PARASITE

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. The many previous film versions of “Little Women” include dirrector Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, which is better and more moving than people tend to remember. It 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’mgrateful she trusted them enough to give us something new, and bracing. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

1917

1/2 R, 119 minutes. Through today only at Niantic. Still playing at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Also, Sun. only at Garde. Sam Mendes’ “1917” is nothing short of astonishing. Designed as two extraordinarily long, unbroken shots, the film is a stunning feat of cinematography, production design and performance moving seamlessly as one piece. But the most incredible thing about “1917” is how often you forget about the trick of it all, absorbed in character and story rather than any “gimmick.” For Mendes, it’s a deeply personal story, a passion project dedicated to his grandfather, Alfred Mendes, “for the stories he told us,” which places this 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. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

R, 132 minutes. Through today only at Niantic, Madison Art Cinemas, Stonington. Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho has steadily built a canon of masterpieces over the past two decades, genre-hopping from mystery to monster flicks, dabbling in post-apocalyptic horror and animal rights action movies, switching between Korean- and English-language films, all while maintaining his signature darkly comedic tone. His longtime collaborator, actor Song Kang-ho, first starred in Bong’s epic, hilarious true crime murder mystery “Memories of Murder.” He’s an integral part of Bong’s unique style, walking the tonal tightrope of tragedy and comedy. He’s starred in every film Bong’s made since, including his most recent masterpiece, “Parasite,” a slick, Hitchcockian family thriller and a class warfare cri de coeur. It would be criminal to describe the details of the plot of this deliciously twisty fable. — Katie Walsh, Tribute News Service

THE PHOTOGRAPH

1/2 PG-13, 106 minutes. Through today only at Lisbon. In this soulful and adult romantic drama, Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield star as tentative, would-be lovers in modern-day New York. He’s a magazine writer on an assignment and she’s a museum curator. They first connect over a photograph of her mother that unlocks mom’s backstory, set in 1980s Louisiana. Written and directed by Stella Meghie, the film is a gentle and attentive inter-generational tale with a first-rate cast. To the always-charged romantic question “Do I love this stranger?” it adds another equally fraught query: “Am I becoming my mom?” Lakeith (FX’s “Atlanta”) plays Michael as a coiled, watchful and smoldering hunk who seems to be acting from deep within his guts. He’s just as likely to flee as he is of cuddling. Rae’s Mae is luminous and charismatic, with wide eyes that convey so many emotions. When Rae (HBO’s “Insecure”) bursts into a laugh, she seems to tap into that joyful, infectious place that Julia Roberts does. Their initial mating dance is as cute as any rom-com — who’s making the first move? — before they finally get together and have a meal. And how refreshing it is to hear a debate over who’s the better rapper — Drake or Kendrick Lamar — as the first date conversation? But Meghie (“The Weekend”) is not interested in a mere rom-com and “The Photograph “has miles more heft and depth. She’s interested in exploring how behavior can be inherited, how ambition can topple personal lives, how we establish patterns in our love life and how bravery in romance can be just about saying what your heart feels. — Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

1/2 R, 121 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” obeys all the accepted conventions of juicy gothic romance: In a drafty mansion on a windswept coast, a mismatched couple tries to ignore the irresistible pull of forbidden love. Passions proceed to seethe, tensions simmer and bodices literally heave. The twist in Céline Sciamma’s intriguing but inert take on the genre is that the couple is two women: Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has arrived at the stately Brittany home of Héloise (Adèle Haenel) to paint her portrait, which is to be sent directly to a potential suitor in Milan in the 18th-century equivalent of match.com. Héloise, a moody young woman given to deep, meaningful looks and walks on the beach, has no interest in posing, which is why her strategically minded mother (Valeria Golino) has asked Marianne to pursue her enterprise in secret, gathering her material from observational subterfuge. That contrivance and the stolen glances it entails gives “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” an extra frisson of danger, even if Sciamma and her audience know exactly where this will lead: Drenched in fetishistic pleasures (those bodices!) and a faint mist of tragedy, the film is less about the narrative itself than its attempt to marry eroticism and feminist theory. As an exercise in watching — Marianne watches Héloise, who watches Marianne, as the viewers watch them both — “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” becomes a critical treatise on the male gaze, which for a century has reduced women to passive objects. Much in the same way Lorene Scafaria played with those ideas in “Hustlers” last year, Sciamma obviously has fun subverting those traditional norms; and, like Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” her film is steeped in the economics of marriage as a form of security and lifelong servitude. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG

1/2 PG, 100 minutes. Through today only at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. Still playing at Niantic, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. I’m as surprised as anyone to report that “Sonic the Hedgehog,” the adaptation of the popular 1990s Sega video game, is actually good. Expectations have been low since the movie’s rocky rollout in its first trailer, with online backlash regarding the look of the computer-generated character requiring animators to go back to the drawing board, completely redesigning the speedy blue hedgehog. So color me surprised to discover that after all of that, “Sonic the Hedgehog” is legitimately funny, heartwarming and entertaining. There are a few hard and fast facts about Sonic: he claims to be a hedgehog, he runs everywhere, he’s from an idyllic island and he has little golden rings that allow him to transport himself anywhere. Writers Patrick Casey and Josh Miller plug those character traits into a story structure that is well-loved and a bit retro, an odd couple road movie about friendship. It’s a little bit “E.T.,” one part “Harry and the Hendersons,” with a dash of “National Lampoon’s Vacation.” As it turns out, if you write a very funny script, and hire very funny people to perform it, it doesn’t really matter if the movie is about an extraterrestrial hedgehog, or even what he looks like. Ben Schwartz voices Sonic, a lonely alien living in exile on Earth for his own safety, where he longs to connect with the humans around him. The big news here is Jim Carrey’s glorious return to his best rubber-faced, fast-talking form as a secretive government mad scientist. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service

THE TRAITOR (IL TRADITORE)

1/2 R, 135 minutes. Through today only at Madison Art Cinemas. The 1986 Maxi Trial, in which 475 members of the Sicilian Mafia, known as Cosa Nostra, were indicted for their crimes, is an event absolutely ripe for cinematic adaptation. Held in a bunker of a courthouse inside the Palermo prison, the accused Mafiosi watched the proceedings from behind bars. They reserved their worst ire for the witnesses, though, their former friends, mob bosses-turned-informants. It’s here that the movie finds inspiration for the sprawling Italian gangster epic “The Traitor.” It follows the life, times and crimes of famous informant Tommaso Buscetta, played marvelously by Pierfrancesco Favino. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service