OPENING
Aay (NR) Narne Nithin stars in this Indian comedy as a software engineer whose romantic life turns upside-down when he returns to his home village. Also with Nayan Sarika, Rajkumar Kasireddy, Ankith Koyya, Mime Gopi, Krishna Chaitanya, and VTV Ganesh. (Opens Friday at Cinemark Tinseltown Grapevine)
Between the Temples (R) Nathan Silver’s comedy stars Jason Schwartzman as a rabbi having a professional crisis when his former music teacher (Carol Kane) asks him to help her convert to Judaism. Also with Dolly de Leon, Madeline Weinstein, Caroline Aaron, Lindsay Burdge, and Robert Smigel. (Opens Friday)
Catching Dust (NR) This Western is about a couple from New York who stay with a Texan rancher (Jai Courtney), not knowing that he’s actually a criminal in hiding. Also with Erin Moriarty, Ryan Corr, Dina Shihabi, and Olwen Fouéré. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Crow (R) A new film version of the James O’Barr comic series stars Bill Skarsgård as a murdered man who comes back from the dead to avenge himself on his wife’s killers. Also with FKA twigs, Josette Simon, Sami Bouajila, Jordan Bolger, Sebastian Orozco, and Danny Huston. (Opens Friday)
Decoded (NR) This Chinese historical drama stars Liu Haoran as the real-life cryptographer who figured out how to decipher encoded Japanese communications during World War II. Also with John Cusack, Chen Daoming, Daniel Wu, Yu Feihong, Wang Baoqiang, and Chen Sicheng. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
The Forge (PG) The latest Christian film by the Kendrick brothers stars Aspen Kennedy as a young Black man who learns life lessons from a brotherhood of older men. Also with T.C. Stallings, Cameron Arnett, Ben VanderMey, Tommy Woodward, Priscilla C. Shirer, and Karen Abercrombie. (Opens Friday)
Greedy People (R) Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this thriller set in a small town where a murder and the discovery of $1 million in cash set off a string of crimes. Also with Lily James, Himesh Patel, Tim Blake Nelson, Simon Rex, Uzo Aduba, Jim Gaffigan, Nina Arianda, José María Yazpik, Joey Lauren Adams, and Traci Lords. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Land of Happiness (NR) This South Korean historical drama stars Jo Jung-suk as the lawyer who defends Park Tae-joo (Lee Sun-kyun) after his 1979 assassination of the country’s president. Also with Yoo Jae-myung, Choi Won-young, Jin Ki-joo, Woo Hyeon, Jeon Bae-soo, and Lee Won-jong. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Maruthi Nagar Subramanyam (NR) This Telugu-language comedy stars Rao Ramesh as a middle-aged family man who comes into a large sum of money due to a bank error. Also with Ankith Koyya, Indraja, Ajay, Ramya Pasupuleti, and Harsha Vardhan. (Opens Friday)
Place of Bones (R) Heather Graham stars in this Western as a woman who must protect her daughter when a gang of outlaws lays siege to their home. Also with Tom Hopper, Corin Nemec, Brielle Robillard, Ray Abruzzo, and Donald Cerrone. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Sing Sing (R) Good enough to make you wish it had been better. Colman Domingo stars in this drama as an upstate New York prison inmate who runs a theater program for his fellow inmates while also being a jailhouse lawyer and working for free on his fellow inmates’ appeals. The story of the performing arts helping prisoners achieve individuality and dignity in a place that’s designed to rob them of those things should be uplifting, and yet Greg Kwedar’s film stubbornly refuses to budge because it’s so tied down to feel-good formulas. The film is worth seeing for the performances by Domingo and Clarence Maclin as a hard case who takes to Shakespeare, but too much of the movie glosses over the harsh realities of life in prison. Also with Johnny Simmons, Brent Buell, Sean San Jose, Sean “Dino” Johnson, Mosi Eagle, David “Dap” Giraudy, Patrick “Preme” Griffin, James “Big E” Williams, and Paul Raci. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Strange Darling (R) JT Mollner’s horror film stars Willa Fitzgerald as a woman who turns the tables on the serial killer (Kyle Gallner) who has targeted her. Also with Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey, Steven Michael Quezada, Madisen Beaty, Bianca A. Santos, and Giovanni Ribisi. Narrated by Jason Patric. (Opens Friday)
200% Wolf (PG) This German animated film is about a poodle (voiced by Ilai Swindells) who wishes to become a werewolf. Additional voices by Samara Weaving, Elizabeth Nabben, Janice Petersen, Heather Mitchell, Michael Bourchier, and Jennifer Saunders. (Opens Friday)
NOW PLAYING
Alien: Romulus (R) Not as good as the first two movies in the series, but better than the last two. Some years after the events of the first Alien movie, the story is about a miner (Cailee Spaeny) and her android protector (David Jonsson) who fall in with a group of young space pirates looking to ransack a space station before it self-destructs, not knowing that the aliens are waiting for them on board. The film fills in some bits of knowledge about the alien mythology, and new director Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe) does much to bring the franchise back to its horror roots. Unfortunately, it doesn’t point the series in any sort of new direction, although Spaeny has the emotional depth to be the heroine of any future installments. Also with Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu.
