Friday, May 24 - Monday, May 27: (3:00), 5:30, 8:00
Tuesday, May 28 - Thursday, May 30: (5:30), 8:00
On the eve of their high school graduation, two academic superstars and best friends realize they should have worked less and played more. Determined not to fall short of their peers, the girls try to cram four years of fun into one night.Read more
The Revenge-of-the-Femi-Nerds Comedy We Deserve
★★★★ (of Five Stars)
Peter Travers / Rolling Stone
Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut reinvents — and reinvigorates — the raunch-com with this hilarious, heartfelt story of two brainiacs cutting loose. 'Booksmart' changes the game and opens the genre up to greater possibilities. Directed by the actor Olivia Wilde in a smashing feature debut, this femcentric spin on Freaks and Geeksis high on girl power. Graduation day is breathing down the necks of Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and her best friend, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever). After four years of grinding at L.A.’s Crockett High, these brainiacs are about to reap Ivy League glory — Molly at Yale and Amy at Columbia. So it’s a shock to their system when the superior attitude they wear like armor is dented by the news that, guess what? The school’s 24-hour party people are also bound for the Ivys. Working from a clever script by a quartet of female writers, Wilde turns this rowdy party into comic bliss. You could write off Booksmart as a female Superbad, which starred Feldstein’s big brother, Jonah Hill. But Wilde’s film is less obsessed with sex than with female friendship in all its complexities and contradictions. All the actors get their licks in, but the movie belongs to Feldstein and Dever, who are stars in the making.
Together with Wilde, whose touch with slapstick and nuance is equally unerring, they make Booksmart the smart choice for anyone looking for a comedy that’s outrageously entertaining and quietly revolutionary at the same time.
Life experiences shape the creative process, which is the main theme of Dome Karukoski’s biopic charting the formative years of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, aka J.R.R. Tolkien, who would write one of the most beloved and popular high fantasy series ever written. The Finnish director, along with screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, intercuts between Tolkien’s youth and education and his harrowing experience as a soldier in World War I. It is a well-worn device to contrast the idyllic with the horrific, and for the most part it succeeds, but it also falls into a kind of pedantic flow of checkmarks ticked off inherent to the genre. Tolkien the film is incredibly concerned with the connect-the-dots moments from the author’s life that informed his work, almost to a fault. Here there is the pastoral landscape that informs the Shire and there is the camaraderie of young men forming a “fellowship.” The performances are wonderful, especially Hoult and Collins, who exude a charming chemistry, and fans of both the books and the films will find pleasure in this look at the early life of the man whose work still influences artists to this day.
Friday, May 24 - Monday, May 27: (2:00), 4:30, 7:00
Tuesday, May 28 - Thursday, May 30: (4:30), 7:00
A testament to the immense complexity of nature, The Biggest Little Farm follows two dreamers and a dog on an odyssey to bring harmony to both their lives and the land.Read more
The Pleasures of D.I.Y. Agriculture
NYT Critic's Pick
Glenn Kenny / New York Times
Directed and narrated by John Chester, a longtime documentary cinematographer, “The Biggest Little Farm” opens with the then-seemingly unstoppable California wildfires of 2018 threatening to wipe out the small farm Chester founded with his wife, Molly, nearly 10 years before. But here the movie flashes back to the cute reason the couple left Los Angeles to found a farm they would run in an old-school, anti-corporate-agriculture style. (It involves a promise made to a dog.) As depicted in the movie, the Chesters’ inexperience at the outset seems close to naïveté. It’s a little implausible, but it gives the movie a lot of narrative juice. If you’ve entertained "Green Acres"-inspired reveries on the joys of “farm living,” this documentary may rid you of them in short order. But it may also revive your wonder at the weird but ultimately awe-inspiring ways in which humans can help nature do its work.
