“Eighth Grade” (Drama: 1 hour, 33 minutes)

Starring: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton and Jake Ryan

Director: Bo Burnham

Rated: R (Profanity and some sexual content)

 

Movie Review: “Eighth Grade” is a riveting screenplay. It marks the first full-length photoplay for director-writer Bo Burnham. Burnham provides audiences with a grand portrayal of what it is like to be a teenager in eighth grade. His script is refreshing realism, where Elsie Fisher shines in the leading role.

Kayla Day (Fisher) is an eighth-grader during her last week of middle school. The introverted teenage girl faces the challenges of young adulthood surrounded by other teens experiencing a similar reality. Her life is school and the home she shares with her father, Mark (Hamilton), who tries his finest to understand their teenage daughter.

Burnham’s characters, especially Fisher’s Kayla Day, are richly inviting. He offers a new perspective on what it is like to be a kid again in middle school, one on the fast track to adulthood.

Elsie Fisher plays his main character well. Kayla is an everyday teenager. She is not a beauty queen or popular. She is just a quiet, introverted young woman trying to find her place. Fisher plays her superbly, making her a definite Oscar contender.

Fisher’s scenes with an impressive Josh Hamilton are funny, thought-provoking and irritating. Their characters’ relationship inspires all those adjectives, yet the movie offers more.

Burnham’s screenplay allows one inside the head of a teenager beautifully while still not understanding. He takes an ordinary young woman and makes her dazzling to observe. Her story becomes fascinating. Hats off to Burnham, Fisher, Hamilton and the rest of the cast and crew for this poignantly inspiring coming-of-age tale.

Grade: A- (Grade A entertainment is the presentation.)

“The Darkest of Minds” (Science-Fiction/Thriller: 1 hour, 44 minutes)

Starring: Amandla Stenberg, Harris Dickinson, Skylan Brooks, Miya Cech, Mandy Moore and Patrick Gibson

Director: Jennifer Yuh Nelson

Rated: PG-13 (Violence including disturbing images and thematic elements)

 

Movie Review: Alexandra Bracken’s novel serves as the basis for this dystopian teenage novel. Like many of these teen movies, the “Darkest of Minds’” initial setup is not convincing. The story may gain attention with creative narratives, but it is a farfetched plot.

A pandemic called IAAN kills over 90 people of people younger than the age of 20, mainly children. The remaining children and teens survive, inexplicably developing superintelligence, telekinetic or superhuman abilities. Declared a serious threat by the government, these children are detained indefinitely by the United States government. 

Among those detained is Ruby Daly (Stenberg from “Everything, Everything,” 2017). She is deemed “Orange,” one of the more powerful of these new youthful mutants. She and others mount a resistance to the government.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2,” 2011; “Kung Fu Panda 3,” 2016) directs the screenplay penned by Chad Hodge. They do their best to make Bracken’s novel entertaining. It is an attention-getting narrative, but it quickly becomes mundane.

It consists of mostly young people running and fighting. Do not worry; they are healthy enough. Meanwhile, the story feels overly familiar. It is teenagers placed in a plot that leaves one pondering how this universe happened.

Grade: C- (Mindfully, it is dim.)

“Christopher Robin” (Adventure/Fantasy: 1 hour, 44 minutes)

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael and Jim Cummings

Director: Marc Forster

Rated: PG (Some action sequences)

 

Movie Review: “Christopher Robin” is about the continued imagination that propels childhood.

A delightful movie that is decent for audiences of multiple ages. It is a mild-mannered piece that gratifies enough to warrant the price of a ticket.

Christopher Robin (McGregor) is a family man and executive at a suitcase company. When his job and family obligations become stressful, he rediscovers childhood friend Winnie the Pooh (Cummings). Pooh helps Christopher Robin find his strength through returning to the Hundred Acre Wood to help find Pooh’s lost friends.

Characters created by A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard continue to inspire. Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball,” 2001; “The Kite Runner,” 2007) directs this fantasy with artistic flair. Pooh and his friends come alive through computer-generated imagery. The result is a relaxing movie that inspires.

Grade: B (Christopher Robin’s imagination is still the key for enrichment.)

“The Spy Who Dumped Me” (Comedy/Action: 1 hour, 57 minutes)

Starring: Mila Kunis, Kate McKinnon, Justin Theroux and Sam Heughan

Director: Susanna Fogel

Rated: R (Violence, perverse language, sexual content, crude humor and nudity)

 

Movie Review: Occasionally, a movie is silly and overly unbelievable, but it humors its narrative to a point it becomes entertaining. This is the case with this funny but wayward comedy.

Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon star as friends Audrey and Morgan. In the process of a break up with boyfriend Drew (Theroux), Audrey discovers Drew is a secret government agent. More important, Audrey and Morgan are caught in the middle of a deadly international conspiracy of spy versus spy that places the friends in danger often. 

Kunis and McKinnon play oddball friends. They provide laughs constantly, even if the fun is farfetched. The women provide comedy. Their male counterparts, Justin Theroux and Sam Heughan, who plays a dubiously charming British agent, provide action sequences. The mixture is as amusing as it is weird.

Susanna Fogel (“Life Partners,” 2014) directs the comedy. She allows everyone to run amok, including the photoplay, which she co-wrote with David Iserson.

