OPENING
Borderlands (PG-13) Adapted from the popular video game, Eli Roth’s film is about a group of misfits who must travel across a dystopian landscape to save a girl with mystical powers. Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Janina Gavankar, Gina Gershon, Haley Bennett, Bobby Lee, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Voice by Jack Black. (Opens Friday)
A Carpenter’s Prayer (NR) Stephen Baldwin stars in this Christian drama about a pastor who looks to a carpenter for spiritual guidance. Also with Bethany Anne Lind, Rebekah Ward, Alicia Kelley, Tim Bensch, David Bianco, and Jeff Dernlan. (Opens Friday at Cinepolis Euless)
Cuckoo (R) Hunter Schafer stars in this thriller as a teenage girl who’s stalked while her family is looking after a deserted Alpine ski resort. Also with Dan Stevens, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Mila Lieu, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey. (Opens Friday)
Girl You Know It’s True (NR) This musical biopic tracks the rise and fall of Milli Vanilli (Elan Ben Ali and Tijan Njie) in the 1980s. Also with Matthias Schweighöfer, Bella Dayne, Graham Rogers, Darlene Tejeiro, James Flynn, and Natasha Loring. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Instigators (R) Matt Damon and Casey Affleck star in this thriller as two criminals who go on the run after a planned heist goes wrong. Also with Hong Chau, Jack Harlow, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ron Perlman, Toby Jones, André de Shields, Owen Earls, and Alfred Molina. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
It Ends With Us (PG-13) Blake Lively stars in this drama as a woman who’s drawn into an abusive relationship. Also with Justin Baldoni, Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton, Isabela Ferrer, Alex Neustaedter, Robert Clohessy, and Kevin McKidd. (Opens Friday)
The Last Front (NR) Iain Glen stars in this Belgian historical thriller as a widower who has to save his village during the last days of World War I. Also with Sasha Luss, Joe Anderson, Julian Kostov, Leander Vyvey, Koen de Bouw, Trine Thielen, and James Downie. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Pilot (NR) This Korean thriller-comedy stars Jo Jung-suk as a famous air force pilot who must disguise himself as a woman after his reputation is tarnished. Also with Lee Ju-myoung, Han Sun-hwa, Shin Seung-ho, Kim Ji-hyun, Oh Min-ae, Seo Jae-hee, and Lee Chan-won. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Running on Empty (R) Daniel André’s romantic thriller stars Keir Gilchrist as a dying young man who tries to avoid being killed while wooing a dying young woman. Also with Lucy Hale, Dustin Milligan, Monica Potter, Francesca Eastwood, Rhys Coiro, Jay Pharoah, Clara McGregor, Dylan Flashner, and Jim Gaffigan. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (NR) This Hong Kong thriller stars Raymond Lam as a young man who lives life inside the walled city of Kowloon. Also with Louis Koo, Richie Jen, Philip Ng, Lau Chun-Him, Aaron Kwok, Cecilia Choi, and Sammo Hung. (Opens Friday)
NOW PLAYING
Deadpool & Wolverine (R) The partnership of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman has been teased for so long, it would have been easy for the thing to disappoint. Fortunately, Jackman’s eternally grumpy Wolverine and Reynolds’ Deadpool with his psychological need to make a joke out of everything is comedy gold. Deadpool has to save his world from annihilation, so he teams up with the worst version of Wolverine and goes to The Void, a funny dystopia where superheroes past are banished because their storylines never got resolved. It may not add up to great art, but it is very funny. Also with Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Karan Soni, Matthew Macfadyen, Leslie Uggams, Brianna Hildebrand, Dafne Keen, Tyler Mane, Ray Park, Aaron Stanford, Henry Cavill, Jon Favreau, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes, Channing Tatum, and Chris Evans. Voices by Stefan Kapicic, Nathan Fillion, Blake Lively, and Matthew McConaughey.
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.
The Fabulous Four (R) They stuck four great actresses into this comedy and hoped something amazing would happen. Well, it didn’t. Bette Midler plays a retiree who invites her New York friends (Megan Mullally and Sheryl Lee Ralph) down to Key West for her wedding, and they trick their mutual friend (Susan Sarandon) who’s estranged from the bride into coming along as well. Truly nothing works. The lines aren’t funny, the references to Ernest Hemingway novels are needlessly obscure, and the most life this movie shows is when some of the ladies accidentally ingest marijuana edibles. Also with Bruce Greenwood, Sophie von Haselberg, Nicholas Velez, Kaden Taylor, and Michael Bolton.
