OPENING
The Beast Within (R) This British horror film stars Caoilinn Springall as a girl who starts to question why her family lives secluded in the woods. Also with Kit Harington, Ashleigh Cummings, Ian Giles, and James Cosmo. (Opens Friday)
Dead Sea (NR) This horror film is about a group of shipwreck survivors who are rescued only to discover more dangers awaiting them on board the new ship. Starring Isabel Gravitt, Dean Cameron, Garrett Wareing, Alexander Wraith, Genneya Walton, and Koa Tom. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Fabulous Four (R) Susan Sarandon, Bette Midler, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph star in this comedy about a group of school friends who reunite for one’s wedding. Also with Bruce Greenwood, Sophie von Haselberg, Nicholas Velez, Kaden Taylor, and Michael Bolton. (Opens Friday)
The Girl in the Pool (NR) Freddie Prinze Jr. stars in this thriller as a man who must hide his murdered mistress’ body during a surprise birthday party. Also with Monica Potter, Dionysio Basco, Tyler Lawrence Gray, Jake McLean, Jaylen Moore, and Kevin Pollak. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Last Breath (R) This thriller is about a group of scuba divers trapped underwater by great white sharks. Starring Alexander Arnold, Kim Spearman, Jack Parr, Erin Mullen, and the late Julian Sands. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
NOW PLAYING
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (R) What it’s supposed to be and no more. Marcus (Martin Lawrence) suffers a heart attack and comes out of it believing that he’s bulletproof, which does nothing for the comedy but comes in handy as he and Mike (Will Smith) are framed along with their late captain (Joe Pantoliano) for being moles for the drug cartels and have to go on the run. The character stuff ran dry a long time ago and the stuff about the cops’ families doesn’t feel real for a second, but directors Adil and Bilall (who also did the previous Bad Boys movie) do know how to film a shootout. That’s what’s carrying this series now. Also with Vanessa Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Jacob Scipio, Tasha Smith, Melanie Liburd, Rhea Seehorn, John Salley, Dennis Mcdonald, DJ Khaled, and Tiffany Haddish.
Bad Newz (NR) This Indian comedy stars Triptii Dimri as a woman who becomes pregnant with twins by two different fathers. Also with Vicky Kaushal, Ammy Virk, Neha Dhupia, and Ananya Panday.
Despicable Me 4 (PG) Where other long-running movie franchises run out of ideas, this fourth installment has so many ideas that they get in each other’s way. When a cockroach-obsessed French supervillain (voiced by Will Ferrell) busts out of prison and vows revenge on Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), our bald baddie and his family have to go into hiding and pretend to be normies in the suburbs. This would be enough plot for a movie, but this chapter piles on a new baby for Gru, a honey badger, and some of the minions gaining X-Men powers. It’s so much that even Ferrell gets lost in the shuffle, and the only part that works at all is when he and Carell duet on “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” This could have worked if it had been broken down into episodes of an animated TV show, but on the big screen, it’s exhausting. Additional voices by Kristen Wiig, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Joey King, Sofía Vergara, Madison Polan, Chris Renaud, Laraine Newman, Chloe Fineman, Pierre Coffin, Steve Coogan, and Stephen Colbert.
Fly Me to the Moon (PG-13) This workplace comedy starts out well enough. Set in 1969, the movie teams up a grumpy NASA launch director (Channing Tatum) with a fast-talking Madison Avenue marketing specialist (Scarlett Johansson) to sell the public on the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon. Johansson dominates the proceedings as someone who knows how to communicate between the engineering geeks that she’s working with and an American audience divided by the Vietnam War. Unfortunately for her and the film, a U.S. government handler (Woody Harrelson) blackmails her into staging a fake Moon landing for use in case the real landing goes wrong, and the script gets so tangled up in questions of right and wrong that it stops having fun. All the fizz goes out of this film well before the end. Also with Ray Romano, Anna Garcia, Jim Rash, Donald Elise Watkins, Colin Woodell, Nick Dillenburg, Noah Robbins, Christian Clemenson, Joe Chrest, Peter Jacobson, Colin Jost, and an uncredited Victor Garber.