The cast and crew all appear to have fun. Audiences may also if one can look beyond a poor script of lame jokes that fall flat or have forced insertions frequently.

Grade: C+ (A good break up!)

“Three Identical Strangers” (Documentary: 1 hour, 36 minutes)

Director: Tim Wardle

Rated: PG-13 (Thematic material and language)

 

Movie Review: When the movie starts, one gets the sense it is just a movie about triplets encountering each other 19 years after their birth. A moviegoer would be in error to believe that is all this movie is. 

People find long-lost relatives often, but this movie turns into something more. It is a brilliantly but subtly engrossing mystery, one with a disturbing plot. 

Edward Galland, David Kellman and Robert Shafran were triplets separated at birth. Nineteen years later, their reunion happens in New York in 1980. They are joyful, and become instant celebrities. They are interviewed on countless television programs, including “Today” and “The Phil Donahue Show.”

If one has been following the story of the triplets, you know their separation was not accidental. Approximately 38 minutes into the movie’s runtime, audiences learn it was planned.

The triplets were the offspring of a teenage girl, born July 12, 1961, at Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y. After nearly six months, the triplets were split by the Manhattan adoption agency Louise Wise Services, which closed in 2004. The agency never told their parents but the boys were within 100 miles of each other.

The triplets were not the only babies the agency separated. Countless twins were treated similarly, which is a smaller portion of the documentary. And that is where the story becomes tragic.

Without giving too much away for those who will walk into this movie blind as to its major reveal, the brothers were part of research studies of nature versus nurture headed by Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent child psychologist who collaborated with Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna.

The triplets’ ecstatic reunion brings fame, but it also is a revelation about the nature of research involving humans. Filmmaker Tim Wardle aptly makes that the focus of his movie. He does this through multiple interviews with brothers Kellman and Shafran, minus Galland who died in 1995. 

Wardle also interviews the triplets’ family, friends and others, and the director combs through records with journalists, attorneys and researchers involved in Neubauer’s experiments. Like the triplets, many seek answers for Neubauer and his team’s ominous research involving kids and their families. 

Wardle and his team make this documentary one of the more intriguing movies one will see this year. It is an unexpected story that easily becomes riveting from start to finish. When the tragic story ends, one can tell Wardle and his team have just scratched the surface of a good story.

Grade: B+ (Thrice joy and tragedy rendered effectively.)

“Death of a Nation” (Documentary: 1 hour, 48 minutes)

Starring: Victoria Chilap, Dinesh D’Souza, and Pavel Kríz

Directors: Dinesh D’Souza and Bruce Schooley

Rated: PG-13 (Language and thematic elements including violence and disturbing images)

 

Movie Review: Think of this as the death of a documentary. Dinesh D’Souza returns to offer more propaganda, conservative alarmism about the perceived threat of liberalism. D’Souza, who was pardoned by Trump, creates this homage to Trump, a thank you for a “get out of jail card” 

The documentary compares President Donald Trump to President Lincoln. One of Lincoln’s closest allies might respond to D’Souza by stating, “I knew Lincoln, and Trump is no Lincoln.”

Lincoln was tasked with keeping the country together during the events of the Civil War. Lincoln’s problems were tenfold. Despite some good executive decisions by Trump, his biggest problem is himself. Even when the 45th president does something agreeable, he counters with some derogatory or controversial comment.

D’Souza’s attempts to insinuate the two presidents are fighting equal bouts to save the United States are ridiculously outlandish. Such actions are why this documentary is political propaganda. 

Just because Lincoln is the presidential originator of the Republican Party, it does not mean he and Trump’s presidencies have similar parallels. The country is politically fractured, yes. Democrats and Republicans, at the behest of corporatism’s crony capitalism, cause the fracture from the national to state to local levels of government. Media outlets merely instigate and/or facilitate the political struggle. 

D’Souza institutes a type of modern yellow journalism, one based upon sensationalizing events and exaggerating relationships of certain political facets, such as linking the modern the Democrat Party — the party that followed President Barack Obama — to slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and Hitler’s Nazis.

Here, he compares Trump to Lincoln when Trump indicated earlier during his presidency that he favors President Andrew Jackson, who was a Democrat. D’Souza, contrarily, links President Jackson to Democrats. 

Remember Jackson, along with President Martin Van Buren, is the president who ordered the detaining of the first United States’ citizens, Native Americans.

Fascism, socialism and racism is applied to the United States in the manner of college freshman after watching some partisan political commentary. Applications of these terms are haphazard material to brainwash audiences. Well, like two shots of Novocain, the audience should not feel D’Souza’s serenading of Trump.

The movie is made to alarm United States citizens that the sky is falling. Its motive, besides praising President Trump, is to detail how the Democratic Party is destroying the very foundation Lincoln fought to preserve.

D’Souza is entertaining. His movies play like conspiracy theories. Here, he provides some interesting reenactments to help promote his message. These segments are attention-getting scenes but they are not persuasive additions.

Near the end of the movie is a rousing rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by American writer Julia Ward Howe. It is a good patriotic manner to conclude the movie. It is one of D’Souza and co-director Bruce Schooley’s better scenes.

If you lean to the right politically, especially if you think Trump is the best president since Lincoln, you will selectively find this awesome. Others will not drink D’Souza’s Kool-Aid.

Grade: C- (Fake news!)