Borderlands (PG-13) They took 15 years to make the popular video-game franchise into a movie, and they needed 16. Cate Blanchett stars as a flame-haired interplanetary bounty hunter who’s sent back to her home planet to recover the abducted teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) of a wealthy mogul, only to become caught up in a treasure hunt conducted by murderous rogues. The movie remains watchable with Blanchett doing her damnedest to elevate this junky sci-fi thriller, but the supporting characters make little impression and the action set pieces by director/co-writer Eli Roth never raise the pulse. Also with Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramírez, Florian Munteanu, Janina Gavankar, Gina Gershon, Haley Bennett, Bobby Lee, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Voice by Jack Black.
Coraline (PG) This animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s subtly terrifying 2002 novel is about a bored, frustrated 11-year-old girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) who discovers a secret world with cooler versions of her parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) who turn out to be monsters who want to sew buttons over her eyes. The stop-motion animation by Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) is just glorious in the film’s middle section, presenting Coraline and us with a fantasy world that’s just a little bit too shiny and perfect to be believable. The film could have been scarier, but it’s still intense stuff, with bounteous amounts of imagination, wit, and beauty to go with its amazing hand-crafted technique. Additional voices by Keith David, Ian McShane, Robert Bailey Jr., Dawn French, and Jennifer Saunders.
Cuckoo (R) Wow, this plot really spins off the rails. Hunter Schafer portrays a teenage girl who accompanies her family to the Bavarian Alps for the summer offseason. Everything about her body language says “leave me alone,” but nobody can take the hint. The movie starts out being about dealing with a crappy customer service job at the near-deserted hotel, then starts to hint that the protagonist may be severely mentally disturbed, and then writer-director Tilman Singer barrels off into an insane plot about eugenicists breeding a murderous human-cuckoo hybrid species. Schafer’s performance very nearly holds the movie together, but the way it flies apart makes for compelling viewing. Also with Dan Stevens, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Jan Bluthardt, Mila Lieu, Greta Fernández, Proschat Madani, Kalin Morrow, and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey.
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.
Dìdi (R) A precise sense of the time period helps this movie achieve an unusual power. Sean Wang’s drama stars Izaac Wang as a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy who comes of age in 2008, when communicating with friends means MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger rather than text messaging and Instagram. What the writing lacks in sharpness, it makes up for with honesty as our hero gradually realizes his friends are full of crap and falls in with a group of skateboarding kids and films their tricks. Joan Chen also gives an understated and brilliant performance as the boy’s overwhelmed mother who has to handle everything because the kids’ father is working his job in Taiwan. Also with Shirley Chen, Zhang Li Hua, Raul Dial, Aaron Chang, Mahaela Park, Joshua Hankerson, Chiron Cillia Denk, Sunil Maurillo, and Stephanie Hsu.
Double iSmart (NR) Boo, hiss! The sequel to the 2019 film iSmart Shankar brings back Ram Pothineni as the boorish small-time Hyderabad criminal who’s targeted by a terminally ill mob boss (Sanjay Dutt) who wishes to transfer his memories to the younger man to attain immortality, not knowing that iSmart hates the mob boss because the mobster killed his mother (Jhansi). The hero is a creep who’s somehow irresistible to smart and uninterested women, the cops are hopelessly inept at stopping anyone, and there’s a truly insulting subplot about an oversexed, pre-verbal Amazonian native (Ali) who gets loose in the city. The misogyny and racism here get blasted through the multiplex speakers at full volume. Also with Kavya Thapar, Sayaji Shinde, Bani J, Getup Srinu, and Makarand Deshpande.
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.
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.
