OPENING
Don’t Turn Out the Lights (R) Andy Fickman (She’s the Man) writes and directs this horror film about a group of friends who must fight for their lives while traveling to a music festival. Starring Jarrett Austin Brown, John Bucy, Bella DeLong, Jasper Cole, and Crystal Lake Evans. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
GOAT (NR) This Indian thriller stars Joseph Vijay as a police hostage negotiator forced to reckon with his past. Also with Prabhu Deva, Prashanth, Sneha, Jayaram, and Yogi Babu. (Opens Friday)
Great Absence (NR) This Japanese drama stars Tatsuya Fuji as a father trying to re-connect with his long-estranged son. Also with Mirai Moriyama, Yoko Maki, and Hideko Hara. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
His Three Daughters (R) The latest film by Azazel Jacobs (French Exit) stars Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen as estranged sisters who have to reunite to care for their ailing father (Jay O. Sanders). Also with Jovan Adepo. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Honest Candidate (NR) This Mexican political satire stars Adrian Uribe as a presidential candidate who’s cursed to only tell the truth just before the country’s elections. Also with Teresa Ruiz, Coral de la Vega, Tiaré Scanda, Mariana Seoane, Daniel Tovar, and Luisa Huertas. (Opens Friday)
I’ll Be Right There (NR) Edie Falco stars in this comedy as a woman with a compulsive need to take care of everyone in her life. Also with Bradley Whitford, Charlie Tahan, Kayli Carter, Michael Beach, Jeannie Berlin, Sepideh Moafi, and Michael Rapaport. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Let Them Breathe: City on the Ocean (NR) Candice Rogers’ animated film is about a boy separated from his family during an apocalyptic event. Voices by Yumiko Daniel, Boris Jumper, and Candice Rogers. (Opens Friday at Cinépolis Euless)
A New York Story (NR) Fiona Robert writes, directs, and stars in this comedy as a young woman whose social clique threatens to ostracize her over her romantic choices. Also with Sophie Robert, Paul Karmiryan, Richard Ellis, Logan Miller, Noelle Miller, Carolyn Farina, and Whit Stillman. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Red Rooms (NR) This Canadian thriller stars Juliette Gariépy as a fashion model who becomes increasingly obsessed with a serial killer’s murder trial. Also with Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, and Guy Thauvette. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Thicket (R) Peter Dinklage stars in this Western as a bounty hunter who’s hired to rescue a girl from a killer (Juliette Lewis). Also with Levon Hawke, Esme Creed-Miles, Leslie Grace, Macon Blair, David Midthunder, Gbenga Akinnagbe, James Hetfield, Arliss Howard, and Ned Dennehy. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
35 Chinna Katha Kaadu (NR) Nivetha Thomas stars in this Indian drama as a mother whose young son fails to earn passing marks at school. Also with Gautami, Priyadarshi Pulikonda, Bhagyaraj, Vishwadev Rachakonda, and Krishna Teja. (Opens Friday)
Tokyo Cowboy (PG) This drama stars Arata Iura as a Japanese business executive who must travel to a cattle ranch in Montana for his job. Also with Robin Weigert, Ayako Fujitani, Goya Robles, Gabriel Clark, Stephanie Hernandez, and Jun Kunimura. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Upstream (NR) This Chinese drama is about a man (Xu Zheng) who must show resilience after suffering a series of misfortunes. Also with Lawrence Wang, Xin Zhilei, Jia Bing, Feng Bing, and Ding Yong-Dai. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
NOW PLAYING
AfrAId (PG-13) This isn’t M3GAN, or even Unfriended. Chris Weitz’s horror film stars John Cho and Katherine Waterston as a married couple and parents of three who install a new AI assistant in their house and then worry that it’s taking over their family. The horror scares aren’t convincing, but that would matter less if Weitz had anything trenchant to say about artificial intelligence. This is sadly not the case, and all the characters come off as idiots who act stupidly because the plot requires them to do so. This should have gone straight to streaming instead of polluting our multiplexes in the doldrums of summer. Also with Havana Rose Liu, Riki Lindhome, Lukita Maxwell, Isaac Bae, Ashley Romans, Bennett Curran, Wyatt Lindner, Keith Carradine, and David Dastmalchian.
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.
Blink Twice (R) The scariest villain in this year’s movies is here, the more terrifying for being so ordinary. Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat play waitresses who are invited by a tech billionaire (Channing Tatum) to his private island. The place seems like paradise until someone disappears and all the other guests swear that she was never there. Zoë Kravitz makes her directing debut and scatters clues well throughout the early going to lay the groundwork for the M. Night Shyamalan-like plot twist. Tatum is the wrong actor to portray someone who’s hiding sinister underneath his charm, but that’s a minor flaw in the face of the twist. This is a rare horror film that becomes more horrifying once you know everything that’s going on, and it’s the sort of evil that will make you want to curl up in a ball. Also with Christian Slater, Adria Arjona, Haley Joel Osment, Simon Rex, Levon Hawke, Liz Caribel, Trew Mullen, María Elena Olivares, Cris Costa, Kyle MacLachlan, and Geena Davis.
City of Dreams (R) This movie so wants to be the defining epic about the border crisis, and it is so not. Ari Lopez portrays a near-mute Mexican boy who’s lured north of the border with the promise of a soccer camp in L.A. and then forced to work as a sweatshop laborer. Writer-director Mohit Ramchandani executes some nifty extended tracking shots in his first feature filmmaking effort, but that matters little when the storytelling is so crude and sadistic, subjecting the protagonist to torture after torture to bring home the point that undocumented immigrants are exploited the hell out of. He has no faith in the audience’s intelligence or sensitivity, so his movie is something only callous blockheads are going to enjoy. Also with Jason Patric, Paulina Gaitan, Renata Vaca, Samm Levine, Andrés Delgado, Francisco Denis, Adina Eady, Alfredo Castro, and Diego Calva.
