Chile Pages
BECOMING NOBODY
Not rated. 81 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. See review, Page 40.
THE CHAMBERMAID
Not rated. 102 minutes. In French and Spanish with subtitles. Jean Cocteau Cinema. See review, Page 41.
FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES
This documentary about Fiddler on the Roof explores the musical’s enduring appeal, beginning with how unlikely the production seemed during its first staging amidst the social change of the 1960s, and how much it remains part of the fabric of our culture. To this end, director Max Lewkowicz interviewed many people associated with the first production, including composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick, and book author Joseph Stein, as well as many Broadway luminaries of today. Rated PG-13. 92 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Not reviewed)
THE GOLDFINCH
Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2013 novel gets a film adaptation courtesy of director John Crowley. Ansel Elgort plays Theo Decker, a young man whose mother (Hailey Wist) was killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when he was 13 years old. He makes off with a painting titled The Goldfinch, is taken in by a wealthy socialite (Nicole Kidman), and goes on to a globetrotting life forging antiques with Boris (Aneurin Barnard), his cohort in crime. Luke Wilson and Sarah Paulson also star. Rated R. 149 minutes. Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
HUSTLERS
Cardi B, Lizzo, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles, and Constance Wu head the cast in this movie about a group of strippers who steal and embezzle money from the wealthy clients who frequent their club. It’s based on a true story as reported in New York magazine’s 2015 article “The Hustlers at Scores.” Wu plays the single mother who conceived the whole scheme, Lopez plays the woman who helped her set it up, and Stiles portrays the journalist reporting on the story and the women’s downfall. Rated R. 109 minutes. Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE
In the 1970s, very few stars were as big as Linda Ronstadt, the singer who traveled in country, bluegrass, rock, pop, soul, and Latin music circles (among others), while selling out massive concerts and achieving multiple platinum records. Not even that level of success protected her from the misogyny in the music industry, however, and this documentary looks at how hard she fought, while also celebrating her incredible talent. Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Don Henley, Dolly Parton, and Bonnie Raitt are among the stars who appear to sing her praises. Rated PG-13. 95 minutes. The Screen and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
OFFICIAL SECRETS
In 2003, Katharine Gun, a translator at a British intelligence agency, leaked information to the press about the illegal activities the United States allegedly committed during its push to invade Iraq. She was arrested for leaking the information, but the case against her was dropped. Keira Knightley plays Gun in this docudrama by Gavin Hood, which examines her ordeal. Ralph Fiennes, Matthew Goode, and Indira Varma costar. Rated R. 111 minutes. Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS
Filmmaker Janice Engel presents this documentary about Molly Ivins, the Texas newspaper columnist who charmed readers and made enemies with her firecracker take on politics. Her fearless and deeply funny voice made her stand out as a Texas liberal, which earned her fame as well as the task of telling George W. Bush’s story from her perspective and tangling with his supporters in the media industry. Not rated. 93 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Not reviewed)
NOW IN THEATERS
ANGEL HAS FALLEN
Those who stand to squeeze even more money from a franchise that has already earned nearly $376 million at the worldwide box office (for Olympus Has Fallen and London
Has Fallen) surely thought a third movie was a good idea. That means we get to sit through another chapter in the adventures of Mike Banning, a Secret Service agent code-named Angel, and played by Gerard Butler as an indiscriminate macho man. As the film opens, Banning is suffering from PTSD and abusing pain pills. He’s on the verge of hanging up his earpiece, yet, predictably, he’s also about to earn a promotion to head up the Secret Service. During an assassination attempt that leaves the president (Morgan Freeman) in a coma, every member of the presidential security detail is killed — except Banning. Our hero is accused of planning the attack. What follows are perfunctory twists and turns that any attentive viewer will spot from a mile away. Here’s the real mystery: How does an $80 million movie end up looking so low-rent? Rated R. 120 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Hau Chu/Washington Post)
THE ANGRY BIRDS MOVIE 2
This is not great cinema, but the animated sequel to
The Angry Birds Movie goes above and beyond what is to be expected from such things. The story takes us to Bird Island, an avian paradise inhabited by flightless birds who travel via a slingshot that hurls them to their destination. Our hero is hot-tempered Red (Jason Sudeikis), who saved his home from an invasion of green pigs in the first film. This time, the pigs’ leader, Leonard (Bill Hader), wants a truce. Pig Island is under attack from nearby Eagle Island and antagonist Zeta (Leslie Jones), a purple bird of prey. She’s coming for Bird Island next. Can Red and his feathered friends join forces with their former enemy to defeat a common foe? The first Angry Birds movie was, arguably, a story of mistrust. In this new and improved sequel, the message is more encouraging: If we could only put aside our differences, we might save the world. Rated PG. 96 minutes. Screens in 2D only at Regal Stadium 14. (Pat Padua/ Washington Post)
BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON
