OPENING
Alanaati Ramachandrudu (NR) Krishna Vansi stars in this Indian romantic comedy as a man who tells a lie to win a woman (Mokksha) who is more outgoing than himself. Also with Brahmaji, Venkatesh Kakumanu, Sivannarayana, and Keshav Deepak. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha (NR) This Indian romantic thriller stars Ajay Devgn as a man who seeks out his ex-wife (Tabu) after being released from a 20-year prison sentence. Also with Jimmy Sheirgill, Sayaji Shinde, Shantanu Maheshwari, and Saiee Manjrekar. (Opens Friday)
Boat (NR) This Indian thriller is about a group of shipwrecked passengers who must survive after their boat is bombed. Starring Yogi Babu, Gouri Kishan, M.S. Bhaskar, Sha Ra, and Jesse Fox Allen. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Coup! (NR) Peter Sarsgaard stars in this comedy as a 1910s cook who leads the servants in an uprising against the rich man (Billy Magnussen) who employs them. Also with Sarah Gadon, Skye P. Marshall, Faran Tahir, Kristine Nielsen, and Fisher Stevens. (Opens Friday)
Daaru Na Peenda Hove (NR) This Indian comedy stars Amrinder Gill as a bachelor who’s forced to change his ways when he has to take care of a little girl. Also with Zafri Khan, Sohaila Kaur, and Pukhraj Sandhu. (Opens Friday at Cinemark North East Mall)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
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. (Opens Friday)
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) Adapted from Crockett Johnson’s children’s book, this movie stars Zachary Levi as a grown-up Harold who draws himself into our reality. Also with Zooey Deschanel, Lil Rel Howery, Jemaine Clement, Benjamin Bottani, Tanya Reynolds, and Pete Gardner. Narrated by Alfred Molina. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
A Place Called Silence (NR) This Chinese thriller stars Wang Shengdi as a mute, bullied schoolgirl whose disappearance sparks a high-profile investigation. Also with Janine Chang, Wang Chuanjun, Wu Kangren, Ivy Yin, Chi Liang-Chu, and Tou Chung-Hua. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
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. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Trap (PG-13) M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie stars Josh Hartnett as a serial killer who discovers that the pop concert he’s attending is a trap by law enforcement intended to catch him. Also with Alison Pill, Kid Cudi, Hayley Mills, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka, and Marcia Bennett. (Opens Friday)
Ulajh (NR) Janhvi Kapoor stars in this Indian thriller as a government agent dealing with a threat to national security while she’s posted to London. Also with Roshan Mathew, Gulshan Devaiah, Adil Hussain, Chang Meiyang, and Rajendra Gupta. (Opens Friday)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
