American Ultra R
Small-town stoner Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) is a convenience store clerk on the fast track to nowhere when he discovers he is actually a highly skilled government agent capable of killing with a spoon. Kept in a deeply hypnotic state, Mike remembers nothing of his secret past when he calls upon his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) for moral support. Initially unaware he’s been marked for termination, Mike’s abilities spring to life after a sympathetic agent delivers the code words that awaken his training. Unable to remember where or how he learned his skills, Mike freaks out while battling an onslaught of professional killers in this violently funny actioner. (Lisa Miller)
The Diary of a Teenage Girl Not Rated
People pass joints in the park and mom’s friends snort coke on the kitchen table. Minnie (Bel Powley) is growing up in 1976 San Francisco under the permissive gaze of a mother best described as radical chic on a lower-middle-class budget. Even so, Minnie slips into a no-go zone when she falls into an affair with mom’s boyfriend, a mustachioed little Marlboro Man. Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is keenly aware of the sexual-emotional confusion of adolescence and the quest for finding solid footing in a dubious society. Director Marielle Heller brings imagination to the film through creative use of animation and astutely chosen music for the soundtrack. (David Luhrssen)
Opens Aug. 21, Oriental Theatre.
Hitman: Agent 47 R
An elite assassin engineered to be the perfect killing machine, Hitman 47 is named for the last two digits of the barcode tattooed on his neck. Superior to mere mortals, 47 is endowed with strength, speed, stamina and intelligence. He’ll need them all to bring down the CEO of a corporation planning to use 47’s genetic code to engineer an army of killers. To defeat his enemies, 47 teams up with a woman possessing knowledge about his own origins. While the movie’s posters picture a 47 that looks very much like Timothy Olyphant (who starred in the first effort to translate this video game to film), this reboot casts Rupert Friend as 47 and Hannah Ware as the woman who can help him in this second attempt by Fox Studios to get it right. (L.M.)
Jimmy’s Hall PG-13
In Director Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, the Irish countryside of the 1930s is a place of deep scars and long memories. The dashing hero, Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward), returns home from the U.S., where he fled a decade earlier after choosing the losing side in the civil war that followed Ireland’s independence. An idealist with a social agenda, Jimmy opens a hall where classes on Yeats, drawing and boxing are taught and jazz records are played. He runs afoul the local Roman Catholic priest, who sees Communism afoot as ancient tensions flare between the landless and the landlords. Beautifully filmed and written with a heavy burden of messages, Jimmy’s Hall endows its major characters with a range of understandable beliefs and believable actions. (D.L.)
Opens Aug. 21, Downer Theatre.