Inside Out 2 (PG) This sequel does not reach the heights of the original Pixar animated film, but it does have some rewarding points. Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) turns 13, and puberty brings on a host of new emotions led by Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke). When Riley gets invited to a hockey skills camp, Anxiety leads a coup against Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler) and the other four emotions, literally bottling them up so that Riley can impress the right people. Even with Hawke missing some of the comic potential in the role, Anxiety is still the best thing about the film, drafting an army of storyboard artists to draft every scenario that could derail Riley and inducing a panic attack in her that will feel horribly familiar to anxiety sufferers. The jokes don’t land as consistently as in the original, nor are the emotions in the story as piercing, but the mindscape remains a nice place to be. Additional voices by Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, Lilimar, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ron Funches, James Austin Johnson, Paula Pell, June Squibb, John Ratzenberger, Diane Lane, and Kyle MacLachlan.
Kalki 2898 A.D. (NR) This Indian science-fiction epic has already out-earned RRR at the box office in its own country, and you can see why. Prabhas stars as a more-than-slightly ridiculous bounty hunter in the 29th century who yearns to ascend to the paradise set up by his dictatorship when he gets caught up in a plot to save one of Earth’s few remaining pregnant women (Deepika Padukone) with the help of an 8-foot-tall demigod (Amitabh Bachchan). The film has clearly learned lessons from the Star Wars movies in terms of effects and the Marvel films in terms of heroic characters who sometimes behave unheroically. The mix isn’t always stable, but it adds up to reasonably effective entertainment. Also with Kamal Haasan, Rajendra Prasad, Saswata Chatterjee, Brahmanandam, Shobhana, Pasupathy, Anna Ben, Harshith Reddy, Disha Patani, Krishnakumar, Vijay Deverakonda, Dulquer Salmaan, Malvika Nair, S.S. Rajamouli, and Mrunal Thakur.
Kill (R) This bone-crunching Indian action-thriller has more in common with its Indonesian and South Korean counterparts than with Bollywood, and that’s a good thing. Newcomer Lakshya stars as a counter-terrorism commando for the military who pursues the woman he loves (Tanya Maniktala) onto a train from Ranchi to Delhi, only to have his romantic plans thwarted by a group of 40-odd machete-wielding bandits who come on board to rob the train. The film runs a scant 105 minutes, leaving no room for musical numbers of the other breaks that we’re used to from Bollywood. The hero also receives and dispenses horrific amounts of violence, and he clearly feels all of it. It’s new for an Indian movie to raise the question of whether the hero is so good at killing people because he’s actually a psychopath. The fight sequences make creative use of the cramped space aboard the train, too. A Hollywood remake of this film has already been announced, but Tinseltown will have to bring its A game to top this. Also with Raghav Juval, Abhishek Chauhan, Ashish G. Vidyarthi, Pratap Verma, Harsh Chhaya, Adrija Sinha, Meenal Kapoor, Parth Tiwari, Devang Bagga, Shivam Parmar, and Akash Pramanik.
Longlegs (R) Osgood Perkins’ storytelling improves markedly in his latest horror movie that owes a great deal to The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files. Maika Monroe portrays an FBI agent in the early 1990s who’s assigned to a cold case in Oregon involving a serial killer (Nicolas Cage) who induces fathers to murder-suicide themselves and their entire families. The sound design is terrific and the prosthetics team manages to make Cage look fundamentally unlike himself. Monroe contributes a tightly wound turn as an agent tormented by her past, and Alicia Witt is almost scarier than the serial killer as the agent’s hoarder and Christian zealot of a mother. The craftsmanship that Perkins brings to this story creates a dread that will make you sweat even through the movie’s Pacific Northwest winter. Also with Blair Underwood, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Lauren Acala, Ava Kelders, Carmel Amit, Jason Day, and Kiernan Shipka.
MaXXXine (R) File this under Bigger Isn’t Always Better. The trilogy from director Ti West and star Mia Goth comes to a disappointing end, as Maxine Minx (Goth) attempts to break out of porn by starring in a low-budget horror movie in 1985 Hollywood, only for someone to start killing all her friends and making the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker. The movie has tons of ideas and no sense of what to do with them, and so it does not succeed as a slasher flick, a study of the perils of fame, a look at pornography within the larger culture, or a character study of a final girl who’s willing to kill to escape her repressive background. The setting promises even more violence and sex than the previous films, and delivers on none of it. Also with Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Monaghan, Halsey, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Giancarlo Esposito, Sophie Thatcher, Simon Prast, Larry Fessenden, Lily Collins, and Kevin Bacon.
