Movies still screening in Bay Area theaters
“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”: This passionate, involving, climatechange documentary, with former Vice President Al Gore, is at its best as it follows him around the globe taking stock of the continued rise in carbon dioxide levels and the melting of glaciers, but also finding that investments in solar and wind power have gone through the roof. If the trip has an emotional high point, it’s during Gore’s visit to conservative Texas, where Georgetown Mayor Dale Ross explains that a decision was made to power the city by 100 percent renewable energy, not for ideological reasons, but because it simply makes sense economically. 3 stars, (Kenneth Turan) (PG) 1:40
“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. 3 ½ stars (Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News) R, 2:00
“Brigsby Bear”: James, a 20-something man (Kyle Mooney), has been raised in isolation by a couple (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams) who kidnapped him as a baby. He was taught that the air outside their bunker was toxic. His only contact with
the wider world was via VHS tapes of a public-access-caliber TV show called “Brigsby Bear Adventures,” created in secret by his fake father. After federal agents arrest the abductors and reunite the man with his biological family, James feels completely disoriented — until he seizes upon the idea of making a film to complete the adventures of his lifelong obsession, Brigsby, and uses his fandom as a mechanism for coping with his strange new world. The story (co-written by Mooney) mines James’ cluelessness for laughs. 2 ½ stars (Stephanie Merry, Washington Post) PG-13, 1:37 “Columbus”: This beautifully photographed indie drama from debuting Korean American writer-director Kogonada follows two lovely young strangers — Seoul-based book translator Jin, played by John Cho (Sulu in the “Star Trek” films), and recent highschool graduate Casey, played by Haley Lu Richardson (“The Edge of Seventeen”) — as their friendship develops. They spend a few days talking and exploring Casey’s hometown, Columbus, Indiana — an unlikely setting for several mid-20th-century buildings designed by internationally renowned architects of the day — while both try to come to terms, respectively, with strained parental relationships. 3 stars (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times) Unrated, 1:44
“Detroit”: Filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow revisits the racial tension, violence and institutionalized police brutality that erupted in July 1967 in the country’s auto capital, ranging from intimidation of the city’s 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 pistol used at the starting line of track and field events, which ignited an outlandish and illegal show of force by racist police officers and National Guardsmen, as they tried to find a sniper rifle that didn’t exist. The thoroughly re- searched “Detroit” illuminates both the overarching picture and the individual stories that help us understand what happened and why — and that remind us how little the racial dynamic in this country has changed over the past half century. 2 ½ stars (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. 4 stars (Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press) PG-13, 1:46 “From the Land of the Moon”: Marion Cotillard, Louis Garrel and Alex Brendemühl star in a 1940s-set drama from Nicole Garcia about a woman in a loveless marriage, who visits a spa in the Alps and falls for a man she meets. Despite some beautiful cinematography, the story falls short of the intended emotional heights. 1 star (Alan Zilberman, Washington Post) (R) 1:16
“The Glass Castle”: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts star in director Dustin Daniel Crettin’s screen version of a 2005 memoir by journalist Jeannette Walls, about her freewheeling, nomadic upbringing in a dysfunctional family. 2 ½ stars (Stephanie Merry, Washington Post) PG-13, 2:07
“Kidnap”: Halle Berry plays a woman who pushes her minivan — and her psyche — to the limit while trying to get her young son back from abductors through a solo chase of their car. Not only is the script horrendous, but many opportunities for interesting twists and turns are squandered. 1 star (Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service) R, 1:22
“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. 1 ½ stars (Katie Walsh, Los Angeles Times) R, 1:30
“Menashe”: Director Joshua Z. Weinstein’s drama focuses on a teenage Jewish boy named Rieven and his recently widowed father, Menashe, a grocery clerk in an ultra-orthodox Yiddishspeaking Brooklyn, New York, community, where tradition mandates that youngsters be raised in a two-parent household. Will custody of Rieven be given to his insufferable uncle and spouse, or will Menashe prove himself worthy of parenting the boy to adulthood? 3 stars (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) PG 1:21
“The Midwife”: Two great Catherines — French actresses Frott and Deneuve — star respectively as the longsuffering, nurturing middleage midwife of the title, and the aging former mistress of this first woman’s late father — who become unlikely allies against the odds. 3 stars (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times) Unrated, 1:57
“The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature”: In an animated sequel — voiced by Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl, Jackie Chan and others — the city-park homes of Surly the Squirrel and his animal friends are threatened by the plan of the Oakton City mayor and his greedy daughter to evict the wildlife and build a shoddy for-profit amusement park on the site. 2 stars (Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service) PG, 1:31
“Step”: Amanda Lipitz’s blink-away-the tears documentary is less about a Baltimore high-school’s step-dancing team than about three remarkable young women on a far more complicated road — to college and to their dreams. 4 stars (Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times (PG) 1:23