Reviews of 'Birth of a Nation, 'Girl on the Train' and 'Middle School'

In this article we write a complete information hollywood In Theaters This Weekend: Reviews of 'Birth of a Nation, 'Girl on the Train' and 'Middle School'. In this article we write a list of horer movies missons movies civil war movies based on jungle movies batman movies superman movies Warcraft  movies based on animal movies based on biography drama comedy adventure based on full action movie based on full romance movies based on adventure action and other type of movies details are provide in this article. A good collection of all fantastic movies 2016 are here

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 'Girl on the Train' and 'Middle School' Movie Review And News:

Read what THR's film critics are saying about films opening Friday.
Preteens, a 19th-century slave rebellion and a handful of murder suspects are among what's headed to theaters this weekend in Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, The Birth of a Nation and The Girl on the Train.

Read on to find out what The Hollywood Reporter's critics are saying about the weekend's new offerings, and click here to see how they're expected to perform at the box office.

The Birth of a Nation

Developed for seven years by writer, director and star Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation brings to the screen what Parker himself has said is a relevant and timely message. The film follows the true story of Nat Turner, a slave who led a rebellion on Aug. 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Va. "In Parker’s script, the story for which he wrote with Jean McGianni Celestin, young Nat Turner (Parker) is largely shielded from the worst depredations by a master roughly his own age, Samuel Turner (Armie Hammer)," writes THR film critic Todd McCarthy. It was after he witnessed the extreme brutality and torture inflicted on his fellow slaves, and was himself whipped for baptizing a white man, that Turner began to think in terms of rebellion. "It’s a film very much in tune with the current state of heightened racial friction," writes McCarthy. "And one that will assuredly generate a great deal of media attention, and probably controversy." Read the full review here.

Emily Blunt and Paula Hawkins were photographed Sept. 17 at The 1896 in Brooklyn.
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The Girl on the Train

Directed by Tate Taylor (Pretty Ugly People), The Girl on the Train is adapted from the 2015 best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins. In the film, Emily Blunt stars as main character Rachel Watson. Having just lost her job due to drunkenness, Watson spends her days spying on and harassing her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Twice a day, Watson takes New York City's Metro North to get a glimpse inside of Tom and Anna's house as she passes by. "Along this river route also lies the house shared by ultra-macho Scott Hipwell (Luke Evans) and his gorgeous young mate Megan (Haley Bennett), who not only bears an acute resemblance to Anna but, at the outset, works as the nanny for Anna's child," writes McCarthy. "Rachel likes to spy on her, too, and one day her prying eyes hit pay dirt when she spots Megan on an upstairs deck kissing a man who is decidedly not her husband." Without giving anything away, the viewer spends most of the rest of the movie with Watson as she tries to remember what happened on a very bad night. Read the full review here.

Rosamund Pike in 'Gone Girl' (left) and Emily Blunt in 'The Girl on the Train'
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Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life


James Patterson's seven-book series will be brought to the big screen by CBS Films. Director Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) teamed up with Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer and Kara Holden to adapt the series into a screenplay, write the script and create the film. The story centers around Rafe Khatchadorian (Griffin Gluck), a typical student at Hills Village Middle School who must confront bullies, ever-fluctuating levels of hormones and a tyrannical principal.

'20th Century Women': Film Review And Rating

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2016 New Hollywood '20th Century Women': Film Review And Rating:

Annette Bening stars opposite newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann in Mike Mills' exploration of the complicated parent-teen bond amid the cultural shifts of late '70s California.
At various points in Mike Mills' lovely minor-key comedy-drama about coming of age in a nontraditional family, you might find yourself itching to get out of your seat and dance along with the people onscreen as they cut loose to songs from the distant past or from their rapidly spinning present. As much as the music, the sheer likability of these lived-in characters is a powerful magnet, thanks to insightful writing and a note-perfect ensemble anchored by a never-better Annette Bening, playing a woman both wise and quizzical, poised right down to her frayed edges.

If Beginners was Mills' love letter to his late father, then 20th Century Women, despite being less tethered to autobiography, is an equally heartfelt tribute to his mother and the other women who helped coax him toward maturity during a time of cultural transition. Opening Christmas Day, the A24 release should hit a sweet spot with discerning moviegoers, particularly those old enough to remember 1979.

The chief strength of Beginners was Christopher Plummer's Oscar-winning performance, a nuanced portrait of a gay man who came out late in life and whose joyous liberation was so infectious that even the death sentence of cancer could barely dampen it. But while the 2011 movie was widely embraced as a quirky charmer, I confess I found its strained whimsicality cloying and the central relationship of its younger characters too twee to be involving.


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There was, however, a riveting presence that kept striding in from the sidelines of Beginners, a brittle, blithely unconventional mother played by Mary Page Keller, who wore the sadness of an unfulfilling marriage like a Chanel suit. A softer, bohemian variation on that figure resurfaces here as Bening's character Dorothea Fields, a divorced woman born into the Great Depression who studies the lurching changes of late-'70s America with the intense scrutiny of an anthropologist.

She's flanked by two equally interesting and fully fleshed-out female characters — Abbie, a free-spirited punk photographer born in 1955, played by Greta Gerwig with a shock of crimson hair and a well of melancholy that spills over into anger; and Julie, an introspective 17-year-old experimenting with sex and self-possession, inhabited by the beguiling Elle Fanning.

