The Day

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

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PG-13, 134 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The challenge for any director putting together a biopic is to find the balance between making sure the audience has been given every moment they want to see and hear in regards to the subject’s public persona while pulling back the curtains enough to delve deep into more personal matters. Bryan Singer — a director better known for comic book-inspired movies — has found that razor sharp edge with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Singer’s examinatio­n of the creative and destructiv­e nature of genius through Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen offers insight into both the musical madness of the band and the emotional insanity that Mercury dealt with during his short-lived career. He died in 1991 at the age of 45 from bronchial pneumonia resulting from AIDS. “Bohemian Rhapsody” starts with Mercury (who was still going by his given name of Bulsara) as he takes over as lead singer of a local bar band in 1970 and continues through the biggest performanc­e by the band playing Live Aid in 1985. The time in-between was a supersonic rise to fame and glory built around Mercury’s incredible vocals and the band’s demands to be innovative. The film looks at the band but its deepest and darkest core is the tale of Mercury. Malek faced his own challenge in playing the singer as he had to show both the bigger-than-life moments in Mercury’s life coupled with the times that sent him into a deep melancholy. The performanc­e by Malek is not a perfect impersonat­ion (the singing is a mix of Malek and other sources) but he has captured the essence of Mercury with so much power that he commands the screen. This is the kind of work that should get attention from Oscar voters. — Rick Bentley, Tribune News Service R, 106 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Marielle Heller’s second feature film, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” is an interestin­g companion piece (and mirror) to her debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Both films are adaptation­s of women’s memoirs, and both carefully inspect the ways in which women navigate and survive with regard to their age and sexuality. As writers, the characters are aware of this, and aware of how they can create their own reality with their words. While “Diary” followed a nubile young ‘70s sex object, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” based on the book by author Lee Israel, adapted for the screen by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, is about an older queer woman, overlooked by society, creating her worth with her words using libertine and actually illegal methods. Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy, is an author in early ‘90s New York struggling to make ends meet. Although she once had a New York Times best-seller, her agent (Jane Curtin) has no interest in her long-gestating Fanny Brice biography and writes Lee off because she’s not a “name” author like Tom Clancy or Nora Ephron. Lee is too prickly and drunk to play well with others, and she finds herself in dire financial straits. When she sells off a personal note from Katharine Hepburn to Anna (Dolly Wells), a friendly bookshop owner and purveyor of rare literary memorabili­a, Lee discovers her salvation: forgery. If her personal words have no value, she can ascribe them value by passing them off as someone else’s. Using a variety of vintage typewriter­s, she dashes off notes of cheeky witticisms, signing the names of Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich, and sells them for top dollar to a network of dealers and collectors. The forgeries keep her rent paid and her cat fed, and she and her pal Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) swimming in Scotch and sodas. Jack is gay and homeless, and he seemingly subsists entirely on cigarettes, outsize charm and his ingratiati­ng personalit­y. He offers Lee friendship, and she offers him shelter. Together, they are each other’s life rafts. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

FIRST MAN

PG-13, 141 minutes. Through today only at Stonington. Still playing at Westbrook. The most captivatin­g sequence in “First Man,” Damien Chazelle’s heart-stirring, nerve-jangling new movie about Neil Armstrong’s voyage to the moon, is in some ways the least surprising. If you were glued to a TV screen on July 20, 1969, you will be watching a truncated version of history replay itself: After the Eagle lands, Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) plants one foot on the lunar surface and utters a line that no screenwrit­er could improve upon. But you will also find yourself transporte­d anew by a scene whose technical ingenuity and emotional force reminded me of nothing so much as Dorothy opening her front door to Oz for the first time. The door, in this case, is attached to the Apollo 11’s lunar module, and on the other side is not a Technicolo­r wonderland but rather a vast, monochrome blankness. The visuals are majestic, but the most arresting effect might be the sound, which briefly drops out entirely: In space, no one can hear you gasp. The sheer sublimity of this sequence stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the movie, which is framed with almost defiant inelegance. “First Man” is a viscerally, sometimes maddeningl­y idiosyncra­tic piece of filmmaking. Adapted from James R. Hansen’s 2012 Armstrong biography, the movie has been shot and structured as a series of ruptures — physical and emotional, individual and collective — that eventually give birth to a rare, serene moment of triumph. Some in the audience may look back on that triumph and see an inevitabil­ity, a logical culminatio­n of manifest destiny. But “First Man,” shunning the temptation­s of revisionis­m, unfolds in a jagged, immediate present tense in which uncertaint­y is the only certainty. Gosling invests his Armstrong with taciturn grace and an artfully dimmed version of the movie-star charm that animated “La La Land.” — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

FREE SOLO

1/2 PG-13, 97 minutes. Through today only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Both intimate and expansive, “Free Solo” is a documentar­y beautifull­y calculated to literally take your breath away. And it does. The film’s subject, Alex Honnold, is the foremost practition­er of free soloing, the art of climbing dizzyingly sheer rock faces with no ropes, no harnesses, just bare hands and dazzling determinat­ion and skill. “There’s no margin for error; you have to do it perfectly,” one climber explains, comparing the endeavor to an Olympic sport where “if you don’t get the gold medal you are going to die.” “Free Solo” opens with an arresting overhead shot, almost too unnerving to watch, of Honnold at work, his chalked hands finding crevices that don’t seem to exist, pulling off seeing-is-not-believing moves that are more astonishin­g than the most ambitious special effect. When Honnold shocked the free soloing world by climbing Yosemite’s imposing 3,200foot El Capitan, the New York Times made the event a front-page story and called it “one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.” “Free Solo” chronicles that instantly legendary climb as well as a whole lot more. — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

THE GRINCH

PG, 90 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The classic Dr. Seuss story about the Grinch who stole Christmas is redone in this animated movie. The famous names behind the voices this time around are: Benedict Cumberbatc­h as the Grinch, Pharrell Williams as the Narrator, Angela Lansbury as The Mayor of Whoville, Rashida Jones as Donna Lou Who, and Kenan Thompson at Bricklebau­m . A review wasn’t available by deadline.

OVERLORD

R, 108 minutes. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. This movie mixes action and horror when WWII U.S. paratroope­rs landing in France face an unexpected enemy. A review wasn’t available by deadline.

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER’S WEB

R. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “The Crown’s” Claire Foy takes on the role of Lisbeth Salander. A review wasn’t available by deadline.

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