Brittany (Jillian Bell) is joking her way through a rut. She attends a doctor’s visit hoping to get a prescription for Adderall, but she is instead told her lifestyle is putting her health at risk. Her heart rate and blood pressure are high, and so her doctor recommends that she lose around 50 pounds. For Brittany, who sleeps until noon and drinks all night, it would require her to change her entire life. But she does, one agonizing step at a time, soon training to run the New York City Marathon. Writer and director Paul Downs Colaizzo focuses less on the challenge of running than on the psychological barriers that impede physical achievement. As Brittany nears her goals, she lashes out more and more against those who seem to affirm her self-worth. Her knee-jerk self-deprecation often feels punishing not only to the character but also to the audience. Bell imbues Brittany with humanity and wit, but all too frequently she is working within the framework of a story that seems hellbent on robbing her character of joy. And while there are references to bodies being beautiful at all sizes, there’s no suggestion that her mental health might benefit from the same attention given to her physical health. Perhaps running can’t treat both at the same time. Rated R. 104 minutes. Violet Crown (Teo Bugbee/New York Times)
COLD CASE HAMMARSKJÖLD
In this unsettling, slippery documentary, viewers are led down an vertiginous path to the mercenary underside of global realpolitiks. The titular protagonist is Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961, in what was then northern Rhodesia. Although it was ruled an accident, several observers noted the suspicious circumstances of his death, including how convenient it was for certain political and corporate factions. Filmmaker Mads Brügger reexamines the episode, returning to the place where the remains of Hammarskjöld’s plane were buried and following an investigator named Göran Björkdahl down a rabbit hole that ends with a pretty convincing case that the U.N. leader was murdered. But Brügger doesn’t stop there: The rabbit hole leads him into even more disturbing areas that have disquieting relevance to modern-day life, from medical epidemics to the equally fatal contagions of white supremacy and militarism. Funny, provocative, and chilling,
Cold Case Hammarskjöld draws the viewer into that helix. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Not rated. 128 minutes. Center for Contemporary Arts. (Ann Hornaday/Washington Post)
DORA AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD
The animated TV series Dora the Explorer has, for eight seasons, been a bilingual cash cow for Nickelodeon. Spinning the adventures of an intrepid 6-year-old Latina girl into a movie could have been a way for Dora — known for going on quests and solving problems with little more than a monkey, a talking backpack, and a map — to seek out a new frontier. In the film, young Dora (Madelyn Miranda) lives in a jungle with her cousin Diego (Malachi Barton), and her parents (Michael Peña and Eva Longoria), professors who have been searching for an Incan city. Ten years later, Dora’s parents are ready to head to Peru for the final search, and the heroine (Isabela Moner) is sent to live with Diego in Los Angeles. Dora and Diego (Jeff Wahlberg) are kidnapped, and it seems that bad guys want to use Dora to track her parents, so it’s back to the jungle they go. Dora’s oblivious cheerfulness makes her wonderfully out of place in the big-city high school. But the movie’s tone is all over the map. Rated PG. 102 minutes. Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Kristen Page-Kirby/ Washington Post)
FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW
A spin-off of the popular action franchise The
Fast and the Furious featuring two of its recurring characters — Dwayne Johnson’s lawman Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s mercenary Deckard Shaw — this film is far from prestige fare. It’s also pretty funny and watchable, in just enough measure to counteract its unabashedly far-fetched plot, which pairs Hobbs, a straight-arrow agent on loan to the CIA, with Shaw, a disgraced former member of the British military, to apprehend an MI6 agent (Vanessa Kirby) who is believed to have absconded with a “programmable bioweapon.” This is complicated by the fact that a cybernetically enhanced supervillain (Idris Elba) also wants the weapon. Hobbs & Shaw works best if you don’t just come in blind, but if you lower all your expectations. Rated PG-13. 135 minutes. Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Michael O’Sullivan/Washington Post)
GOOD BOYS
The raunchy high-school comedy comes to middle school with this film that casts Jacob Tremblay, Keith L. Williams, and Brady Noon as a trio of friends who aim to rise above their status of the dorkiest kids in school. In an effort to get to a party that will elevate their cool quotient, they run afoul of some teenage girls (Molly Gordon and Midori Francis, among others), accidentally co-opt some illegal drugs, and get into untold hijinks. Rated R. 89 minutes. Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
IT: CHAPTER TWO
Director Andy Muschietti attempts to honor everyone involved, including Stephen King, author of the 1986 novel It, so the movie is like a game of musical chairs that runs too long. And since Muschietti has few scare tactics at his disposal, the film loses its capacity to frighten. You will recall that in the first film the Losers Club defeated Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård), a demonic spirit that can take many forms but prefers that of a demented clown. Twenty-seven years later, in 2016, only Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) remembers what happened. Like a bad nightmare, the rest of them barely recall that period in their young lives. Now that Pennywise is on the prowl again, hunting children and other vulnerable people, Mike contacts the rest of the Losers and asks them to return to Derry, Maine. Now that the characters are older, there are fewer lessons for them to learn, so Chapter Two takes them back to a childlike state. Romantic subplots are indelicate, and shared grief arrives with less gravitas. The cumulative effect is downright maudlin, which is not what you might expect from a film with gallons of blood and other bodily fluids. Rated R. 169 minutes. Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Alan Zilberman/Washington Post)
THE LION KING
