DESPICABLE ME 3
AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL: TRUTH TO POWER
1/2 PG-13, 90 minutes. Starts today at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. Given that the biggest climate news of the past year has been the decision to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris global climate accord, it may seem as if the most inconvenient aspect of the new “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” documentary is its timing. Isn’t this follow-up to 2006’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” outdated and beside the point because as major a player as the U.S. has gone its own way, leaving the rest of the world in the lurch? In fact, watching this involving and unexpectedly passionate film will persuade you that just the opposite is true. The need to pay attention is ever greater, no matter which leaders pretend otherwise, and the possibilities of making a difference have increased as well. Though the actions of former Vice President Al Gore, the tireless happy warrior of the climate-crisis movement, are once again front and center, new directors have come on board for the sequel and brought a different creative tack with them. In charge this time are Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, whose credits include a previous climate documentary, 2011’s excellent “The Island President,” about the battles of Mohamed Nasheed, the leader of the Maldives, to keep his political career afloat and his low-lying nation from washing away. The new film is a classic cinema verite production, with the filmmakers shadowing Gore for months and recording his frustrations as well as his determination to do the right thing and make the world respond to what he sees as an existential crisis. Truly, as Gore says, “every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Apocalypse.” But the film is at its best following the former vice president as he spans the Earth both gathering evidence and promoting his message. By definition, he admits, this battle is a contest between hope and despair, but that doesn’t stop him from getting angry from time to time. “Didn’t you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?” he imagines future generations saying to today’s Americans. “What were you thinking?” What indeed. — Kenneth Turan. Los Angeles Times
ATOMIC BLONDE
1/2 R, 115 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. The 1980s are back, baby — the fashions, the tunes, the Russian spies. The Cold War is so hot right now, and action thriller “Atomic Blonde” is here to capitalize on that moment. Charlize Theron stars as the titular blonde in this violently stylish spy flick, doing her own version of “John Wick” as a taciturn secret agent with a very impressive set of skills. Directed by former stunt man and “Wick” co-director David Leitch, “Atomic Blonde” is a cool bit of eye candy with incredible stunts and a killer soundtrack, even though it falters on the story itself. “Atomic Blonde,” adapted by Kurt Johnstad from the graphic novel “The Coldest City” by Antony Johnston, is a harmonious marriage of material and star. Theron is perfect for the role as the frigid, butt-kicking MI-6 agent Lorraine Broughton, dispatched to Berlin for a dangerous mission in the shadow of the falling Berlin Wall in November 1989. Though the film claims it’s not the story of the Berlin Wall, it couldn’t be the story that it is without it. It offers a frenzied political backdrop, a ticking clock, and a robust sense of energy and urgency to “Atomic Blonde.” — Katie Walsh, Tribunte Content Agency
BABY DRIVER
R, 90 minutes. Through tonight only at Lisbon. Edgar Wright has never met a film genre he couldn’t transform. He took the slow-walking world of zombies and infused it with high energy comedy to create “Shawn of the Dead.” The right turn he made in what appeared to be a sleepy village cop movie with “Hot Fuzz” created cinematic whiplash. Now, the director-writer has tackled the rather driven-into-the-ground genre of fast cars with “Baby Driver.” It starts out looking to be nothing more than a fast story of furious thugs, but Wright quickly turns it into a blend of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Romeo and Juliet.” The collision of two such diverse scenarios sounds like what would happen if someone made a peanut butter and ketchup sandwich. As with all of Wright’s work, all you have to do is give his twisted sense of filmmaking a few moments and the beauty of contradictions becomes a thing of beauty. — Rick Bentley, Tribune Content Agency
THE BIG SICK
