OPENING
Adventures of the Naked Umbrella (NR) This comedy stars Jeremy Davies as a conspiracy theorist who goes into a tailspin after his trailer home burns down. Also with Taryn Manning, Vinny Balbo, Rylee Marshall, Richard Riehle, and Tom Arnold. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Great Turkey Town Miracle (PG) Angus Benfield stars in his own comedy as a former radio DJ who must produce several thousand turkeys before Christmas to keep his job. Also with Sharon Oliphant, Cameron Arnett, Jessica Rae, and Corey Cannon. (Opens Friday)
It’s a Wonderful Knife (R) I’m surprised this title hasn’t been taken before. This Christmas horror-comedy stars Jane Widdop as a woman who wishes she had never been born and then sees what life would have been like if she hadn’t saved her town from a slasher. Also with Joel McHale, Jess McLeod, Katherine Isabelle, William B. Davis, and Justin Long. (Opens Friday)
Japan (NR) This Indian heist film stars Karthi as a notorious burglar who aims to get away after pulling off a massive jewel robbery. Also with Anu Emmanuel, Jithan Ramesh, K.S. Ravikumar, Sunil, and Vijay Milton. (Opens Friday)
JIgarthanda Double X (NR) This Indian action-comedy stars Raghava Lawrence as a 1970s gangster who yearns to become a movie star. Also with S.J. Suryah, Nimisha Sajayan, Shine Tom Chacko, and Naveen Chandra. (Opens Friday)
Journey to Bethlehem (PG) Fiona Palomo and Milo Manheim star in this musical version of the Nativity story. Also with Geno Segers, Omid Djalili, Rizwan Manji, Joel Smallbone, Lecrae, and Antonio Banderas. (Opens Friday)
Last Suspect (NR) This Chinese courtroom drama stars Lee Hong-Chi as a lawyer defending a woman accused of murder. Also with Kara Wai Ying-Hung, Zhang Xiaofei, and Wang Ziyi. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Manodrome (R) Jesse Eisenberg stars in this thriller as an insecure man who meets a mysterious family of men. Also with Adrien Brody, Odessa Young, Sallieu Sesay, Philip Ettinger, Ethan Suplee, and Gheorghe Muresan. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Showdown at the Grand (NR) This comedy is about a movie theater owner (Terrence Howard) and a former action movie star (Dolph Lundgren) who team up to save the former’s business from a corporate takeover. Also with Amanda Righetti, Piper Curda, and John Savage. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
NOW PLAYING
After Death (PG-13) Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke’s documentary interviews people who have had near-death experiences.
The Creator (PG-13) This science-fiction epic looks amazing. If only the story were as good. John David Washington stars as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in 2070 who’s tasked with retrieving a superweapon being developed by robots in a war between robots and humans. The weapon turns out to be a 14-year-old kid (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The reported $80 million budget looks like three times as much, with hordes of sentient robots fighting on battlefields and explosions on spaceships that are visible in the sky. Problem is, the relationships between the hero and the girl as well as his possibly dead ex-girlfriend (Gemma Chan) don’t resonate the way they should, and the movie’s statement about artificial intelligence is underbaked. Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) has great gifts, but they come with severe limitations. Also with Allison Janney, Sturgill Simpson, Marc Menchaca, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ralph Ineson, Veronica Ngo, and Ken Watanabe.
The Equalizer 3 (R) It’s unusual how slowly this movie goes about its business, and even more unusual that it works so well. Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is wounded in action and has to heal up in a small town on the Italian coast. He does so just in time for the Neapolitan camorra to start throwing their weight around. Before McCall faces down the bad guys, director Antoine Fuqua stops to take a breath and take in the sights in the various towns in Campania that stand in for the setting. It feels appropriate for the story of an aging hit man who realizes that he needs to hang it up while he can. If this is the last movie in the series, it’s a worthy ending. Also with Gaia Scodellaro, Remo Girone, David Denman, Eugenio Mastrandrea, Andrea Scarduzio, Andrea Dodero, Daniele Perrone, Zakaria Hamza, Manuela Tasciotti, Dea Lanzaro, Sonia Ben Ammar, Adolfo Margiotta, and Dakota Fanning.
The Exorcist: Believer (R) This movie jumps to life when Ellen Burstyn enters the proceedings about halfway through, and then the movie sends her off so unceremoniously that you wonder if the filmmakers knew what they had. It’s one of many missteps in this massively disappointing sequel, as a demon possesses two 13-year-old girls (Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum) and their parents have to enlist the help of Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil to exorcise them. The fantastic cast are hampered by characters that don’t develop in any believable way, and director/co-writer David Gordon Green ditches the Catholicism for simultaneous Catholic, Baptist, and Vodou exorcism rites that only dilute all of them. Some horror set pieces might have saved this, but instead we get fanservice from a director who lacks the ruthless craft of the late William Friedkin. Take away the connections to the 1973 classic, and this is a perfectly ordinary horror film. Also with Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Raphael Sbarge, E.J. Bonilla, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Linda Blair
Five Nights at Freddy’s (PG-13) The animatronic robot monsters are perfectly pitched between cute and creepy in this horror film. Everything else is crap, though. In this adaptation of the video game series, Josh Hutcherson portrays a financially desperate man who takes a job as a security guard at an abandoned pizza place and arcade to avoid losing custody of his 11-year-old sister (Piper Rubio). The film is neither funny enough to work as a comedy nor scary enough to work as a horror film, and director Emma Tammi doesn’t have the instincts to balance the two elements. The acting isn’t up to par, either. Also with Elizabeth Lail, Christian Stokes, David Lind, Kat Conner Sterling, Matthew Lillard, and Mary Stuart Masterson.
