Why are you silent?

Lady Macbeth

Crit

The details are sketchy, but Katherine (a steely soft Florence Pugh) has been left no choice but to marry into a family of deplorables. Apart from her husband (Paul Hilton) and father-in-law (Christopher Fairbank) being despicable, even murder-worthy, each on his own merits, the former is either incapable of or uninterested in conjugal relations in the usual sense of the term.

So thank goodness for the servant Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis), more than willing to supply the want in Catherine's life. And everything is fine until it isn't.

Not a particularly convincing film, but a useful showcase for Jarvis and especially Pugh, whom we will want to see again.

City of Ghosts

Crit

Some of the bravest ever amateur journalists founded Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently in order to publicize the atrocities of Daesh/ISIS, and this is a documentary about their precarious-from-minute-to-minute lives, a story simultaneously inspiring and terrible and depressing.

Once from this island

Dunkirk

Crit

Damn, those Germans really fought dirty. Wow, the Brits were heroic almost to a man. And we have confirmation: sexiest job in a war is fighter pilot.

Counting Their Finest and the upcoming Churchill and Darkest Hour, Dunkirk is getting more attention than at any time since it was happening.

Trailer

• It--Stephen King, scary clowns.

Ice cold war

Atomic Blonde

Crit

Golly, I generally feel like one of those moviegoers who has become desensitized to violence, but this had me cringing and squirming pretty much constantly. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Trailers

• Darkest Hour--Gary Oldman pits his Churchill against Brian Cox's.
• The Snowman--Good cast, creepy psycho movie.

Mistah Kurtz--he ape

The Hero

Crit

Just what an old guy needs: a movie about an old dude (Sam Elliott, older than me, much older! Well, older) confronting death with sex (with a woman less than half his age [Laura Prepon, whom we know as Alex in Orange Is the New Black]), drugs (weed, Molly, shrooms), and rock & roll (and country).

Oh, and meanwhile he's trying to make up for 34 years of neglect of his daughter (Krysten Ritter--oh, right: Jessica Jones!), who, unsurprisingly, isn't in a forgiving mood. Fortunately, I confronted my lousy parenting when I was still relatively young and healthy, and my once-neglected daughter is now my best friend.

Elliott is Elliott, and that's a lot, but that's about it here.

War for the Planet of the Apes

Crit

The tunnel graffiti "Ape-pocalypse now" plagiarizes my post for Kong: Skull Island and can be read as an acknowledgment that Woody Harrelson's character, "the Colonel," and every shaved-head-caressing element of Harrelson's performance, ape Brando's same-rank Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's nearly great Vietnam War film.

I dunno, maybe this film is nearly great, too--it certainly looks great and wants to be great--but if so, I was too distracted by the larceny to appreciate it. Oh, and by another bit of much less advisable theft: Steve Zahn's groveling appropriation, as Bad Ape, of Jar Jar Binks. Less offensive was the ripoff--well, let's call this one an hommage--to Deuteronomy, where (spoiler alert!) God tells Moses he may only glimpse the Promised Land, not live to enter it.

This is my front-runner, I think, for most overrated film of the year.

Trailer

Daddy's Home 2--Wait? How'd I miss the first one?

What's my number?

Baby Driver

Crit

Meh. Well reviewed but just gimmicky for me, and none of the humanity that's supposed to make us care struck me as insufficiently human. Good playlist, though: particularly fun not only to hear Jonathan Richman's obscure "Egyptian Reggae" but to have a character title-check it. I spent most of the movie wondering whether we'd finally get to hear the title song over the end credits. Spoiler alert: yes.

Trailers

• Flatliners--Honestly? Can't even remember whether I saw the original, and don't much care about the remake.
• The Dark Tower--Stephen King, of course.

It's the other white meat

Okja

A huge fan of Joon-Ho Bong's Snowpiercer and a reasonably large fan of his Mother and Memories of Murder and The Host, I was really looking forward to this enthusiastically reviewed (Net)flick, especially since the adorable title genetically enhanced piggish animal befriended by a determined young girl seemed to suggest a possible recommendation for the grandchildren.

Well, no, I don't think the grandkids need porcine rape or abattoir nightmares, and one of them is a vegetarian already. But that's a filmmaker's choice, and I respect that. My disappointment has more to do with the stacked moral decks--the villains are too easy, and the legitimate question of how we feed a burgeoning population deserves a more thoughtful answer than "not this way."

We lost 19 of our best men

The Big Sick

Crit

Damn, I do love me a pic that can make me laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously. And nowadays, I do love a pic that embraces the difference of a foreign culture while making it clear that that culture is a threat only to those in it, and people who get close.

The threat here is posed by Pakistani arranged marriage, and to a lesser extent by Islam as a manifestly apolitical force. Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) has no interest in either, and wonders why his parents brought him to America if they didn't want him to be an American male. He and Emily (Zoe Kazan)] fall in love without his having resolved this issue (or given her any hint of it), and then things get really weird (see movie title spoiler).

Lots of chances to go clichéd here (and I understand that there have been some complaints that screenwriters Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon [his wife; yes, this is largely autobiographical] fall into that trap in its portrayal of South Asian women, an issue I'll let others who are better attuned hash out), but there was never a time when I didn't find the film unique and human, with all the messiness that entails. Wait, I take that back: there was exactly one moment that came across as a cheap and obvious narrative trick (find it for yourself). So it's not perfect.

This has to be classified as a romantic comedy, I guess, in which case Kazan has now starred in 2 of my favorite wildly unconventional romcoms, the other being the excruciatingly dark Ruby Sparks. 

Trailers

• The Glass Castle--Fathers and daughters and issues, again.
• A Bad Moms Christmas--Um, probably no.
• Home Again--Reese Witherspoon as cougar? Too soon!
• The Only Living Boy in New York--If memory serves, the song titled thus immediately followed "Baby Driver" on Bridge over Troubled Water, and now the movie will follow that one into the theaters.