It Ends With Us (PG-13) Blake Lively’s performance is the best thing about this too-cozy movie about cycles of abuse. She portrays a small-town Mainer who flees her abusive dad to set up a flower shop in Boston, only to repeat the cycle by falling in love with a neurosurgeon (Justin Baldoni) who hits her. Baldoni also doubles as the director here, and while he starts off well, he becomes bogged down as he tries to toggle between the present day and flashbacks to the teenage protagonist (Isabela Ferrer) and her first love (Alex Neustaedter). Based on Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, this movie takes forever to get to the subject and then eagerly waves a magic wand to make everyone into some endlessly forgiving saint. Hate to say this, but a movie about domestic abuse really needs to be harder-hitting. Also with Jenny Slate, Brandon Sklenar, Hasan Minhaj, Amy Morton, Robert Clohessy, Robyn Lively, and Kevin McKidd.
Khel Khel Mein (NR) A remake of the 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers, this Indian film is about a group of friends who unveil secrets about one another during a game night at someone’s house. Starring Akshay Kumar, Ammy Virk, Vaani Kapoor, Taapsee Pannu, Pragya Jaiswal, Aditya Seal, Gaurav Manwani, and Fardeen Khan.
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.
My Penguin Friend (PG) Based on a true story, this drama stars Jean Reno as a bereaved Chilean fisherman who determines to save a penguin caught in an oil spill. Also with Adriana Barraza, Rochi Hernández, Nicolás Fracella, Alexia Moyano, Pedro Urizzi, and Pedro Caetano.
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.
Rob Peace (R) Chiwetel Ejiofor directs and co-stars in this biographical film about a young man (Jay Will) who turns to dealing drugs to help his family pay for emergency medical treatment. Also with Mary J. Blige, Camilla Cabello, Curt Morlaye, Caleb Eberhardt, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham, and Gbenga Akinnagbe.
Ryan’s World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure (PG) Ryan Kaji stars in this kids’ movie as a boy who has to save his twin sisters (Emma and Kate Kaji) after they’re sucked into a comic-book alternate universe. Also with Jack Reid, Scott Whyte, and Albie Hecht.
Skincare (R) The real-life case of Donna DaLuise becomes this crime thriller that seems like it should be better than it is. Elizabeth Banks portrays a Hollywood beautician in 2013 who keeps celebrities’ faces looking young and fresh. When another facialist (Luis Gerardo Méndez) opens his own shop in the same shopping center as her salon, she becomes convinced that he’s behind a series of anonymous threats and online harassment that’s coming to her. Director/co-writer Austin Peters convincingly replicates the vibe of the industries and professionals who service Hollywood’s elite, but even though he has taken myriad liberties with the real-life story, it feels like he could have gone even further satirizing Tinseltown and the insecure hustlers who populate its margins. Also with Lewis Pullman, Michael Jaé Rodriguez, Julie Chang, Ella Balinska, Erik Palladino, Wendie Malick, and Nathan Fillion.
Stree 2 (NR) Yet more proof that Indian horror movies are incompatible with Western tastes. After exorcising the demon from the original movie, the hero (Rajkummar Rao) of this sequel has to bring her back in order to stop the evil spirit who is abducting women from his village. There’s an interesting undercurrent here with the victims being all modern women who want to leave for the big city and the demon being a female avenger against male predators, but the scares simply don’t work for audiences brought up on Hollywood fare, and the attempts at comedy are truly groan-worthy. I will say this: The visual of the heroes fleeing down a country road on motorcycles pursued by a flaming severed head is pretty metal. Also with Shraddha Kapoor, Pankaj Tripathi, Aparshakti Khurana, Abhishek Banerjee, Atul Srivastava, Anya Singh, Tamannaah Bhatia, Varun Dhawan, and Akshay Kumar.
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.
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.
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
Consumed (NR) Devon Sawa and Courtney Halverson star in this horror film as a couple who battle a skin-eating monster in the wilderness. Also with Mark Famiglietti. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Deliverance (R) Lee Daniels’ horror film is about a family who discovers that their house may be a portal to Hell. Starring Mo’Nique, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Anthony B. Jenkins, Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, Omar Epps, and Glenn Close.
The King Tide (NR) This thriller is about an island plunged into civil war after a child (Alix West Lefler) with mystical powers washes up on the shore. Also with Frances Fisher, Clayne Crawford, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Aden Young, and Michael Greyeyes.