Freelance (R) Two brilliant comic actors can’t salvage this throwback action-comedy. John Cena portrays an ex-Special Forces soldier providing security for a disgraced journalist (Alison Brie) as she interviews the dictator (Juan Pablo Raba) of a fictitious South American nation. The president at least is characterized as something between a tyrant and a good guy, but director Pierre Morel (Taken) has no feel for comedy, and Cena and Brie fail to inject enough jokes to make the premise stand up. Also with Alice Eve, Marton Csokas, Sebastian Eslava, Mauricio Cujar, Diego Vásquez, and Christian Slater.
Glisten and the Merry Mission (G) This animated movie is about a young elf who has to save Christmas. Voices by Freddie Prinze Jr., Michael Rapaport, Dionne Warwick, Billy Ray Cyrus, Julia Michaels, Trinity Jo-Li Bliss, and Chevy Chase.
The Killer (R) David Fincher’s latest thriller stars Michael Fassbender as a contract killer trying to stay alive while he’s being hunted across the globe. Also with Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Kerry O’Malley, Sophie Charlotte, and Arliss Howard.
Killers of the Flower Moon (R) Martin Scorsese treats the Osage murders of the 1920s like one of his gangster films, and this might be better than Goodfellas or The Irishman. Based on David Grann’s history, this film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a World War I serviceman who returns home to Oklahoma and marries a full-blooded Osage (Lily Gladstone) to gain the money that comes with the rights to the oil on her land. Soon the Osage start dying under mysterious circumstances. Scorsese is canny enough to draw the parallels between the murders and the Tulsa race massacre from the same time, and he presents us with Okie cowboys acting like Mafia hoods to get away with their crimes. DiCaprio is great as a bad man whose accretion of bad deeds finally breaks him, and Gladstone is magnetic as the woman who barely survives when her tribespeople don’t. The film’s 206 minutes fly by and contain more than enough material for a second viewing. Also with Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jason Isbell, Pete Yorn, Scott Shepherd, William Belleau, Yancey Red Corn, Gary Basaraba, Sturgill Simpson, Tommy Schultz, Tatanka Means, Barry Corbin, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser.
Leo: Bloody Sweet (NR) This Indian remake of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence ventures into territory that many Indian films won’t. Vijay portrays a chocolatier in a remote village in the Himalayas who kills five armed robbers who try to shoot the employees in his coffee shop. This attracts the attention of the mob, who know him as a ruthless killer hiding out as an ordinary citizen. The movie has the wit to show our hero re-traumatizing his family over and over as he keeps killing gangsters who come after him for revenge. The resulting film fits uneasily together, but that’s precisely why this action thriller stands out from other Bollywood fare. Also with Sanjay Dutt, Arjun, Trisha, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Madonna Sebastian, Mathew Thomas, Iyal, Mansoor Ali Khan, and Babu Anthony.
The Marsh King’s Daughter (R) Adapted from Karen Dionne’s novel, this low-temperature thriller stars Daisy Ridley as a woman who has to defend her family after her wilderness survivalist and serial rapist-murderer father (Ben Mendelsohn) breaks out of prison and kills a bunch of people on his way to see her. The film has an interesting idea when she goes back to her old house in the Michigan marshes to hunt the old man down before he can get to her husband and kid, but everything feels too muted by half, starting with Ridley’s performance as a jumpy, paranoid American. The prologue sequence is way too long, and director Neil Burger (Limitless) seems to have lost all sense of pacing. This genre fare is flavorless. Also with Garrett Hedlund, Caren Pistorius, Brooklynn Prince, Joey Carson, and Gil Birmingham.
The Nun II (R) What a mess this turned out to be. The sequel to the 2019 horror film is set in 1956 and has Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) traveling to a convent in Provence when she hears that Valak (Bonnie Aarons) isn’t dead after all and is murdering her way through Europe. The story winds up hopelessly scattered as characters run all over this church looking for one another and trying to put their hands on some mystical thingumabob that’s supposed to tip the balance between good and evil. I could live with that if the movie were scary, but the set piece at a magazine stand is outweighed by too much rote stuff, and the appearance of the werewolf demon is one of the more ridiculous things I’ve seen in a horror film. The tying of this series to the Conjuring movies isn’t enough to make it worth the trip. Also with Storm Reid, Anna Popplewell, Jonas Bloquet, Katelyn Rose Downey, Suzanne Bertish, Peter Hudson, Tamar Baruch, Natalia Safran, Patrick Wilson, and Vera Farmiga.
Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie (PG) “They’re cute little dogs who drive around in cars!” says one character. “I know it’s weird, but just go with it.” It’s about to get weirder. A mad scientist (voiced by Taraji P. Henson) pulls a meteorite out of the sky, but the crystals wind up in the paws of our puppies, who then acquire superpowers. Skye (voiced by Mckenna Grace) frets about being the runt of the litter until she acquires super-strength, and Liberty (voiced by Marsai Martin) frets that her superpower hasn’t manifested at all. Somehow none of it adds up to a solid laugh or any story developments that are in any way surprising. The little ones in the crowd will be the only ones who derive any entertainment value from this. Additional voices by Finn-Lee Epp, Luxton Handspiker, Christian Corrao, Christian Convery, Nylan Parthipan, Callum Shoniker, Ron Pardo, James Marsden, Lil Rel Howery, Kim Kardashian, Kristen Bell, and Chris Rock.
Priscilla (R) As a companion piece to Elvis, this biography is unsatisfying in a whole other way. Cailee Spaeny portrays Priscilla Beaulieu Presley from age 14 into her 30s as she meets Elvis (Jacob Elordi) and sticks with him through his abuse, infidelity, and relentless focus on his career. The lead actress’ youthful looks bring home the queasiness of Elvis’ dating of a preteen girl who’s 10 years younger than himself, and her alertness keeps the movie from becoming a stuffy historical pageant. Sofia Coppola gets her point across about the emptiness of a woman’s life when everyone regards her as an attachment to her husband, but the movie could have made the same point over a much shorter length. The ideas are here, but better dramatic shape would have given them more power. Also with Ari Cohen, Dagmara Domińczyk, Tim Post, Lynne Griffin, Dan Beirne, Dan Abramovici, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll, and Matthew Shaw.
Radical (PG-13) Eugenio Derbez stars in this Mexican drama as a schoolteacher who tries to educate his students in a corrupt border town. Also with Daniel Haddad, Jennifer Trejo, Mia Fernanda Solis, Danilo Guardiola, Gilberto Barraza, Victor Estrada, and Manuel Márquez.
Saw X (R) Finally, a Saw movie I can get behind. It only took them 10 tries. Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, falls victim to a scam involving a quack cure, and sets about hunting down the fake doctors who conned him. The movie takes an unusually long time setting itself up, and patiently delves into the emotions of a serial killer as he faces his end. Even better material comes at the end when some of his prospective victims manage to turn the tables on him and force him to lock himself in his own trap while taunting him about everything wrong with his world-view. It’s so good that it almost makes the previous eight or nine films worth having sat through. Also with Shawnee Smith, Michael Beach, Synnøve Macody Lund, Renata Vaca, Steven Brand, Joshua Okamoto, Octavio Hinojosa, Paulette Hernández, Jorge Briseño, and Costas Mandylor.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (PG-13) You’ll likely be watching this in a packed theater with little girls running around and singing along with Taylor, but this movie is strong enough to hold up even if you see it on your smartphone by yourself six months from now. Sam Wrench’s concert documentary takes in Swift’s last performance from the first leg of her current concert tour, where she plays selections from all her previous albums. If you didn’t have the coin to pay your way in to her stadium show, this film showcases her deep understanding of stagecraft, her indefatigable energy, and her unforced chemistry with her fans. Maybe the moss-covered piano she plays on “Champagne Problems” is a bit much, but the show is full of wow moments like the mystical backdrop for “Willow” and the giant snake coiling around the stage to introduce the Reputation part of the program. Swift’s sturdy sense of songcraft underscores all of this. What more could you wish from a concert movie?
What Happens Later (R) Adapted from Steven Dietz’ play Shooting Star, Meg Ryan’s directorial debut veers between deep and deeply annoying, but the writing is strong enough to carry it. Ryan stars as a woman who is snowed in at a regional airport in Arkansas with the ex-husband (David Duchovny) whom she hasn’t seen in years. They hash over everything that went wrong with their marriage, bitch about the Muzak covers of 1990s rock songs over the PA system, and break into a dance number. This is Ryan’s first film role in almost 20 years, and if this is not exactly ground-breaking territory, her delivery is something to be glad to have back. She has some talent behind the camera, too, even if the set looks way too big to be a tiny airport. The film strikes a fine balance between fitting the romantic comedy genre and deconstructing it. Voice by Hal Liggett.
DALLAS EXCLUSIVES
Death at the Border (NR) Wendy Wilkins co-stars in her own drama about two women trying to escape abusive relationships. Also with Shannon Elizabeth, Eric Roberts, Frank Whaley, Kika Magalhães, and Danny Trejo.
Rustin (PG-13) This biography stars Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, the gay civil-rights leader who organized the 1963 March on Washington. Also with Chris Rock, Glynn Turman, Aml Ameen, Johnny Ramey, Michael Potts, CCH Pounder, Audra McDonald, and Jeffrey Wright.
