REEL WORLD
FILM SHORTS Reviewers: Bob Grimm and Juan-Carlos Selznick.
Opening this week American Assassin
An action thriller about a young man (Dylan O’Brien) who—seeking revenge for his fiance who was killed in a terrorist attack—ends up hooking up with the CIA to be trained in black ops. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
A late-night showing of George A. Romero’s second zombie flick. Flesh will be eaten Saturday, Sept. 16, at 10 p.m. Pageant Theatre. Not rated.
Mother!
The tranquil life of a married couple (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem) takes a very dark turn when a couple of mysterious strangers (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) show up at the door of their secluded country home. Directed by Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream). Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas. Rated R.
Paris, Texas (1984)
No clowning around King adaptation outdoes source material It mostly underwhelmed. Cool premise but sloppy, Ioverlong, out-of-control prose. That sucker needread
when the novel came out in 1986, and was
ed some ruthless editing. I was gobbling up Stephen King books at the time—big fan of Christine and Different Seasons—but had experienced a bit of a lull in interest with his lousy Peter Straub collaboration, The Talisman. I felt like King was overextending himself a bit, and the novel It came off as a big mess. by So, I’ll just start off by sayBob Grimm ing I’m not a huge fan of the bg rimm@ source material. newsrev iew.c om The benefit of a movie like Andy Muschietti’s It is that the director and his writers can keep some themes, but switch things up a bit and streamline the narrative to make the story It work better 30 years after it Starring bill was written. In that respect, the Skarsgard, Jaeden new It is a triumph. Lieberher, Sophia Lillis and Jeremy While the wimpy 1990 TV ray taylor. Directed miniseries dealt with both the by Andy muschietti. young and older versions of Cinemark 14, Feather The Losers’ Club, the posse river Cinemas and paradise Cinema 7. of kids that stand up to evil, rated r. the new It stands as part one, completely dividing the kid and adult stories. There’s also a major time change, with the kids’ story taking pace in the late 1980s instead of the ’50s. Thank you, Stranger Things. The core story remains the same: Children in Derry, Maine, have been disappearing for many years, and the film starts with the sad case of Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), a little boy in a yellow rain slicker who follows his paper boat
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to the sewer drain and makes an unfortunate acquaintance. That acquaintance is Pennywise, the dancing, sewer-dwelling clown, played as a most savage beast by Bill Skarsgard, a makeup-cracking, straight-up scary demon clown with an ability to charm for a short while, but he just kind of sucks royally from the get-go, oozing with evil. If you saw him at a circus, you’d be seriously afraid for the trapeze artists and lions. He even drools a little when addressing Georgie, shortly before tearing his arm off. It’s in this moment that It immediately declares itself as an R-rated, no-holds-barred King affair rather than the sanitized TV version. The kids are great. The standout is Sophia Lillis as Beverly Marsh. At one point, one of the Losers calls her Molly Ringwald. Lillis has that kind of leading-lady-in-a-teen-film commanding screen presence. Jeremy Ray Taylor will break your heart as Ben Hanscom, the chubby kid who has a crush on Bev. Their first meeting is one of the best scenes in the film. Jack Dylan Grazer and Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard provide solid comic relief as Richie and Eddie, while Jaeden Lieberher, excellent in Midnight Special, does a damn fine job with the stutter and leading man job as Georgie’s big brother Bill Denbrough. As for the bad kids, Nicholas Hamilton is the second scariest entity in the film as bully Henry Bowers. He’s very real. Muschietti scores some big scares, especially during a slideshow gone very wrong, and a meeting between the Denbrough brothers in the family basement (“You’ll float, too!”). It: Part Two, with the adults, while not official yet, is a certainty. As for part one, it draws the best elements of King’s inconsistent novel effort, and comes out a frightening winner. □
This week’s Pageant repertory feature is German director Wim Wenders’ Cannes Palme d’Or-winning road movie starring Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Dean Stockwell. One showing: Sunday, Sept. 17, 7 p.m. Pageant Theatre. Rated R.
Patti Cake$
Coming-of-age flick about a young woman (Danielle Macdonald) trying to rise above difficult circumstances in run-down New Jersey suburbs by transforming from Patricia Dombrowski to rapper Patti Cake$. Pageant Theatre. Rated R.
Now playing Birth of the Dragon
A throwback martial-arts action film based on the legend of a 1964 fight in San Francisco between Bruce Lee and martial arts master Wong Jack Man. Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) A 40th anniversary reissue of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi classic. Cinemark 14. Rated PG.
Hazlo Como Hombre
A Spanish-language comedy (aka “Do it Like an Hombre”) about a homophobic neanderthal who can’t deal when his longtime buddy comes out. Cinemark 14. Rated R.
Home Again
Reese Witherspoon plays a recently separated woman who, after moving out on her own with her two daughters, boards three handsome young men in her home. Rom-com shenanigans ensue. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13.
major NASCAR event in North Carolina. There’s so much going on in Logan Lucky that the heist, at times, seems almost beside the point. But director Steven Soderbergh and company make good on plenty of action and suspense, even as the film gives rapt attention to darkly comical digressions and bittersweet ventures into miscellanies of bespangled Southern kitsch. The pivotal figures are a rather tattered pair of brothers, a recently laid-off working man and divorcee named Jimmy (Channing Tatum) and a one-handed bartender and war vet named Clyde (Adam Driver). They and their saucy, pedal-to-the-metal sister Mellie (Riley Keough) are Logans, a family known in local legend as cursed with bad luck. The wild card in all this is an imprisoned safe-cracker/bank robber named Joe Bang (played by a fine and fiery Daniel Craig with bleach-blond crew cut and peckerwood accent). He’s the expert in the bunch, and a focal point in perhaps outlandish subplots that entail criminal acts and their deliberate reversal as a strategy for further activity, lawful and otherwise. Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13 —J.C.S.
The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
A 3-D animated feature about a purple squirrel and his animal friends trying to save a natural park from being bulldozed to build a less critter-friendly amusement park. Cinemark 14. Rated PG.
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Wind River
Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River is a crime thriller that distinguishes itself both as an outdoor action film and as a nuanced multicharacter drama. The central mystery of the story revolves around the violent death of a young woman whose battered body is found in snowy mountainous terrain on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The somewhat scrambled investigation that ensues is conducted by a disillusioned tribal policeman (Graham Greene), an eager but young and ill-prepared FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife hunter/tracker (Jeremy Renner) who found the body while tracking wolves that have been preying on local livestock. There’s a lively generic setup in all that, but Wind River delivers a good deal more than the conventional satisfactions, including some uncommon twists of emphasis in what may sound at first like a routinely familiar tale. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R —J.C.S.
Still here All Saints
Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG.
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Annabelle: Creation
Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas. Rated R —B.G.
The Big Sick
SParadise Cinema 7. Rated R.
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Dunkirk
It
Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13 —J.C.S.
See review this issue. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R —B.G.
The Emoji Movie
Leap!
The Glass Castle
A 3-D animated feature about an orphan girl (voiced by Elle Fanning) who sets off for Paris with dreams of becoming a ballerina. Released in Canada and France last year under the name Ballerina. Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG.
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Cinemark 14. Rated PG. Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Cinemark 14, Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7. Rated R.
Spider-Man: Homecoming Cinemark 14. Rated PG-13.
Logan Lucky
The central story involves the somewhat farcical scheme of some Deep South smalltimers’ attempt to pull off a big heist during a
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Wonder Woman
Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13 —B.G.
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