The Firing Squad (PG-13) Cuba Gooding Jr., Kevin Sorbo, and James Harrington star in this Christian film as three American prisoners facing execution in a foreign country. Also with Tupua Ainu’u, Edmund Kwan, Madeline Anderson, Christian Segura, Nadia Maximova, and Eric Roberts.
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.
Gharjwai (NR) This Nepalese comedy is about three people who unexpectedly meet in a village. Starring Dayahang Rai, Miruna Magar, Buddhi Tamang, Puskar Gurung, Raj Thapa, and Shishir Bangdel. (Opens Friday at Cinepolis Euless)
Harold and the Purple Crayon (PG) I really don’t think they had a script in place when they started shooting this. That’s how slapdash this movie version of Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s book is. Zachary Levi plays a grown-up version of Harold who draws a portal into our reality so that he can find his creator. There is a funny villain in Jemaine Clement as a librarian who writes unpublished and incredibly homoerotic fantasy-adventure fiction, but that’s not nearly enough to make up for the misadventures in reality that remind you of the most amateurish 1980s children’s movies. The book, its legion of fans, and anybody who wandered into this movie at a multiplex deserved so much better. Also with Zooey Deschanel, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Tanya Reynolds, Ravi Patel, and Pete Gardner. Narrated by Alfred Molina.
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.
Kneecap (R) A reminder of what a good musical biopic looks like. The members of the Irish rap group called Kneecap (Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh, Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin, and JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh) portray themselves as two dead-end Catholic kids and their former music teacher who band together to rap in the Irish language about sex, drugs, and hating the British. Writer-director Rich Peppiatt does not water down the references to Irish culture and history in his script and peppers the film with animation on top of the filmed image, hand-drawn English subtitles, and an interlude in claymation. Underneath all the gimmicks, the writing is solidly funny and profane as the group makes art out of their surroundings and strikes a blow for the visibility of their language. Also with Josie Walker, Fionnuala Flaherty, Jessica Reynolds, Adam Best, Simone Kirby, and Michael Fassbender.
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.
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.
Raayan (NR) Dhanush writes, directs, and stars in this Tamil-language thriller as a man who has to save his younger brothers from a criminal conspiracy. Also with Prakash Raj, S.J. Suryah, Selvaraghavan, Sundeep Kishan, Dushara Vijayan, Kalidas Jayaram, Aparna Balamurali, and Varalaxmi Sarathkumar.
Successor (NR) A gigantic box-office success in China, this comedy stars Shi Pengyan as an educated young man who is his rural family’s best hope of escaping poverty. Also with Shen Teng, Ma Li, Sa Rina, Ding Liuyuan, Liu Jian, and Jackie Li.
Trap (PG-13) M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is full of his typical plot twists, except the plot twists become less believable as the story wears on. Josh Hartnett portrays a Philadelphia serial killer who takes his young daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop concert, only to discover that the police have set a trap for him at the venue. Hartnett is the best thing about this movie as a firefighter who can fake good cheer or quivering fear as the occasion calls for. Even so, I don’t believe the law enforcement would set up a sting operation like this, nor that the killer would be able to move so freely around the arena without being seen, nor that he would have no confidence in his ability to lie his way past the police checkpoints, nor that he could slip the dragnet in the way that he does. Shyamalan’s real-life daughter Saleka Night Shyamalan portrays the pop star who effectively gets taken hostage as part of the plot, and she sounds like a pop singer without producing any memorable music. Also with Alison Pill, Kid Cudi, Jonathan Langdon, Mark Bacolcol, Vanessa Smythe, Russ, Kid Cudi, and Hayley Mills.
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
Detained (NR) This thriller stars Abbie Cornish as a woman who wakes up in a police station with no memory of the days before. Also with Laz Alonso, Justin H. Min, Moon Bloodgood, Silas Weir Mitchell, Breeda Wool, and John Patrick Amedori.
Dìdi (R) Sean Wang’s autobiographical film stars Izaac Wang as a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy coming of age in the summer of 2008. Also with Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Zhang Li Hua, Raul Dial, Joshua Hankerson, Chiron Cillia Denk, Sunil Maurillo, and Joziah Lagonoy.
Peak Season (NR) This drama stars Claudia Restrepo as an aimless young woman who finds new purpose during a vacation in Jackson Hole. Also with Derrick Joseph DeBlasis, Ben Coleman, Fred Melamed, and Stephanie Courtney.
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.
