OPENING
Author: The JT LeRoy Story (R) Jeff Feuerzeig (The Devil and Daniel Johnston) directs this documentary about the literary hoax that was exposed in 2006. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Dressmaker (R) Kate Winslet stars in this adaptation of Rosalie Ham’s novel as a Parisian couturier who returns to her hometown in Australia to take revenge on those who did her wrong. Also with Liam Hemsworth, Judy Davis, Sarah Snook, Caroline Goodall, Kerry Fox, James Mackay, Barry Otto, and Hugo Weaving. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Harry & Snowman (NR) Ron Davis ‘ documentary about a Dutch immigrant who made a show jumping champion out of a plow horse destined for slaughter. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Is That a Gun in Your Pocket? (R) This incredibly flat-footed anti-gun satire stars Andrea Anders as a housewife in a small, gun-loving Texas town who leads a Lysistrata-like sex strike by the town’s women to get rid of the weapons after her own son (Max Lloyd-Jones) brings his dad’s firearm to school and accidentally shoots up the place.Writer-director Matt Cooper utterly fails to create anything funny from this situation and has neither a feel for the small-town culture nor any sense of pacing or momentum. A limp performance by Anders doesn’t help matters, either. Spike Lee covered all this unevenly but far more effectively in Chi-Raq. Also with Matt Passmore, Katherine McNamara, Horatio Sanz, John Michael Higgins, Christine Estabrook, Lauren Bowles, John Heard, Kevin Conway, and Cloris Leachman. (Opens Friday at AMC Parks at Arlington)
L.O.R.D.: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties (NR) Fan Bingbing stars in this Chinese animated motion-capture epic. Also with Kris Wu, Yang Mi, Lin Yun, Aarif Rahman, William Chan, Amber Kuo, and Wang Zhifei. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Masterminds (PG-13) Zach Galifianakis stars in this comedy based on real life as an armored truck security guard who engineers a major heist. Also with Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Ken Marino, Devin Ratray, and Owen Wilson. (Opens Friday)
Maximum Ride (PG-13) Based on a James Patterson novel, this science-fiction film is about six children with special abilities who escape from the laboratory where they’ve been experimental subjects. Starring Allie Marie Evans, Patrick Johnson, Lyllana Wray, Luke Gregory Crosby, Gavin Lewis, and Peter O’Brien. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (NR) Sushant Singh Rajput stars in this biography of the legendary Indian cricketer. Also with Disha Patani, Fawad Khan, Ram Charan, Kiara Advani, and Anupam Kher. (Opens Fridayl)
Operation Avalanche (R) Matt Johnson stars in his own thriller as the leader of a team of CIA agents who are sent into NASA in 1967 to find an intelligence leak in the space program. Also with Owen Williams, Josh Boles, Krista Madison, Madeleine Sims-Frewer, and Tom Bolton. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Starving the Beast (NR) Steve Mims’ documentary about the conservative effort to defund large public universities across America. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
NOW PLAYING
Barcelona: A Love Untold (NR) This Filipino romance was filmed in Spain, but the love scenes set in the shadow of the Sagrada Familia or in Parc Güell can’t disguise the fact that this is the same movie as countless others made in the old country. Daniel Padilla plays an architecture student who comes across a young woman (Kathryn Bernardo) who happens to look exactly like his deceased ex-girlfriend. The drill is the same; this thing looks great, but its pacing, writing, and acting wouldn’t pass muster on a daytime soap opera here. Also with Joshua Garcia, Aiko Melendez, and Edgar Mortiz.
Blair Witch (R) The original movie set the standard for found-footage horror films. This sequel is just a standard found-footage horror film. James Allen McCune stars as the younger brother of the lead character from the 1999 movie, who takes a larger film crew into the same woods to search for her. The crew’s modern-day equipment includes GPS, walkie-talkies, and a bevy of smaller cameras, including one mounted on a drone. The tech winds up betraying the crew, although director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (who did the far better You’re Next) make disappointingly little out of it. They execute some better special-effects within the format than the original could, but they can’t keep this thing from feeling like the retread that it is. Also with Callie Hernandez, Corbin Reid, Brandon Scott, Wes Robinson, and Valorie Curry.
Bridget Jones’s Baby (R) Despite a long absence from the screen, Renée Zellweger’s flair for physical comedy remains undiminished in this third installment that finds the klutzy British TV news producer now older, thinner, still single, pregnant, and unsure of whether the father is her ex (Colin Firth) or an American dating-website billionaire (Patrick Dempsey). Bridget is also somewhat less annoyingly self-absorbed, thanks to the auspices of new screenwriter Emma Thompson (who also plays a humorless ob/gyn here), and there are a few scattered big laughs here, but this outing never has enough of them to take flight, nor does it have the emotional weight to transcend its trashy late-’90s roots. Also with Jim Broadbent, Gemma Jones, Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Sarah Solemani, Kate O’Flynn, and Celia Imrie.