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.
The Crow (R) This sure feels like something that they dug up after it was dead for 30 years. Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) directs this energy-free adaptation of James O’Barr’s comic series about a man (Bill Skarsgård) who’s murdered along with his girlfriend (FKA twigs) and is given a chance to return from the dead to take revenge on their killers. Sanders gives us plenty of rain-soaked nighttime streets, but the two lead actors don’t have the chemistry needed to carry this. Danny Huston is phlegmatic as the Luciferian mob boss at the center of the evil plot, and the movie takes forever to get to the plot that we already know about. The climactic fight sequence in an opera house ignores how the acoustics of opera houses work, too. The original film formed part of a tradition of Goth-y, doom-laden thrillers with The Matrix and the Batman films of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan. This is just a dead end. Also with Josette Simon, Sami Bouajila, Laura Birn, Jordan Bolger, David Bowles, Isabella Wei, and Sebastian Orozco.
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 Forge (PG) While other Christian movies are getting better, the ones by the Kendrick brothers are getting worse. Aspen Kennedy plays a young Black man in Charlotte who goes to work for a fitness equipment manufacturer and winds up learning lessons about manhood and Jesus Christ from the company’s CEO (Cameron Arnett). The lack of pace and dramatic tension in this thing makes you wonder whether the filmmakers have ever seen a movie before, and the acting is too embarrassing even to trash in this space. Whatever lessons this movie is trying to teach about what makes a boy into a man, they get lost amid this movie’s amateur theatrics. Also with Priscilla C. Shirer, Selah Avery, T.C. Stallings, Ben VanderMey, Tommy Woodward, and Karen Abercrombie.
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.
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.
1992 (R) The plot of this action-thriller is pretty decent, but the execution turns it bad when it could have been terrific. Tyrese Gibson stars as an ex-convict who is trying to raise his teenage son (Christopher A’mmanuel) when the L.A. riots happen. He takes his son to the metalworks factory where he works in maintenance, just at the same time as a group of thieves try to take advantage of the chaos to rob the factory of $10 million worth in platinum bullion. It is more than a workable premise, but director Ariel Vromen (The Ice Man) takes this at a leaden pace, and Tyrese is a wooden presence in the lead. At 96 minutes, this movie still feels like it lasts an eternity. Also with Scott Eastwood, Clé Bennett, Dylan Arnold, Michael Beasley, Ori Pfeffer, Oleg Taktarov, and the late Ray Liotta.
Reagan (PG-13) Dennis Quaid stars in this biography of the former movie star-turned-U.S. president. Also with Penelope Ann Miller, Mena Suvari, C. Thomas Howell, Justin Chatwin, Amanda Righetti, Kevin Dillon, Xander Berkeley, Lesley-Anne Down, Jennifer O’Neill, Robert Davi, Mark Moses, Nick Searcy, Kevin Sorbo, and Jon Voight.
Saripodhaa Sanivaaram (NR) Also titled Surya’s Saturday, this Indian action thriller stars Nani as a man who seeks vigilante justice against a police inspector (S.J. Suryah) who brutalizes civilians for fun. Also with Priyanka Mohan, Abhirami, Aditi Balan, P. Sai Kumar, Murali Sharma, Ajay Ghosh, Subhaleka Sudhakar, and Harsha Vardhan.
Slingshot (R) Casey Affleck stars in this science-fiction thriller about an astronaut trying to stay sane aboard a mission to one of Saturn’s moons. Also with Laurence Fishburne, David Morrissey, Tomer Capone, and Emily Beecham.
Strange Darling (R) Clever, but shallow. JT Mollner’s horror movie tells its story out of sequence Pulp Fiction-style in order to generate suspense and lead us down false alleys. The film initially appears to be about a woman (Willa Fitzgerald) who’s fleeing a serial killer (Kyle Gallner), but the line between victim and predator becomes blurry real fast as the backstory is filled in. It all works the way it’s supposed to, but the final result comes to considerably less than the hype around the movie promises. Actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi gives the movie the grainy look of a 1970s exploitation film even though the story takes place in the present day. That and the score by Z Berg are the best things here. Also with Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey, Steven Michael Quezada, Madisen Beaty, Bianca A. Santos, and Giovanni Ribisi. Narrated by Jason Patric.
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.
Take My Hand (NR) Radha Mitchell stars as an Australian expat who returns to the country of her birth after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. Also with Adam Demos, Bart Edwards, Meg Fraser, Natalie Bassingthwaighte, and Darren Gilshenan.
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.
Vaazhai (NR) This Tamil-language drama is about a 12-year-old boy who sees a plantain tree become central to the village’s life. Starring Dhivya Dhuraisamy, Kalaiyarasan, Nikhila Vimal, and Priyanka Nair.
You Gotta Believe (PG) The filmmaking team of Ty Roberts and Lane Garrison (12 Mighty Orphans) reunites for this baseball drama about the real-life Texas team that made the final of the Little League World Series. Starring Luke Wilson, Molly Parker, Sarah Gadon, Lew Temple, Patrick Renna, and Greg Kinnear.
DALLAS EXCLUSIVES
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.
Lost in the Shuffle (NR) Jon Ornoy’s documentary profiles magician Shawn Farquhar.
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.