Oddity (R) The title could not be more appropriate for this Irish horror movie. After a woman (played by a brunette Carolyn Bracken) is murdered in the country house she just moved into, her blind psychic identical twin sister (played by a blonde Bracken) uses a very scary life-sized wooden marionette to try to solve the case, much to the displeasure of the widowed husband (Gwilym Lee) whom she moves in with. Writer-director Damian McCarthy knows how to engineer a jump scare and also knows to use the device judiciously, but the pieces of the story don’t fit together. Judge the film on its set pieces and it comes off better. Also with Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton, Steve Wall, and Johnny French.
A Quiet Place: Day One (PG-13) Michael Sarnoski (Pig) takes over the franchise and makes it into something his own. Lupita Nyong’o stars as a terminal cancer case who visits New York with a bunch of fellow hospice patients on the day of the alien invasion. Having given up on her life, she now has to save her emotional support cat and a young Englishman (Joseph Quinn) who has no one in America to turn to. Sarnoski’s action set pieces are perhaps not as memorable as John Krasinski’s, but he finds some lovely character bits in the moments when his heroes are not running from the aliens. Nyong’o, too, brings her character to vivid life as a woman who’s hellbent on finding the last slice of New York-style pizza in the apocalypse, and her chosen method of death from blasting Nina Simone is about as good a death as you can expect in this fictional world. The series evolves enough to stay fresh. Also with Alex Wolff, Eliane Umuhire, Alfie Todd, and Djimon Hounsou.
Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot (PG-13) A follow-up of sorts to Sound of Freedom, this Christian drama is about the real-life East Texas pastors who adopted dozens of vulnerable children from the foster system. Starring Demetrius Grosse, Nika King, Elizabeth Mitchell, Diaana Babnicova, Jillian Reeves, and Taj Johnson.
Twisters (PG-13) An agreeable sequel to the 1996 blockbuster. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a meteorologist from Oklahoma who’s coaxed back home years after a tragedy in the field to kill tornadoes with an ex-colleague (Anthony Ramos) and a YouTube influencer (Glen Powell). From such a splendidly stupid premise, the movie wades hip-deep into so much weather jargon that it becomes so much noise for those of us who don’t have meteorology degrees. Fortunately, director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) keeps the narrative from dragging. Powell is no slouch here, but you may be surprised to find Edgar-Jones carrying this movie effortlessly, conveying her character’s guilt without harshing the fun popcorn vibe that the movie is going for. The country music-laden soundtrack helps this movie lift off, too. Also with Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane, Katy O’Brian, Brandon Perea, Kiernan Shipka, Nik Dodani, Tunde Adebimpe, Harry Hadden-Paton, Daryl McCormack, David Born, David Corenswet, and James Paxton.
DALLAS EXCLUSIVES
Before Dawn (R) This World War I drama stars Levi Miller as a teenager from Western Australia who has to fight in Europe. Also with Travis Jeffery, Ed Oxenbould, Stephen Peacocke, Myles Pollard, Tim Franklin, Jordan Dulieu, and Oscar Millar.
Clawfoot (NR) This black comedy stars Olivia Culpo and Francesca Eastwood as housewives and enemies who are both terrorized by an insane contractor (Thomas Forbes-Johnson). Also with Nestor Carbonell and Oliver Cooper.
Customs Frontline (NR) This Hong Kong action thriller is about a customs agent (Nicholas Tse) who discovers a mole in his agency facilitating illegal arms smuggling to Africa. Also with Jacky Cheung, Cya Liu, Karena Lam, Michelle Yim, Ben Yuen, Carlos Chan, Melvin Wong, Brahim Chab, Amanda Strang, and Francis Ng.
Silent Thunder (NR) This Western horror film stars Ted McGinley as a U.S. Marshal who must save prostitutes who have been kidnapped by monsters living in the desert. Also with Jack Lucarelli, Jonathan Stoddard, Laura James, Cassi Colvin, Brent Kublick, and Michael Lazari.
Widow Clicquot (R) Haley Bennett stars in this historical drama as the 19th-century French champagne maker who turns her wine into a global business. Also with Tom Sturridge, Ben Miles, Phoebe Nicholls, Paul Rhys, Cara Seymour, and Sam Riley.