Don’t Breathe (R) Evil Dead remake director Fede Alvarez re-teams with his star Jane Levy to make this rather good thriller about a small-time criminal who tries to get her younger sister away from their abusive mom and white-trash-hell Detroit by robbing a rich blind man (Stephen Lang), only to discover that he’s a ruthless killer. The characters’ emotional layers are brought up without being followed through on, but Alvarez builds up tension with some great sequences inside the blind man’s house, including one shot in total darkness, and a sickening one where he captures her and reveals what he intends to do with her. It’s not quite as good as 10 Cloverfield Lane, but it’s an excellent bet. Also with Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto.
Greater (PG) Great, are we going to have a college football weeper for every school now? Because so far, they’re all the same, all filled with mushy platitudes about hard work and Christian faith and wise coaching and the sanctity of University of _______ football. This one stars Christopher Severio as Brandon Burlsworth, an offensive lineman who walked on at Arkansas in the 1990s and played well enough to be drafted by the NFL but was killed in a car accident before he made the pros. With Severio a mushy presence in the lead and a script derived from thousands of other football movies, this offers nothing of interest to anyone outside of Razorbacks fans. Also with Neal McDonough, Leslie Easterbrook, Michael Parks, Nick Searcy, Quinton Aaron, Texas Battle, and M.C. Gainey.
Hell or High Water (R) A great Western. This contemporary thriller stars Ben Foster and Chris Pine as two West Texas brothers looking to save their family ranch by robbing the rural branches of the very bank that owns the mortgage on their place. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan wrote Sicario, but unlike that film, this one has a sense of humor and earns its moral ambiguity by counting up the cost of the brothers’ crime spree and having them stand to become wealthy if they can clear their debt. Jeff Bridges contributes a magnificent turn as a crusty old Texas Ranger who’s chasing the outlaws down, and the final confrontation between him and Pine is one you won’t soon forget. Also with Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, Katy Mixon, John-Paul Howard, and Dale Dickey.
The Hollars (PG-13) Sheer torture. John Krasinski co-stars in and directs this dramedy as a New York City insurance guy and frustrated artist who returns to his vaguely Southern small hometown after his mother (Margo Martindale) is diagnosed with a brain tumor. With the exception of the sainted, dying mother, everybody else here acts like an overgrown child, from the wishy-washy hero himself to his needy and pregnant fiancée (Anna Kendrick) to his ex’s insanely jealous current husband (Charlie Day) to his brother (Sharlto Copley), whom the movie doesn’t seem to realize is a thoroughgoing creep for stalking his ex-wife. All over this thing, Krasinski mistakes buried secrets and family dysfunction for cute comedy. Also with Richard Jenkins, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Randall Park, Mary Kay Place, and Josh Groban.
The Magnificent Seven (PG-13) Denzel Washington headlines this watchable-but-only-that, ethnically diverse remake of a remake as a warrant officer in the 1870s who’s hired by the people of a small town to protect them from the depredations of a land baron (Peter Sarsgaard). Washington and his co-stars (Chris Pratt as a hard-drinking gambler, Ethan Hawke as a shell-shocked war veteran) provide the magnetism, but director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) makes his usual hackwork out of the action. There are some remakes where you can simply plug actors of color into roles originally played by white people and get on with it, but a period Western demands something more. Oh, what Quentin Tarantino could have done with this! Also with Haley Bennett, Lee Byung-hun, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Martin Sensmeier, Luke Grimes, Matt Bomer, Cam Gigandet, and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Mr. Church (PG-13) A big pile of Jell-O with extra sugar and saccharine tossed in for good measure. Eddie Murphy stars in this drama as a saintly, sexless, selfless caretaker whose six-month job for a cancer patient (Natascha McElhone) turns into a 15-year stint as he essentially parents the woman’s daughter (Britt Robertson) into her college years and beyond. Directed by Bruce Beresford of Driving Miss Daisy fame, this is in the same offensive, outdated mold of stories about an African-American man who lives only for the white people he serves and never exhibits any sort of agency on his own. The movie is cluttered with dumbed-down narration by the white girl to explain things for the slowest members of the audience, and the story developments are full of the most wretched melodrama. This is a nasty experience in just about every way. Also with Xavier Samuel, Lucy Fry, Christian Madsen, and McKenna Grace.
SoulMate (NR) This exquisitely boring drama from China is about one Type A, straightedge rich girl (Ma Sichun) and one rebellious girl from rougher circumstances (Zhou Dongyu) who are childhood best friends until they get older and fall out over a man (Li Chengshan). Everybody goes round and round with pretty much the same emotions for 110 minutes, and it’s unleavened by any meaningful touch of humor. The manuscript of an autobiographical novel is introduced to provide tension and fails at its job. This is a bun that’s hollow inside and left too long in the steamer.
Storks (PG) Some of the gags in this animated kids’ movie are just brilliant. If only there were a story to connect them. In a world where storks have gotten out of the baby delivery business to deliver packages instead, Andy Samberg is the voice of one stork who wants to take over the company but has to team up with a misfit girl (voiced by Katie Crown) to deliver a baby to its proper home when one accidentally comes his way. Along the way, there’s a pack of wolves who form themselves into vehicles to chase after the stork and a climactic fight sequence that takes place in complete silence because no one wants to disturb the sleeping baby. Yet director Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors) jumps manically from tangent to tangent and keeps the movie from building momentum. Additional voices by Jennifer Aniston, Ty Burrell, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, Danny Trejo, and Kelsey Grammer.
