Still screening in Bay Area theaters
“All the Money in the World”:
The 1973kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the 16-year-old grandson of billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, is told with solid style and suspense in Ridley Scott’s drama. Michelle Williams plays the boy’s distraught mother, Mark Wahlberg the elder Getty’s negotiator with the kidnappers, Christopher Plummer the billionaire and Charlie Plummer (no relation) the kidnap victim. ★★★ (Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post) R, 2:12
“Call Me by Your Name”:
This almost sinfully enjoyable movie from writer-director Luca Guadagnino evokes the pleasures of art, music, food, natural beauty and sexual awakening, while observing and obeying the natural rhythms of the languid 1980s Italian summer inwhich it is set. The screenplay (by James Ivory) revolves around the 17-year-old son (Timothée Chalamet) of an archaeology professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a 24-year-old American student (Armie Hammer), who has come for a few weeks to serve as the professor’s research assistant. At first the teenage Elio seems barely aware of the presence of the American, Oliver. But soon the two young men are gravitating toward one another as friends, and eventually more. ★★★ (Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post) R, 2:12
“Darkest Hour”: Gary Oldman’s grab-for-the-gusto portrayal of a wildly eccentric Winston Churchill in 1940, during his first two months as Britain’s primeminister, becomes increasingly convincing the more we see of it, and his delivery of the PM’s celebrated speeches is mesmerizing. Kristin Scott Thomas gives a regal performance as the only person who can keep Churchill in line, his wife Clementine. Director Joe Wright’s overhead shots, elaborate tracking sequences, chiaroscuro lighting and deft camera movement ensure there are no dull moments. ★★★ (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) PG-13, 2:05
“Hostiles”: Christian Bale, Wes Studi and Rosamund Pike star in this story of a U.S. Cavalry captain (Bale) ordered in 1892to escort an ailing Northern Cheyenne war chief (Studi) and his family froma prison in New Mexico through dangerous territory to their tribal homeland in Montana. Accompanying the party is a frontier widow (Pike), who has suffered a shattering catastrophe at the hands of the Comanche. The key question posed by writer-director Scott Cooper is whether these people are irrevocably prisoners of their past actions or are capable of change. ★★★ (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) R, 2:15 “I, Tonya”: This dramatic comedy revisits— with verve, intelligence, scathing humor and more than a touch of sadness— the bizarre attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan by goons associated with the camp of Kerrigan rival Tonya Harding before the 1994Winter Olympics. In Margot Robbie’s performance as Harding, the actress disappears beneath a veneer of tough-girl-makeup and crunchy hairspray, but the actress finds and shows us the broken pieces of Tonya’s damaged soul with a kind of fierce vulnerability that makes her sympathetic and at times heartbreaking. Allison Janney, as Tonya’s profane harridan of amother, steals every scene she’s in. ★★★ (Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post) R, 2:00
“The Post”: These days, major-studio cinema made with a real-world purpose can be a risky business— particularly when it takes on a counterintuitive subject like The Washington Post’s 1971 role in publishing government secrets froma 70,000-page Department of Defense study of the Vietnam War. But first-time screenwriter Liz Hannah has capably told a fact-based story of female empowerment for the Weinstein era— that of Post owner-publisher Katharine Graham’s courageous decision towage a court battle for the right to expose a government cover-up spanning four administrations, at the risk of dooming her efforts to take the company public. Director Steven Spielberg has given the film the pace of a thriller, and Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks bring authenticity to their performances of Graham and the newspaper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee. ★★★★ (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times) PG-13, 1:55
“The Shape of Water”: As a kid, youmay have had a nagging question about “Creature from the Black Lagoon”: What did the Gill Man want with the girl? But ultimately monster movies are less about the monster or the girl than about virtue and the brave people who step up to save her from harm. Guillermo del Toro’s film turns all that on its head, giving us a role-reversal romance in the Cold War ’60s, rather than a rape-revenge metaphor. An unlikely princess named Elisa (Sally Hawkins, playing a mute cleaning woman at a military-industrial facility in Baltimore) embarks on an interspecies romance with an endangered humanoid frog (Doug Jones, playing a sea creature captured in the Amazon and brought in by the feds). A scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) wants to study him, while amilitary man (Michael Shannon) wants to torture and kill him. Elisa’s neighbor is beautifully played by Richard Jenkins, as is her co-worker, friend and translator by Octavia Spencer. ★★★ (Rafer Guzmán, Newsday) R, 2:04
“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”:
Director Martin McDonagh’s stinging black comedy taps into the human thirst for revenge with an unpredictable narrative about the way amother’s quest to avenge themurder of her daughter upends a town and prompts a showdown worthy of the Old West. Frances McDormand is wonderful as the hard-shelled mom; Woody Harrelson plays the police chief and Sam Rockwell is his mess of a deputy. McDonagh audaciously balances the impossibly harrowing with the laugh-out-loud funny. ★★★★ (Randy Myers, Bay Area News Group correspondent) R, 1:55