Selma (PG-13) This civil rights drama is a tad square and conventional, but is it ever so timely. Ava DuVernay’s film tracks the efforts of Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) and his fellow ministers to enshrine voting rights for African-Americans by demonstrating in Selma, Ala. The movie succeeds gloriously at its hardest task — making King come alive as a dramatic character — by focusing on the details of his life and by a grand performance from Oyelowo. DuVernay succeeds both at epic sequences like the re-creation of the “Bloody Sunday” march and at small, domestic scenes. She also pays tribute not just to King but to the movement around him, with its other leaders and philosophical differences. After a year when America has been roiled by racial issues, this movie is a rousing call to thought and action. Also with Tom Wilkinson, Carmen Ejogo, André Holland, Colman Domingo, Common, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Tessa Thompson, Lorraine Touissant, Dylan Baker, Niecy Nash, Wendell Pierce, Stephan James, Trai Byers, Giovanni Ribisi, Tim Roth, and Oprah Winfrey.
Spare Parts (PG-13) Yet another inspirational teacher movie, this one stars George Lopez as the leader of a real-life group of Hispanic high-school students from Phoenix who entered a robotics competition and defeated teams from the country’s most prestigious colleges. The real-life story is pretty good, and while the movie isn’t unwatchable, Lopez’ humor is tamped down in a buttoned-up role-model type of character. Everything unrelated to the engineering competition, including the romantic subplots, is dull, dull stuff. A story like this deserved an odder, less conventional, more inspiring movie. Also with Marisa Tomei, José Julián, Carlos PenaVega, David Del Rio, J.R. Villarreal, Steven Michael Quezada, Alexa PenaVega, Esai Morales, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Strange Magic (PG) “Strange” doesn’t begin to cover this wildly off-the-mark animated musical about a fairy princess (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) and a goblin king (voiced by Alan Cumming) battling over a love potion in an enchanted land. The story is punctuated by numbers in which the characters sing 1970s rock songs, for some reason. The songs don’t fit the story, the performances are undistinguished, and the animation is strictly second-rate. If you’re going to see this, take some serious psychotropic drugs before it starts. Additional voices by Kristin Chenoweth, Elijah Kelley, Alfred Molina, Maya Rudolph, Sam Palladio, Meredith Anne Bull, Marius de Vries, and Peter Stormare.
Taken 3 (PG-13) Everybody is an idiot in this movie. Yes, that includes indestructible hero Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) and the supposed genius cop (Forest Whitaker) who pursues him after Bryan is framed for his wife’s murder. Once again, Bryan uses his particular set of skills to take revenge on a bunch of faceless tattooed bad guys — Russian, this time — and while the movie tries to make use of the villain’s knowledge that Bryan is a mindless killing machine who can be pointed in the wrong direction, the filmmakers here aren’t nearly clever enough to make something meaningful out of it. Oh, and Bryan’s hovering over his daughter (Maggie Grace) is starting to look downright creepy. Also with Dougray Scott, Leland Orser, David Warshofsky, Jon Gries, Don Harvey, Dylan Bruno, Sam Spruell, and Famke Janssen.
The Theory of Everything (PG-13) A failure, despite two terrific performances. Eddie Redmayne stars in this biography of Stephen Hawking, as he meets his future wife Jane (Felicity Jones) when they’re still attending Cambridge, then finds her indispensable after he’s diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Director James Marsh is a brilliant documentarian (Man on Wire) who seems to lose his storytelling instincts in fiction. Though he tries to make Jane as fascinating as Stephen, the script renders her as yet another self-sacrificing supportive wife. Redmayne does a superb job of depicting Stephen’s physical deterioration, and Jones is even better as a frustrated, overshadowed spouse. Still, this movie’s imagination is way short of its subject’s. Also with Charlie Cox, David Thewlis, Christian McKay, Simon McBurney, and Emily Watson.
Unbroken (PG-13) Louis Zamperini lived an amazing life, Laura Hillenbrand wrote an amazing biography of him, and the Coen brothers adapted that book into a script. So how did this movie come out so boring? Jack O’Connell plays Zamperini, the former Olympic athlete whose plane went down over the Pacific in World War II and who survived months drifting at sea and then years being tortured in a Japanese prison camp. The British newcomer O’Connell gives the part a good whack, but director Angelina Jolie turns this into so much inspirational pabulum. On the strength of this unmoving epic, she really shouldn’t quit her day job. Also with Jai Courtney, Finn Wittrock, Garrett Hedlund, Domhnall Gleeson, Miyavi, and Alex Russell.
The Wedding Ringer (R) Paging Adam Sandler. Kevin Hart stars in this comedy as a man who hires himself out as a best man to grooms who have no male friends to serve as one. Hart does a nifty dance routine with Josh Gad as a new client who needs seven groomsmen on short notice, but they can’t cover up the tedious predictability of the gags or the fact that all the women here are either psychotic or dispensable. Hart’s a funny guy, but I wish he would make better movies. Also with Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting, Jorge Garcia, Affion Crockett, Alan Ritchson, Corey Holcomb, Dan Gill, Colin Kane, Aaron Takahashi, Jenifer Lewis, Ken Howard, Olivia Thirlby, Nicky Whelan, Josh Peck, Mimi Rogers, Whitney Cummings, and Cloris Leachman.
Whiplash (R) A soft-headed melodrama that’s redeemed by its performances. Miles Teller plays an aspiring jazz drummer who gets into music school only to discover that the top professor (J.K. Simmons) is a classic bully who runs his band by humiliating his musicians. The movie is full of bromides about musical genius, and the romance with a movie theater employee (Melissa Benoist) is particularly badly handled. However, Simmons is fearsome as a man raging at the world’s embrace of mediocrity, and Teller does well in an atypically reserved, sensitive role. Writer-director Damien Chazelle takes a cubist approach to life at music school and crafts a climactic drum solo that will lift you out of your seat. Also with Paul Reiser, Austin Stowell, Nate Lang, Chris Mulkey, Damon Gupton, and April Grace.
Wild (R) Maybe this movie’s biggest achievement is wiping Reese Witherspoon’s slate clean. She stars in this adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir about pulling herself out of a downward spiral of drug use and promiscuous sex by hiking more than 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. The material neatly fits director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriter Nick Hornby, who deal with the highly cerebral source by cutting Cheryl’s hike with flashbacks and filling the soundtrack with fragments of remembered conversations, poems, songs, and other thoughts that bubble up inside Cheryl’s head amid the walk’s tedium. Just as the walk boiled Strayed down to her essence, it seems to scrape away all Witherspoon’s baggage from her junky earlier films and leave behind her salient qualities. Also with Laura Dern, Thomas Sadoski, W. Earl Brown, Mo McRae, Brian Van Holt, Kevin Rankin, Cliff de Young, and Gaby Hoffmann.
