This Week’s Movies:The Girl on the TrainBeing 17The Birth of a Nation“The Birth of a Nation” tells the story of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Nate Parker directs, writes and stars, and the film arrives following controversy over a 17-year-old rape case in which Mr. Parker was acquitted. In his review A.O. Scott writes:The case against Mr. Parker triggered public rejections of the movie. Only judging Mr. Parker, as the author and star of this film... “The Birth of a Nation” is an ambitious attempt to corral the contradictions of history within the conventions of popular narrative. It dwells, sometimes too comfortably, sometimes too clumsily and sometimes with bracing effectiveness, within long-established patterns of mainstream movie storytelling. Mr. Parker is less a revolutionary than a revisionist, adapting old strategies to new purposes, inflecting familiar tropes of violence and sentimentality with fresh meanings.“Being 17” follows two schoolmates  as they teeter between animosity and attraction.In his review Stephen Holden writes:Andre Techine’s strongest film in many years is a touching drama about raging hormones, bullying and sexual awakening. Notes of magical realism are threaded through the movie. Even when punching one another furiously, the characters’s senseless schoolyard fights have an undertone of repressed desire, wear the stricken expressions of innocents caught up in a war they don’t understand and would rather not fight. Overall the movie is not really about deciding whether you’re gay or straight —- those terms are never spoken. It’s about the chemistry of two people at a moment in time.“The Girl on the Train” is the film adaption if the best-selling mystery by Paula Hawkins about the disappearance of a woman.In her review Manohla Dargis writes:Much like the 2015 book of the same title, “The Girl on the Train’s” troika of dubious female narrators didn’t make it an obvious choice for the big screen, partly because of its rotating first-person voices. The director, Tate Taylor, partly tries to solve this problem by piling on close-ups, creating a proximity that approaches the dermatological. The film doesn’t falter in its absurdity or commitment to its own seriousness. It never winks. But there’s genuine pleasure in that mirth. There’s always something to be said for an entertainment that sustains its nuttiness all the way to its twisty finish.