SEARCHING

PG-13, 102 minutes. Starts tonight at Waterford. The eeriest scene in the gripping techno-whodunit “Searching” consists of little more than a computer screensaver, glowing silently in the dark like a jellyfish. A series of incoming call notifications pop up on the screen, but the computer’s owner, David Kim (John Cho), is asleep and thus unaware that his teenage daughter, Margot (Michelle La), is desperately trying to reach him. The moment takes on layers of Hitchcockian dread and a paralyzing sense of helplessness: Thanks to bad luck and human error, not even the devices that connect us 24/7 can tell us everything we want to know. The dubious paradoxes of internet technology — its power to inform and deceive, to connect and alienate — are at the heart of this ingeniously high-concept thriller from the 27-yearold writer-director Aneesh Chaganty. A Bay Area native and former Google employee making a sharp, confident feature debut, — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

JULIET, NAKED

happily nor unhappily — with boyfriend Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a film professor at the local college whose lectures make comparisons between “The Wire” and Greek tragedy. But that pretentiousness pales in comparison to the seriousness with which Duncan takes his hobby: a fan website devoted to Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), an American cult musician who, after releasing his seminal 1993 album “Juliet,” seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth. When a bootleg CD surfaces featuring unplugged demo recordings from that album, Annie, who has had it up to her ears with Duncan’s fanboy-ism, posts a negative review of the CD online. This not only leads to some minor tensions with her live-in beau, but more important, to an email correspondence between Annie and Tucker, who, it seems, isn’t hiding out, but simply living below the radar in his ex-wife’s garage in upstate New York. Tucker happens to agree with Annie’s assessment of his music. It’s a classic love triangle — with Tucker and Annie, as email pen pals, slowly coming to the realization that they may have feelings for each other, and with Duncan playing the jealous third wheel. — Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

OPERATION FINALE

who oversaw the transportation of millions of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps. Peter is tormented by surrealistic visions of his sister Fruma (Rita Pauls), who met her demise in a German forest with her three children at the hands of Nazi soldiers. The story’s details are truly wild and unbelievable, but the plotting and characters feel rote. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

THE BOOKSHOP

PG, 113 minutes. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. “The Bookshop,” director/writer Isabel Coixet’s (“Learning to Drive”) adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel, has the feel of a book found collecting dust on the back shelf of a closet. There’s an expectation of great potential considering the lineage but on closer examination the experience teeters on tedium so much it ends up a mystery of what the draw was in the first place. A widow, Florence Green (Emily Mortimer), takes a major emotional and financial leap in 1959 to open a bookshop in the conservative coastal town of Hardborough, Suffolk. She opens her bookstore as a loving tribute to her dead husband. Although her progressive thinking — powered by the writings of Vladimir Nabokov and Ray Bradbury — sends a ripple through the conservative community, that is not what attracts the immediate assault from Mrs. Violet Gamart (Patricia Clarkson), the local grand dame who controls everything that happens in the city. She has her mind set on opening an art center in the building where Green has opened her bookstore and will use any means to obtain the use of the location. — Rick Bentley, Tribune Content Agency

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