HIDDEN FIGURES

PG-13, 113 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas. In the opening moments of “Frantz,” the latest intricately layered mystery from the French writer-director François Ozon, a German woman named Anna (Paula Beer) visits the grave of her fiance, a soldier recently slain in the trenches of World War I. You can sense the war’s immense reach in a few fleeting details — a man who whistles in Anna’s direction is missing an arm — but also in the eerie quiet that has descended on the town’s cobbled streets and in the somber cast of the movie’s black-and-white images. If you happen to have seen Ernst Lubitsch’s “Broken Lullaby,” the 1932 antiwar drama on which this new film is based, you might also sense something more: a curious and telling shift in perspective. Lubitsch’s film, adapted from a play by Maurice Rostand, was a rare message picture from a director celebrated for his exquisite comic touch, unfolded through the eyes of a French veteran making an unexpected visit to the grieving loved ones of a dead German soldier. “Frantz” retains the earlier film’s central premise and pacifist themes. A Parisian musician named Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney) has come to pay his respects to Dr. Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and his wife, Magda (Marie Gruber), and to share his memories of their fallen son, Frantz (played by Anton von Lucke in flashbacks). But this time, the story’s moral and dramatic fulcrum is Anna, whose loving, protective attitude toward the Hoffmeisters, whom she regards as her own parents, is matched by her intense curiosity about this stranger in their midst. The presence of a Frenchman in Germany so soon after the Great War does not go unremarked upon by Dr. Hoffmeister, who receives Adrien coldly at first, or by the glowering locals — one of whom, Kreutz (Johann von Bülow), wants to marry Anna himself. Adrien, for his part, is sympathetic but not entirely above suspicion. His recollections of many happy hours spent with Frantz in Paris before the war, visiting museums and playing the violin together, bring the Hoffmeisters no small measure of solace. But his sad eyes and halting, fearful demeanor seem to tell a darker, more unsettling story. That story will CHUCK ZLOTNICK/WARNER BROS. PICTURES VIA AP not be revealed here, though Ozon, a master of misdirection and one of French cinema’s most prolific chroniclers of gay desire, delights in raising the sort of romantic possibilities that are easier for an audience to countenance now than they were in 1919. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

GET OUT

R, 103 minutes. Through today only at Lisbon. Still playing at Stonington, Westbrook. Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.” “Do they know I’m black?” Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) asks his white girlfriend PETER IOVINO, WARNER BROS VIA AP Rose (Allison Williams) as they get ready to leave their city apartment for a weekend at her parents’ rural estate. “No,” she replies. “Should they?” “It seems like something you might want to mention,” he sighs. “I don’t want to get chased off the lawn with a shotgun.” It’s a joke but it’s also foreshadowing — and just a hint of the frights to come. In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has —as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?” Those are the kinds of things that Rose’s father, Dean (an excellent Bradley Whitford), says as he PG, 127 minutes. Westbrook. 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

KEDI

Unrated, 80 minutes. Through today only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas.

Sari the hustler, Duman the gentleman, Bengu the lover, Psikopat the psycho — they may sound like characters straight out of a gangster movie, but they are, in fact, some of the colorful felines profiled in “Kedi,” an endearing documentary about Istanbul’s street cats. For centuries, if not millennia, street cats have roamed the city of Istanbul, where they are not merely tolerated for their rodent-controlling

abilities but beloved by its human inhabitants, who feed them and form close attachments to them. Foreign visitors have likewise been captivated by the ubiquitous presence of cats in Turkey’s largest city. Turks delighted when, on a state visit by Barack Obama to Turkey in 2009, the president famously bent down to pet one of the strays living in the Hagia Sophia church, a well-known landmark. In “Kedi” (Turkish for “cat”), director Ceyda Torun profiles seven kitties across the city — each one a fixture in the community — and the residents who have developed relationships with them. — Vanessa H. Larson, Special to The Washington Post “Skull Island” is never boring, but it never sits still. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

PG, 104 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook, Lisbon.