Along with the actors, the strength of 20th Century Women is the multigenerational sweep of its observations, particularly the pleasing balance of its empathy for the challenges of both the single parent and the adolescent offspring, uncomfortable with all the attention being focused on his emotional development.

That would be Dorothea's skateboarding son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), with whom she lives in a ramshackle house under constant renovation in Santa Barbara. (Nice work from production designer Chris Jones.) Abbie rents a room there, and neighbor Julie is a regular visitor, sleeping in Jamie's room though insisting on keeping it platonic. There's also carpenter, mechanic and potter William (Billy Crudup), a gentle soul who's all about earthy interconnectedness and yet has never been able to find a relationship that sticks.

'20th Century Women'
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The movie opens with a final remnant of Dorothea's marriage, a Ford Galaxie with a faulty engine, bursting into flames outside the supermarket. She invites the firemen to her birthday party that night, an impulse that typifies the immediacy of this post-counterculture sophisticate, who teaches her son according to her own idiosyncratic ethics but frets that her influence alone is not enough. Recognizing that Jamie and William don't connect, she asks Abbie and Julie to help show her son how to be a good man. But he's irked by his mother's intervention, creating a cool distance between them for a time.

Mills uses some of the same devices as Beginners to illuminate his characters' cultural formation, notably historic montages of their birth years or backgrounds prior to coming together. And he also glances ahead to their future lives, after the arc of the movie. But the quilting is more seamless here because the eccentricities are so integral to the writing and performances. Also because this film is so specifically rooted in its era, making the period comparisons more relevant.

One key moment has the household gathering around the TV to watch Jimmy Carter give his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, which used the energy crisis as a springboard to reflect on the increasing fragmentation and self-interest of a nation driven not by community but by materialism. We all know how much lasting impact that warning had. In focusing on Dorothea's reaction, Mills effectively takes a snapshot of that moment, before Reaganomics, AIDS, globalization, the Internet, and so many other developments came along to erase every trace of American innocence. He even co-opts sequences from Godfrey Reggio's cine-essay Koyaanisqatsi to foretell the brewing turmoil.

Mills also uses significant books of the period to key us into his characters. Dorothea reads Watership Down and Future Shock, classics about societies under threat. As a sexually curious young woman, Julie reads Judy Blume's Forever…, but being the child of a shrink (we see her pouting through her mother's teen therapy groups), she also gravitates toward The Road Less Traveled.


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Abbie's work is influenced by reading Susan Sontag's On Photography, and the feminist texts she lends Jamie, Our Bodies, Ourselves and Sisterhood is Powerful, cause a clash with one of his peers, a macho traditionalist who doesn't appreciate being lectured on clitoral stimulation. In one droll yet painful scene, Jamie reads an essay excerpt to his mother, hoping to unlock answers about her loneliness, only to watch her snap shut.

Divergent music tastes also get Jamie into trouble when he acquires a liking for Talking Heads from Abbie; the band's cultivated art-rock sensibility is at odds with the hardcore punk that's cresting. The punk subculture of the time plays a part in the dramatic ferment, and there's a touching determination in Dorothea's efforts to understand the raw nihilism of the music. Favoring old standards like "As Time Goes By" herself, she listens intently to Black Flag singing about going berserk in "Nervous Breakdown," crinkling up her face and asking with hilarious earnestness, "Is that interesting?"

For a movie running a full two hours, relatively little happens in 20th Century Women, at least until lovelorn Jamie takes flight with Julie to San Luis Obispo, where he hopes their friendship will escalate to romance. But the film never feels like it's meandering, instead assembling exquisitely observed moments that coalesce into a portrait of how our lives are shaped by those closest to us and by cultural touchstones. The brightness and warmth of the visuals echo the tone to a tee.

Mills clearly loves his characters unconditionally, which means each of them gets at least a scene or two to reveal something deeply personal. After receiving results from a post-cervical cancer checkup, Abbie learns she may not be able to have children, yielding a beautiful scene between Gerwig and Bening. Fanning is luminous as Julie talks candidly about regretting hooking up with guys half the time, but then details the little things that make the other half memorable.

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While the women are the core of the film, Crudup finds a sweet lost quality in William, a man who never quite fit the hippie mold and has been searching for his place ever since. And Zumann more than holds his own among such seasoned company, bringing as much spiky intelligence as vulnerability to Jamie's struggle with identity and manhood.

But the movie belongs to Bening, gorgeously costumed by Jennifer Johnson in effortless '70s chic and looking like an attractive middle-aged woman, not a Hollywood version thereof. Pretty much every other character attempts to analyze Dorothea at some point, and even when they're right, she responds with quietly tickled inscrutability. This is a woman who in some ways is open and spontaneous, but in many others unknowable. Bening gives radiant life to all her complexities. Even her solitude.



Venue: New York Film Festival (Centerpiece)
Opens: Sunday, Dec. 25 (A24)
Cast: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup, Lucas Jade Zumann, Waleed Zuaiter, Alia Shawkat, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Alison Elliott, Thea Gill
Production companies: Annapurna Pictures, Modern People, Archer Gray
Director-screenwriter: Mike Mills
Producers: Megan Ellison, Anne Carey, Youree Henley
Executive producer: Chelsea Barnard
Director of photography: Sean Porter
Production designer: Chris Jones
Costume designer: Jennifer Johnson
Music: Roger Neill
Editor: Leslie Jones
Casting: Laura Rosenthal, Mark Bennett


Rated R, 118 minutes.