American operatives are in harm's way on screens this week in a CIA thriller and an Iraq war movie, while danger of an entirely different kind can be found in a cocktail restaurant on a first date. Elsewhere, documentarians have weaved together archival footage from the early 1970s to paint a portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's lives. Here are four of the buzziest movies in theaters this weekend.
The Amateur
In theaters Friday
Charlie, played by Rami Malek, knows he's out of his depth in this revenge thriller about a CIA data analyst trying to track down and kill the people who murdered his wife. Though he can locate surveillance images of them faster than you can say The Bourne Supremacy, he has never so much as handled a gun. So he asks for mission-specific training, only to be met with ridicule.
"I don't think you could beat a 90-year-old nun in an arm-wrestling match," says the boss, which is not kind, but also not wrong. Charlie's the nerdiest guy in the CIA.
Still, nerds know stuff — like how to get the upper hand when an assassin is in a glass-bottomed swimming pool suspended between skyscrapers. I mean, that can't come up often, but Charlie's ready when it does. He's got baroque ways to terminate other killers and to stave off interference from a corrupt CIA old-timer he really should be going after, too.
Laurence Fishburne is on hand to supply world-weary common sense as required. Filmmaker James Hawes keeps The Amateur clicking along competently, if not plausibly, through loose ends, loose characters and some blather from the head of the CIA about ethics. That sounds awfully precious in the current political environment, quite apart from making you think — c'mon guys, have you heard of the CIA? — Bob Mondello
DROP
In theaters Friday
Say you're out living your life and, suddenly, out of nowhere, you get a random air-dropped message on your phone from a complete stranger. You'd probably just ignore it and disable further contact, right? Well, most of us are not characters in the bonkers thriller Drop.
Violet (Meghann Fahy) is a single mom whose first date goes off the rails when she starts getting increasingly alarming air-dropped messages from someone nearby. Then the messages keep coming, and they keep getting weirder and darker and — ultimately — more personal. They become impossible to ignore, until she's beholden to the demands of the mysterious messenger. And that mysterious messenger could be anyone else in this restaurant at this moment — another patron, the piano player — maybe even Henry, her date (Brandon Sklenar). The potentially romantic dinner turns into a life-or-death situation. — Aisha Harris
Warfare
In theaters Friday
Iraq, 2006. Under cover of darkness, an American unit moves into a residential building, quietly taking over two apartments, herding terrified residents into a bedroom, and setting up a sniper/surveillance position. That's the setup for a harrowing, real-life mission that's been reconstructed in something like real time by filmmaker Alex Garland and his co-director/writer Ray Mendoza.
Garland is the director and writer of Civil War, last year's portrait of an America divided under a blustering third-term president. Mendoza is a former U.S. Navy SEAL who was one of the men who lived through the Iraq mission in Ramadi being depicted in Warfare.
Using his memories and those of his comrades, the film re-creates the mission-gone-wrong with visceral clarity — the men being spotted by al-Qaida forces, taking fire, calling for a tank to evacuate them, for medical assistance, for a "show-of-force" when a jet fighter flies terrifyingly low, sending shock waves scudding through the streets, and silencing guns and grenades. The film — well acted, and immersive — is a nerve-wracking jolt to the system, though one that is all but devoid of political context. The film's not really like most Hollywood war movies — no talk of heroism, courage, sacrifice. Warfare is just warfare, calibrated as a cinematic show-of-force. — Bob Mondello
One to One: John & Yoko
In IMAX theaters Friday
In 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved from London to Manhattan and took up residence in a small Greenwich Village apartment to be close to artists and scenesters. About a year-and-a-half later, they did a benefit concert for the children at Staten Island's Willowbrook State School, a notoriously inhumane institution that warehoused children with developmental disabilities. Lennon said the kids at Willowbrook were "almost symbolic of all the pain on earth." The couple's effort to help — the One to One concert — was the only full-length concert Lennon would give after leaving the Beatles.
Documentarians Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards channel surf between concert footage and archival clips from those years — both video and audio — illustrating the couple's lives with interviews, commercials, news events and a recurring series of phone calls in which Yoko and her assistant try to order 1,000 houseflies for one of her artworks. The film centers its lively, if less-than-well-annotated portrait of a period of youthful rebellion on a vibrant, charismatic Lennon. Early on, the singer is asked to reminisce about his earlier fame and says, "The Beatles don't exist anymore. I don't want to re-create the past."
Audiences will likely be glad the filmmakers didn't follow his lead. — Bob Mondello
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