openingnight
new movies this week EIGHTH GRADE
R, 93 minutes. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas and Lisbon. “Eighth Grade” is so spot-on, so painstakingly realistic, you may think you’ve stumbled into a documentary. The credit goes to first-time writer-director Bo Burnham and to whoever the casting genius was who found Elsie Fisher to play lead character Kayla Day. It’s a kick when a director’s vision is so precisely aligned with a performance. Burnham’s script and Fisher’s acting make “Eighth Grade” a compelling tale of a young girl struggling with the adolescent angst of her last few days in middle school. Coming-of-age stories and movies about navigating the pratfalls of classrooms, mean teens, sexual urges, parties and pimples are nothing new. But Burnham offers a twist: Kayla’s life exists in two realms. Confident Kayla posts inspirational videos on YouTube. She offers sound advice to her fellow 13-year-olds about being yourself, trusting yourself, putting yourself out there and brushing off putdowns from negative jerks. But once her laptop camera is clicked off, she becomes real-life Kayla: awkward, shy, clumsy, tongue-tied, a loner but not by choice. Clearly, she has never taken her own advice. As the school year winds down, the “class superlatives” are presented, and she wins the award she dreaded: Most Quiet. We feel her pain whenever she sees her crush, Aiden (Luke Prael), the designated class cute guy who only seems interested in girls willing to text him nudies of themselves. Throbbing music erupts whenever she spies Aiden, accentuating the blood rushing to her head and that whooshing sound of her lungs emptying. We also feel her hyper excitement-fear when an older girl, Olivia (Emily Robinson), who showed her around on high school shadow day, invites Kayla to the mall to hang out with some friends. Fisher is fantastic. She’s vulnerable, she’s desperate. She’s not just everygirl, she’s everyperson. Burnham nicely captures the quirks and cadences of teen-speak. In that sense, “Eighth Grade” also serves as a nifty time capsule of 2018. We can all relate to Kayla’s anxiety, though we all probably didn’t have school-shooter-on-the-loose drills. — Clint O’Connor, Akron Beacon Journal
THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME
1/2 R, 116 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook. Don’t ever question the power of a well-deployed Kate McKinnon. It’s been proven time and again that her specific brand of kooky comedy can elevate anything. Wind her up, set her loose and watch her wring laughs out of any flimsy, high-concept premise, like the action-comedy “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” co-written and directed by Susanna Fogel. All you need to know is right there in the title, a play on the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,” which was subsequently parodied with the 1999 Austin Powers sequel “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” The next logical step in this relationship? A breakup. When the dashing but mysterious Drew (Justin Theroux) dumps Audrey (Mila Kunis) via text, she’s heartbroken, and he’s too busy battling Lithuanian thugs to return her calls. Her best friend, Morgan (McKinnon), tries to cheer up Audrey with a birthday party and the attention of a randy Ukrainian man, but all too soon, the girls are ensnared in the remnants of Drew’s failed spy plot. Surfacing briefly, Drew instructs Audrey to deliver a trophy to a cafe in Vienna, and soon, the women are off, globetrotting across Europe as highly untrained yet surprisingly skillful rogue operatives. The spy story itself is the rote, standard-issue spy stuff. But the heroes are just a pair of clueless gals. But what pleases in “The Spy Who Dumped Me” isn’t the twists and turns of the plot, it’s McKinnon’s general clownery — literally, her climactic moment involves a showdown on a trapeze — but it makes the lightweight material sing. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
THE DARKEST MINDS
PG-13, 105 minutes. Starts tonight at Stonington, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. When teens mysteriously develop powerful new abilities, they are declared a threat by the government and detained. This movie wasn’t reviewed by deadline.
CHRISTOPHER ROBIN
PG, 118 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Family man Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) encounters his childhood friend Winnie-the-Pooh, who guides him to rediscover the happiness of life. This movie wasn’t reviewed by deadline.