Fontaine and composer Mica Levi. Shot on Super 16 mm film, the camera squares directly on Jackie’s face at eye level, peering into her eyes, close enough to nearly feel her breath. Eerily beautiful cellos and violins swoon like sirens and moans on the soundtrack, woozy and undulating like Jackie on a grief bender blasting the “Camelot” soundtrack LP throughout the West Wing. Portman verily channels Jackie herself, in the comportment of her face, eyes, mouth and posture. She apes the flat voweled patrician accent well enough, but it’s the physical performance that summons the ghost of the first lady. Emotionally, we can only imagine what Jackie’s experience
was in the days after JFK died in her lap during that Dallas motorcade, but Portman pours her primal yet poised emotional self into Oppenheim and Larrain’s vision of a highly visible woman suddenly finding herself bereft, alone, traumatized, searching for meaning and purpose. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2
is L.A., the legendary wonderland where dreams are born and buried day after day. It stars Emma Stone as Mia, a striving would-be actress and actual barista at a studio-lot coffee shop, and Ryan Gosling as Sebastian, a bohemian pianist hoping to run his own jazz club. Under endless West Coast skies they cross paths at the opening, stuck in a titanic freeway ramp traffic jam that generates a surreal song and dance chorus with a cast of hundreds. — Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE
separated from his brother at a train station in Khandwa, and ends up on a decommissioned passenger train that takes him 900 miles away to Kolkata. There, he’s placed in an orphanage and adopted by an Australian couple who live on the island of Tasmania. The return journey, delayed over two decades, follows the emotional trip of adult Saroo (Dev Patel) as he uses modern technology to find his village and travel back across the ocean to find his family. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
PATRIOTS DAY