1/2 R, 119 minutes. Through tonight only at Madison Art Cinemas. Still playing at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Westbrook. “The Big Sick” is a small movie that makes a big impact. While a romantic comedy on the surface, it plumbs emotional depths, all while never losing its insightful sense of humor. The brainchild of comedian-writer Kumail Nanjiani, best-known as Dinesh on the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” “The Big Sick” gets added heft from the fact that it’s largely autobiographical. When combined with the strong performances, especially from a positively electric Holly Hunter, this is a film that fires on all cylinders. Nanjiani plays himself, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant trying to make it as a stand-up on the Chicago comedy circuit. One night, a woman in the audience good-naturedly heckles him, leading to a conversation with her after he gets off stage. She turns out to be Emily (Zoe Kazan) and they soon become much more than upstaged performer and overly zealous crowd member. Because she’s a white American, he keeps her a secret from his family who only want him to marry a South Asian Muslim. His mother has made it her maternal mission to invite any available young Muslim women to “casually” drop by while the family is having dinner — yet it’s all to no avail. But, wait, there’s more. Kamail’s not just keeping his budding romance a secret; he can’t bring himself to tell his family that he’s no longer sure if he believes in all the tenets of Islam either. He’s not even praying five times a day anymore and hasn’t in a long time. The issue of being torn between two cultural worlds and two continents would be enough for most films of this type. But fate then throws Kumail and Emily a nearly knockout curveball that will change both of their lives, taking “The Big Sick” to another level. Directed by Michael Showalter, “The Big Sick” balances the comedic, dramatic and melancholic with a juggler’s aplomb. — Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
THE DARK TOWER
PG-13, 95 minutes. Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Westbrook, Lisbon. Stephen King spent more than three decades writing his self-declared magnum opus, “The Dark Tower” series, which comprises over four thousand pages. It’s taken a decade of development for the project to make its way to movie screens. The film’s epic source material and extended origin story were always going to cast a long shadow over the final product, but the film should stand on its own merit, or lack thereof. After much anticipation, “The Dark Tower” that arrives on screens this weekend is inconsistent, incoherent and often cheesy. First, a caveat — this critic hasn’t read the book series, but this is not a review of the books, but of the film, directed by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel. There’s no doubt the story is built on an intriguing mythology, though some of the metaphorical aspects of the literature come across as obtuse and over-simplified on screen. There’s a tower, it’s dark, and it keeps “darkness” from invading the universe. In the books, that oblique symbolism may have worked, in the movie, it’s too vague to inspire real stakes. The Man in Black, aka Walter (Matthew McConaughey) is attempting to destroy the tower by shooting lasers made of children’s brain power at it. He and his nebulous group of henchman in human suits have been kidnapping psychic kids from the streets of New York City for this purpose, and Jake (Tom Taylor), a boy beset by terrifying nightmares and apocalyptic visions, is their next target. Walter is most definitely the weakest link of “The Dark Tower.” Firstly, there is no stated motivation for why he so desperately wants to destroy the tower and unleash darkness. Secondly, McConaughey has chosen to play this role with all the over-the-top swagger of a Las Vegas magician. Elba is fantastic in this role as a weathered cowboy with a singular motive: vengeance. “The Dark Tower,” while hinting at a horrific and fascinating story, has problems with scope, which results in problems with stakes, and emotional attachment. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency
H1/2 PG, 90 min. Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Though the Minions now have their own film (of the same name), they still pull back-up duty in the “Despicable Me” franchise, and yes, they are somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into “Despicable Me 3,” a serviceable stop on the inevitable way to “Despicable Me 4.” As a couple of hours of kidtertainment, you could do worse, but it’s nothing to write home about. “Despicable Me 3,” directed by Pierre Coffin, Eric Guillon and Kyle Balda, written by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, relies on pre-established audience familiarity with the characters and universe of the franchise, and then just throws subplots on top of subplots on top of that. Each story is so shallow that it feels like a series of shorts, with only the flimsiest of narrative threads stitching the whole thing together. Two new characters are introduced in this third installment: Balthazar Bratt, voiced by Trey Parker, is the antagonist, a washed up child actor
from the ’80s turned super-villain, with a serious axe to grind against the industry that rejected him as a pimply, pubescent teen. He’s got a mullet, a keytar, a purple suit with shoulder pads, and one heck of a music licensing budget (it’s packed with snippets of hits from Michael Jackson to Van Halen). — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
DETROIT
