Movies still screening in Bay Area theaters

“13 Minutes”: In director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s drama, inspired by an actual but little-known November 1939 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Christian Friedel plays Georg Elsner, the Bavarian carpenter and clockmaker who hatched the plot and acted alone planting explosives in a place where Hitler was supposed to appear. But his timing was off by 13 minutes. The film’s unanswered question is how this nonpolitical German became so radicalized to attempt a final solution for der Führer. ★★★ (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:50

“Atomic Blonde”: Director David Leitch updates the Cold War thriller by transforming it into an action flick with a female star — Charlize Theron, playing MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, on a mission in 1989 Berlin. The story itself is superficial, leaving plenty of room for former stuntman Leitch to show off his talent for choreographing action and mayhem. The film’s most formidable asset, though, is Theron, whose spy doesn’t just dominate, as subjugate, every other character on the screen. ★★ (Jake Coyle, Associated Press) R, 1:54

“Baby Driver”: This heist picture not only has a hip soundtrack, but director Edgar Wright has carefully synced the action and visual rhythms to it. Ansel Elgort plays the young wheelman who whisks a Kevin Spacey-led gang, including Jon Hamm and Jamie Fox, away from each crime scene before the dust settles. Lily James delivers the eye candy. Think of it as a Tarantino-esque jukebox musical. ★★ (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) R, 1:57 “Beatriz at Dinner”: This darkly comic fantasy focuses on what happens when, over dinner, an empathetic Latina healer (Salma Hayek) comes face to face with a racist, vulgar member of the 1 percent (John Lithgow). The result is a queasily funny, suspenseful satire for the Trump era. ★★★ (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:23 “The Beguiled”: Sofia Coppola revisits the Southern Gothic genre in her steamy remake of a 1971 Civil Warera thriller starring Clint

Eastwood. This time the Yankee soldier taken in by the Farnsworth Seminary for Young (Southern) Ladies to recover from his wounds is played by Colin Farrell. Nicole Kidman brings icy decorum to the role of the headmistress, even as repression loses its grip on the corseted students (Elle Fanning and Kristen Dunst, among them), and sexual tensions erupt. But Coppola never once lets the male character hijack the narrative, and soon he realizes he has been outflanked. ★★★★ (Karen D’Souza, Staff) R, 1:34

“The Big Sick”: The screenplay, written by star Kumail Nanjiani and his real-life wife, Emily V. Gordon, was inspired by their courtship. The sexy, beguiling Zoe Kazan brings intelligence and believability to the Gordon role. The romance is almost derailed because Kumail can’t bring himself to tell his traditional Pakistani parents he’s in love with an American named Emily, who comes down with something debilitating, and is in a medically induced coma when Kumail finally visits the hospital and meets her parents. This film transcends the clichés of each formula it flirts with. ★★★ (Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News) R, 2:00 “Detroit”: Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow revisits the racial tension, violence and institutionalized police brutality that erupted in July 1967 in the U.S. auto capital, ranging from intimidation of black residents to the tragic killing of three black teenage boys by authorities who were later acquitted. Those killings were triggered by the firing of a blank in a pistol used at the starting line of track events. The shot set off an outlandish and illegal show of force by some racist police officers and others, including National Guardsmen, who followed suit as they tried to find a sniper rifle that didn’t exist. The thoroughly researched film illuminates both the overarching picture and some individual stories that help us understand what happened and why — and it reminds us how little the racial dynamic in this country has changed over the past half century. ★★ (Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune) R, 2:23 “Dunkirk”: Christopher Nolan’s WWII drama is a stunning, immersive survival film that puts viewers in the midst of the action, whether on the beach with the 400,000 Allied soldiers waiting for a rescue that may never come, on the English Channel in a little civilian ship with only an aging man and two teenage boys aboard, heading into hostile waters, and in the air above the beach in two lone Spitfires that are about to run out of fuel. “Dunkirk” ranks as the best film of 2017 so far and as the director’s best, too. ★★★★ (Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press) PG-13, 1:46

“Lady Macbeth”: This icy, unnerving tale revolves around the spectacular rebellion of a 19th-century teenage bride (Florence Pugh, in a breakthrough performance) against a horrific marriage to a man twice her age. While her husband and father-in-law are away from the remote English manor house where she is essentially a prisoner, she starts a passionate affair with a new groomsman (Cosmo Jarvis) on the estate. The mood sustained by director William Oldroyd is so intense you can hear a pin drop as the complications play out. Alice Birch adapted the screenplay from an 1865 Russian novella. ★★★ (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:29

“Landline”: In filmmaker Gillian Robespierre’s 1995 New York-set nostalgia fest, Jenny Slate and Abby Quinn play sisters who suspect their father (John Turturro) is cheating on their mother (Edie Falco) and trying to prove it. The insight of the movie is that lust, dissatisfaction and restlessness manifest themselves at every age and stage of life. The family dynamics are persuasive enough, but the techiness of those involved becomes monotonous well before the final scene. ★★ (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:33 “Letters From Baghdad — Gertrude Bell”: British explorer, author, photographer and stateswoman during the early 20th century — played a pivotal role in creating the country of Iraq. The folly of that colonial exploit and its grievous present-day repercussions run like a cruelly ironic subtext through this film, constructed entirely from Bell’s correspondence and other primary sources (much of it read by Tilda Swinton), while nitrate images of historic Persia, Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula supply the astonishing visuals. ★★★ (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) Unrated, 1:35 “The Little Hours”: In Jeff Baena’s cheeky adaptation of parts of Boccaccio’s 14th-century story collection “The Decameron,” randy nuns run amock, especially after the arrival of a young hunk of a gardener-caretaker (Dave Franco). The nuns — played by Aubrey Plaza, Kate Micucci and Alison Brie, among others — speak in anachronistic 21st-century slang. With hardly any jokes in the screenplay, the language gimmick and the genre itself are the punchlines, as such. ★ (Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:30 “The Midwife”: Two great Catherines — French actresses Frott and Deneuve — star respectively as the long-suffering, nurturing middle-age midwife of the title, and the aging former mistress of this woman’s late father — who become unlikely allies against all odds. ★★★ (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times) Unrated, 1:57 “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”: Luc Besson’s visually stunning indie sci-fi extravaganza, adapted from his favorite childhood comic-book series, stars Cara Delevingne and Dane DaHaan as government operatives who have traveled to an intergalactic metropolis called Alpha to investigate a possible genocide. Would that the screenplay were half as exciting as the visuals. ★★ (Jake Coyle, Associated Press) PG-13, 2:17

AMAZON STUDIOS Jenny Slate, left, and Abby Quinn play sisters who suspect their father is cheating in “Landline.”

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Christian Friedel plays Georg Elser, would-be assassin of Adolf Hitler, in the film “13 Minutes.”