LOVING VINCENT
chatty, socially awkward and very fast teen — and Victor Stone, aka Cyborg — a brooding former football star brought back from the dead by his scientist father who turns him into man-machine. Snyder brought a level of darkness and nihilism to this franchise, so it’s very, very strange that “Justice League” is as quippy as it is. No doubt this is due to the presence of Whedon, who takes a screenwriting credit, but it just does not fit with Snyder’s dour takes on the characters. Not to mention the dialogue is painful. Miller’s neurotic routine is initially quite charming, until his one-liners become incredibly cheesy and tired. Aquaman peppers his speech with many dude-brah phrases, while Cyborg, regrettably, utters “boo-yah” at one point. But it’s not the quips that truly offend, but the blur of horrible CGI that starts from minute one and never lets up. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency
LADY BIRD
R, 93 minutes. Niantic, Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Westbrook. American movies today are generally aimed at four different audiences: kids, adults, females and males. The coming-of-age screwball comedy “Lady Bird” crosses all those mutually exclusive boundaries to take us down novel, delightful paths. While it’s focused on a high school senior looking forward with a touch of angst and confusion, this effervescently witty story about the life and times of Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson goes against most teen-movie conventions. It rejects Hollywood’s custom of painting each character in a single color. A rare delight of honesty and humor, like “Rushmore” and “Juno,” it covers the highs and lows and magic of teenage life and resonates in all directions. The film is a dazzling collaboration between two of the most impressive art-house actresses of the past decade. Saoirse Ronan plays the awkward but brilliant title character, a small-town girl aiming for something better. Greta Gerwig moves behind the camera in her debut as solo writer/director, smoothly and effectively guiding the progress of fun, nostalgia, heartaches and optimism from start to finish. Neither has ever been better. I can’t recall many who have. Lady Bird invented her own nickname (she considers it her given name because “I gave it to myself”). It suits her because she wants to fly away from California’s state capital, a stable, respectable community where she feels incurable claustrophobia. A lovable brat, she shares the viewpoint of the Joan Didion quote that fills the opening screen: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” Lady Bird hopes for a romance before her impending graduation from a small private Catholic school, where she pretends to be more sexually experienced than she is. — Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
1/2 PG, 94 minutes. Starts Friday at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. You have, I am certain, never seen anything quite like “Loving Vincent,” which is being promoted as the world’s first entirely hand-painted movie. It’s an animated film, but that descriptor isn’t quite accurate: To tell this story about a mystery surrounding the 1890 death of artist Vincent Van Gogh, filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman assembled a cast, found period-appropriate costumes and sets, and shot the film. Then the real work began: Every frame was hand-painted over in oil paint in the style of Van Gogh, by a team of more than 100 artists. With settings and characters inspired by a number of Van Gogh’s paintings, the film unfolds as if the viewer fell asleep in a museum and dreamt of art that came alive. — Moira MacDonald, The Seattle Times
MARSHALL
PG-13, 118 minutes. Through today only at Lisbon. Thurgood Marshall — the pioneering civil rights lawyer who argued Brown vs. Board of Education and became the first African-American Supreme Court justice — receives the biopic treatment with “Marshall,” directed by Reginald Hudlin. Chadwick Boseman once again tackles a legendary figure of American history as Marshall. (He also inhabited Jackie Robinson and James Brown.) “Marshall” takes a look at the period of time before the civil rights movement when Marshall was an NAACP lawyer in the 1940s, traveling from city to city representing clients who were likely accused of crimes because of their race. “Marshall” plucks one case from the files to illustrate the type of man he was and the causes for which he fought. For a film simply called “Marshall,” you expect to get a wider slice of the justice’s life, but he ultimately becomes an ensemble player in his own eponymous film. The choice of case comes from screenwriter and Bridgeport, Conn., lawyer Michael Koskoff, who had prior knowledge of this 1941 trial and tapped his screenwriter son, Jacob, to collaborate on the screenplay. It’s a rape case involving a Greenwich socialite, Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), who accused her African-American driver, Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown), of sexual assault. This case has the