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New Movies
Author: The JT LeRoy Story
B+ When a mysterious, HIV-positive, queer former child prostitute going by the name JT LeRoy stormed onto the literary scene in 1999 with the staggering novel Sarah, celebrities lined up to harvest the cultural capital of being associated with such a fascinating figure. Everyone from the ever-less-relevant Bono, to the fully irrelevant Courtney Love made sure to get photo ops with the new literary it boy. The only problem was that JT LeRoy was actually a persona (or delusion, or splintered personality) of Laura Albert, a New School-educated, middle-aged San Franciscan who had mostly failed at finding an audience for her fiction before creating the persona of LeRoy during a conversation with her therapist. In Author: The JT LeRoy Story, we see the elaborate (and possibly meta-artistic) plot Albert used to fashion her own fame out of whole cloth. ZACH MIDDLETON.
Author: The JT LeRoy Story is rated R. It's playing at Fox Tower.
Deepwater Horizon
C+ How do you make a movie about the worst oil disaster in U.S. history? If you're director Peter Berg (Lone Survivor), you condense an environmentally devastating oil spill into an action blowout starring Mark Wahlberg as Mike Williams, a BP employee who escaped the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster that ultimately killed 11 people. As a disaster epic, Deepwater Horizon is too incoherent to be gripping and doesn't acknowledge that the Deepwater tragedy not only gave rise to courage under oil and fire, but illustrated a primal truth: You mess with nature, nature messes back. BEN FERGUSON.
Deepwater Horizon is rated PG-13. It opens Sept. 30 at Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Vancouver.
Jheronimus Bosch: Touched by the Devil
2016 marks the 500th anniversary of Jheronimus Bosch's death, and this art history doc follows a team of Bosch experts who traveled the world for four years to find every single hellish creature in Bosch's deeply elaborate paintings, delving deep into the creative process that spawned a hundred bird demons. Not screened for critics.
Jheronimus Bosch: Touched by the Devil is not rated. It's playing at Living Room Theaters and Whitsell Auditorium.
Masterminds
When a work crush ensorcells armored-truck driver David (Zach Galifianakis) into a committing a heist, he stumbles his way into stealing $17 million, is promptly betrayed, and must hide from the cops and a hit man while trying to set up the crooks who set him up. Not screened for critics.
Masterminds is rated PG-13. It opens Sept. 30 at Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Vancouver.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
B- According to Ransom Riggs, the author of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the young adult best-seller was originally strung together as means of repurposing the author's vintage photograph collection. If this narrative holds true, Tim Burton's adaptation nearly ignores the dull business of storytelling altogether via expository plot dumps crumpled in between ever more fantastical evocations of ghoulish Victoriana. Once introduced to Jake (Asa Butterfield of Hugo and Ender's Game)—a modern-day Floridian teen singularly able to detect terrifying beasties known as Hollows—we're given little understanding of why he must seek out his murdered grandpa's old tweener-mutant academy, one hidden in Wales circa 1940 by a time-loop-manipulating, crossbow-wielding, falcon-morphing headmistress Miss Peregrine (Eva Green). Nor are we given much reason to root along its defense against the eyeball-slurping Barron (Samuel L. Jackson as equal parts Screamin' Jay Hawkins and velociraptor). Any other telling would surely have at least addressed the pitfalls of perpetual adolescence for freakish urchins driven to endlessly repeat the same day, but within Mr. Burton's cinema for adult children, emotional maturity is the most transparent illusion of all. JAY HORTON.
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is rated PG-13. It opens Sept. 30 at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Lloyd, Pioneer Place, Tigard, Vancouver.
Mr. Pig
Kicking off Portland's 10th annual Portland Latin American Film Festival is Diego Luna's newest film, a story of a California pig farmer (a grandfatherly Danny Glover) attempting to smuggle his last pig across the border. Not screened for critics.
Mr. Pig is not rated. It kicks off the Portland Latin American Film Festival at Hollywood Theatre, Sept. 29 at 7 pm.
Operation Avalanche
B- Neil Armstrong's moon landing was faked in a scrappy CIA conspiracy, according to this gleefully silly mockumentary directed by Matt Johnson. In the film, Johnson stars as a secret agent named—why not?— Matt Johnson who, with his spectacled best friend Owen Williams (Owen Williams), concocts an elaborate scheme to fake the Apollo 11 mission using Stanley Kubrick-style special effects. As this con balloons into a fiasco, the film's jittery cinematography grows irritating, but Johnson's geeky performance is delightful, and the movie's notion that two buffoons were behind history's greatest space expedition is one of the year's better gags. BEN FERGUSON.
Operation Avalanche is rated PG-13. It opens Sept. 30 at Living Room Theaters.
Queen of Katwe
B+ The irony of "based on a true story" preceding a live-action Disney film is that the movie to follow will probably feel like a fantasy. But Queen of Katwe's finishing move is depicting Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi's rise to a world-class master with levity and without pandering. Director Mira Nair makes the day-to-day of making due in Mutesi's near shantytown of a neighborhood—hawking maize to car windows and selling your last fineries for paraffin reading light—as vivid as street soccer. As Phiona's coach, David Oyelowo meets the child actors on a deeply empathetic level, and as her mother, Lupita Nyong'o takes on a prideful posture. Get caught up in the sentiment, brush past some glaring overdubbing, and this is the kind of story you'll know very well told in rare fashion. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER.
Queen of Katwe is rated PG. It opens Sept. 30 at Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Lloyd.
Old Movies
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh. Heheheheheheheheheheheheheh. Academy Theater. Sept. 28-29.
The Thing (1982)
Speaking of cult classics, John Carpenter's The Thing is as famous for its critical panning—Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie" that "aspired to be the quintessential moron movie of the '80s"—as it is for being one of the best horror movies of all time. Kurt Russell and company are trapped on an Antarctic research base, desperately trying to stop a shape-shifting alien life form from escaping to civilization and ending life on Earth as we know it. The blood-test scene will have you on the edge of your seat. Academy Theater. Sept. 30-Oct. 6.
Mean Girls (2004)
If you are between the ages of 24 and 30, Mark Waters' Mean Girls probably played a formative role in your teenage development. The story of home-schooled, 16-year-old Cady Heron's (Lindsay Lohan) plunge into suburban high school and recruitment into the tyrannical it-girl posse the Plastics (Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried and a pre-vape Rachel McAdams) is usually treated as the MySpace generation's pre-eminent entry into the high-school canon. New WW intern Bennett Campbell Ferguson has a different take: The "everyone is just as insecure as each other, so let's all get along" lesson is bullshit, and the cathartic release comes from watching the mean girls suffer. Teen classic or revenge flick? You be the judge. Mission Theater. Oct. 3 and 5.
Willamette Week