There is considerable technical prowess at work in this remake of the 1994 animated film The Lion King, which replaces the cartoony visuals of the original with ultrarealistic CGI animation. The animals are so realistic, and the environments so stunning, that it often looks like a nature documentary. Unfortunately, the animals look so real that they struggle to convey any emotion or personality. The story
centers on a young lion named Simba (voiced by JD McCrary as a cub and Donald Glover as an adult) who must face the evil Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) after Scar kills his father (James Earl Jones) and exiles him. Nearly every beat of this plot replicates the 1994 film, and many shots from the original movie are recreated exactly. Coupled with the less-evocative characters, this makes for a boring experience, if one that’s beautiful to look at. Rated PG. 118 minutes. Screens in 2D only at Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD
The most nuanced movie in Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood finds the filmmaker utilizing exceptional art direction and sketching crisscrossing stories across 1969-era Tinseltown. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Rick Dalton, a past-his-prime actor who spirals through decreasingly attractive job opportunities in search of his mojo. The eternally cool Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, his stunt double, a man content as a sidekick close in orbit to Dalton’s stardom. This delightful depiction of male friendship finds minor conflict when Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and husband Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) move next door to Dalton, drawing the cult led by Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) near. Unlike many Tarantino films, there is no heist to score, no villain to vanquish, and the relaxed nature of the plot suits the director, who is allowed to invest himself deeply in the individual scenes and subvert expectations at every turn. Rated R. 161 minutes. Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)
OVERCOMER
This faith-based drama centers on John Harrison (Alex Kendrick), a basketball coach in a small town who struggles when a local factory closes and many in the community are forced to move away. He reluctantly becomes the coach of the cross-country running team, and through prayer and hope, he puts his life back together and helps one of his athletes (Aryn Wright-Thompson) achieve heights that neither of them expected. Rated PG. 120 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON
A young man with Down syndrome named Zak (Zack Gottsagen) dreams of being a professional wrestler and breaks out of his assisted living facility to pursue these aspirations. After a surprising turn of events, he ends up partnered with a small-time crook named Tyler (Shia LaBeouf), who helps him on his quest. Along the way, the two form a bond. Bruce Dern, John Hawkes, and Dakota Johnson also star in this indie comedy. Rated PG-13. 93 minutes. Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
ROJO
Filmmaker Benjamín Naishtat’s drama, set in small-town Argentina in 1975, opens with two very curious scenes. In the first, a house is evocatively framed on the screen, and we watch looters remove its contents. In the second, Claudio (Darío Grandinetti), a prominent lawyer, attempts to dine in a restaurant when he is accosted by a stranger (Diego Cremonesi) in an altercation that swiftly grows violent. Both scenes intertwine in surprising ways, telling a fable rooted in the ways in which people try to look the other way and deny the past when confronted with injustice. These themes are tied in with how Argentina’s middle class coped after the country’s 1976 right-wing coup d’état, with Claudio profiting where he can and playing ignorant when he must. Naishtat filters his story through a dark sense of humor and an elliptical plot that gets sidetracked easily (and often delightfully). His scene-setting is extraordinary throughout, and the final result is a mostly satisfying whole strung together with thoroughly captivating parts. Not rated. 109 minutes. In Spanish with subtitles. Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Robert Ker)
SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK
This adaption of the children’s horror book series centers on a small town in 1968 and the kids who live there. One young girl in particular (Kathleen Pollard) has an axe to grind. She writes a book of scary stories that soon manifest themselves as creepy scarecrows, bloated hospital patients, and similarly sinister forces, which become unleashed on the locals. Rated PG-13. 111 minutes. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
SPIDERMAN: FAR FROM HOME
After Iron Man died at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios had a massive void to fill. They filled it by making Spider-Man (Tom Holland) into Iron Man, with all of the technology and global threats that such a distinction implies. In the process, the film strays too far from the web-slinging, New York-living, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, ending up in a mess of half-baked ideas. Peter Parker (Spidey’s alter-ego) is sent on a school trip to Europe, where the villain Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) shows up among a series of grandiose illusions. The subplot with Parker and Mary Jane (Zendaya), meanwhile, offers the sweetest romantic core of any Marvel movie. They should have focused on these basic elements — cramming everything into a massive, multi-movie Marvel universe is starting to feel more like a curse than a blessing. Rated PG-13. 129 minutes. The extended cut screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6. (Robert Ker)
TODS CAEN
In this comedy from Mexico, Martha Higareda plays Mia, a TV producer who dreams of creating a show titled Todos Caen, which aims to teach women how to find a man and take charge of the relationship. Adán (Omar Chaparro) is a player who thinks he knows every trick in the book. The two meet at a bar one night and try to one-up each other in the game of seduction strategies. Soon, however, they realize they may be falling for each other for real. Rated PG-13. 120 minutes. In Spanish with subtitles. Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)