R, 143 minutes. Niantic, Stonington, Waterford, Lisbon, Westbrook. With a panoramic docudrama sweep that gives way to the disquieting intimacy of a horror-thriller, Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, excruciating and entirely necessary new film “Detroit” returns us to the summer of 1967, when racial tensions engulfed the Motor City and claimed 43 lives over five days of violent unrest. In thrusting the viewer directly into a war zone, the film recalls Bigelow’s prior collaborations with the screenwriter Mark Boal, “The Hurt Locker” (2009) and “Zero Dark Thirty” (2012), still the two finest dramas yet made about America’s post-9/11 military and intelligence operations in the Middle East. If “Detroit” feels even harder to watch in its jagged, youare-there ferocity, it may be because its particular war zone, although 50 years removed from the present, feels so much closer to home. It may also be because Bigelow and Boal, whose behind-the-headlines thrillers have been marked by a certain ideological distance, have cast aside any pretense to neutrality here. The two drew a few allegations of apoliticism on “The Hurt Locker” and a lot of wrongheaded criticism over their depiction of government torture in “Zero Dark Thirty,” but with “Detroit” they have made a picture whose political resonance in the Black Lives Matter era is fierce and unambiguous. It could scarcely be anything else, given the specific story it’s telling. Although its title suggests an all-encompassing vision, “Detroit” is less interested in capturing the riot’s day-by-day chaos than in revisiting one of its darkest chapters — a furious confrontation between law enforcement and unarmed civilians that, on the night of July 25-26, turned a local establishment called the Algiers Motel into a charnel house. Before the night was over, three unarmed black teenagers — Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple — were shot to death by police in a haze of terror and confusion that John Hersey sought to clarify in his exhaustively researched 1968 book, “The Algiers Motel Incident.” Bigelow sets the scene on the ground with crackling immediacy, ricocheting between quick bursts of newsreel footage and her own meticulous period re-creation of Detroit’s heavily segregated black communities. We see the spark igniting on July 23, 1967, when cops raid a “blind pig,” or illegal after-hours bar, and drive its black patrons out into the street, drawing an angry crowd and setting the first waves of violence in motion. Even as she’s establishing context — something she accomplishes with the help of an animated prologue detailing the social and economic disparities that kept black urban Americans in a perpetual state of struggle — Bigelow has an almost preternatural respect for the audience’s intelligence. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
DUNKIRK
R, 107 min. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. With a bare minimum of dialogue, and a brutal maximum of scenes depicting near-drowning situations in and around Dunkirk, France, in late May and early June 1940, Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is a unique waterboarding of a film experience. Many will respond to it, primally, as a grueling dramatization of what the English call “the Dunkirk spirit,” one that turned a perilous mass evacuation of British and Allied troops, under German fire (though bad weather kept the Luftwaffe largely at bay), into a show of collective resilience at a crucial early crossroads of World War II. Operation Dynamo, Winston Churchill called it. Thanks to a series of interlocking lucky breaks (including the decision, probably Hitler’s, to call off the Nazi tanks before they got to Dunkirk), somewhere between 340,000 and 400,000 Allied soldiers, mostly British and French, were rescued from the beach and harbor of the smoldering coastal city. Nolan’s somewhat perversely structured screenplay tells three stories, also interlocking, laced with flashbacks and revisits to scenes, moments, really, you may not realize are revisits from a new perspective. On land, storyline one, aka “The Mole,” unfolds over a week’s time. The young soldier in British uniform we follow (played by Fionn Whitehead) comes upon the beach, which has filled up with thousands and thousands of British Expeditionary Force fighting men. The Germans are closing in. The young man, our introduction to this place, spies an opportunity for rescue, grabbing a stretcher along with another, nearly mute soldier (Aneurin Barnard) and joining an increasingly desperate fray awaiting naval rescue. What little exposition “Dunkirk” contains is meted out by Kenneth Branagh’s imposing naval commander and James D’Arcy’s army colonel, as they eye the skies for the enemy, and the air support that will not come. Story two, “The Sea,” takes place in a single day. Story three: “The Air,” taking place in a single hour. This is where “Dunkirk” soars, literally, metaphorically and cinematically. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
THE EMOJI MOVIE
PG, 86 minutes. Through tonight only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Still playing at Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “Words aren’t cool” is the courtship advice imparted by one texting teen to another in “The Emoji Movie.” That statement is the canary in the coal mine that “Cyrano de Bergerac” this movie is most decidedly not. Will Alex (Jake T. Austin) choose the right emoji to express his ardor