LITTLE WOMEN

PG, 135 minutes. Through today only at Waterford. Still playing at Niantic, Westbrook. Fresh off “Lady Bird” (2017), a wonderful movie about a young writer leaving home, the writer-director Greta Gerwig has made another wonderful movie about a young writer leaving home, although she ends up there. Gerwig has taken on Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which she begins with a title card featuring Alcott’s own words: “I had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.” With an established and frequently adapted classic, it’s useful to tip your hand and let the audience know what it’s in for straight away. The new film’s pacing and rhythm reveals Gerwig’s full-gallop approach to the four March sisters, their mother and their intertwining private lives during and after the Civil War. The way Gerwig handles them, the March family’s stories are treated as a disarming comedy of manners under serious, cloudy skies. She doesn’t stop there: By the end of this “Little Women,” freer visually as well as narratively compared to “Lady Bird,” Alcott’s story and Jo March’s story dovetail into a third, hybrid tale of one woman’s freedom from want. “A Very Charming Book for Girls”: That’s how Alcott’s first volume (price: $1.50), clearly unfit for half the planet, sold itself in the October 1868 Chicago Tribune classifieds, promising something “fresh, sparkling, natural and full of soul.” The many previous film versions of “Little Women” include George Cukor’s 1933 deluxe edition starring Katharine Hepburn as Jo, one of her greatest early screen performances. Director Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, better and more moving than people tend to remember, has a lot in common with Gerwig’s adaptation; it’s full of natural, easy-breathing ensemble work. Gerwig’s comic instincts bubble to the surface more often, though, and I’m grateful she trusted them enough to give us something new, and bracing. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

1917

breathtaking World War I film into a stark and very human reality. Although the cinematic undertaking is complex, the story, scripted by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns from a fragment of a war story told to him by his grandfather, is simple: A message must be delivered. Two young lance corporals, Blake (Dean Charles-Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), are summoned by General Erinmore (Colin Firth) and given the order to deliver a message by morning to a battalion of British soldiers who are walking into a trap if they attack the German line as planned. Blake’s brother is a lieutenant in the battalion, so whether or not he is “good with maps,” as the general mentions, he’s determined to fight his way through No Man’s Land and the occupied French village of Écoust to bring the message in time and save his brother from the massacre. Blake and Schofield are constantly moving, as they wind their way up and down the trenches, and across the razor wire and mud caught with bloated and desiccated corpses both human and animal. The people they encounter along the way will seem to wander into their path almost by happenstance. Over the next eight hours, they’ll creep through deserted German trenches and war fields littered with ordinance; they’ll wander through abandoned farm houses where buckets of milk are left standing. Through the hellish, ruined inferno that is Écoust lies a river and then a wood where their destination awaits. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

R, 161 minutes. Waterford. It’s shocking to say that Quentin Tarantino’s Manson murders film is perhaps his most sedate and self-reflective yet. But maybe that’s because it’s not a Manson murders film. It’s not even a revenge picture. Rather, “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” is a rumination on stardom and myth-making, a memo on the cult of celebrity and the narratives we use to process the world around us. Can’t movie magic change these stories? The reality we live in? The film is a bit rueful, sentimental even, which is a new mode for the enfant terrible auteur, and it even casts his most operatic historical fantasy revenge pictures in a new light. “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” is still very much a Tarantino film, chockablock with his obsessions and peccadilloes. His fetishes and fixations are front and center, from the macro (flashbacks nested inside of flashbacks, random voice-over narration) to the micro (lots of bare female feet). Tarantino’s camera obsessively points out every detail of the period-specific production design, whole swaths of Los Angeles dressed to the nines in its