OPENING
Ada: My Mother the Architect (NR) Yael Melamede’s documentary profiles her mother, Ada Karmi-Melamede. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
A Breed Apart (R) Grace Caroline Currey stars in this horror film as an influencer whose trip to a private island turns into a deadly survival game. Also with Hayden Panettiere, Virginia Gardner, Troy Gentile, Zak Steiner, and Riele Downs. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Caught by the Tides (NR) The latest film by Jia Zhangke (Ash Is Purest White) stars Zhao Tao as a woman whose memories play out in musical fragments. Also with Li Zhubin, Zhou You, Lan Zhou, Hu Maotao, and Pan Jianlin. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
A Desert (NR) Joshua Erkman’s horror film stars David Yow as a photographer whose travels in the desert take a bad turn. Also with Kai Lennox, Sarah Lind, Zachary Ray Sherman, Ashley Smith, and Rob Zabrecky. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Desert Dawn (R) Kellan Lutz and Cam Gigandet star in this Western as a sheriff and his deputy who investigate a murder in their small town. Also with Chad Michael Collins, Texas Battle, Mike Wolfe, Mike Ferguson, Niko Foster, Helena Haro, Chris Maher, and William Christopher Watson. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Devil’s Double Next Level (NR) Also called DD Next Level, this Indian horror-comedy stars Santhanam, Geethika Tiwary, Selvaraghavan, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Nizhalgal Ravi, Kasthuri Shankar, Redin Kingsley, Rajendran, and Lollu Sabha Maaran. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Final Destination: Bloodlines (R) Brec Bassinger stars in the latest installment of the horror franchise as a college student trying to break the death curse on her family. Also with Richard Harmon, April Telek, Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Rya Kihlstedt, Anna Lore, Gabrielle Rose, and Tony Todd. (Opens Friday)
Friendship (R) Feels like Tim Robinson unfiltered, for better or worse. He stars in this comedy as a suburban dad whose life starts to fall apart when he befriends his new neighbor down the street (Paul Rudd), only for the neighbor to unfriend him because he’s a creepy weirdo. Writer-director Andrew DeYoung mostly goes for cringe rather than belly laughs, so your enjoyment of this will depend on your particular taste. Robinson is fantastic as a poorly socialized corporate consultant whose attempts to infiltrate the neighbor’s circle of male friends only succeeds in making them uncomfortable, and Rudd complements him as a guy who’s also a loser but is better at hiding it. These characters probably deserved a movie that had a few more ideas about them. Also with Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, Whitmer Thomas, Daniel London, Jacob Ming-Trent, Josh Segarra, Meredith Garretson, Omar Torres, and Billy Bryk. (Opens Friday at Alamo Drafthouse Denton)
Hurry Up Tomorrow (R) Trey Edward Shults’ latest film stars The Weeknd as an insomniac music star who starts to lose track of reality. Also with Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan. (Opens Friday)
Jaar (NR) This Nepalese film is about a 19th-century husband (Saugat Malla) who seeks to legally murder the man (Anoop Bikram Shahi) who had sex with his wife. Also with Geetanjali Thapa. (Opens Friday at Cinemark North East Mall)
Love God’s Will (NR) Cimela Kidonaki’s documentary profiles a seminary student who was diagnosed with cancer before his ordination as a priest. (Opens Friday at EVO Entertainment Southlake)
Maaman (NR) This Tamil-language family film stars Soori, Aishwarya Lekshmi, Rajkiran, Swasika, Bala Saravanan, Viji Chandrasekhar, and Geetha Kailasam. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Queens of Drama (NR) This French musical stars Louiza Aura as a pop singer whose career spirals during a destructive 50-year relationship with a rival (Gio Ventura). Also with Alma Jodorowsky, Nana Benamer, Dustin Muchuvitz, Raya Martigny, Thomas Poitevin, and Asia Argento. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
The Ruse (R) Stevan Mena’s horror film stars Madelyn Dundon as an in-home caregiver stranded at a remote house with her elderly patient (Veronica Cartwright). Also with Michael Steger, Drew Moerlein, T.C. Carter, and Bill Sorice. (Opens Friday)
Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted (NR) This documentary profiles the cult music star and his home, which he has turned into a haven for fellow artists. Also with Moogstar, Guitar Shorty, Tom Kenny, Jenny Lewis, John Prine, Mike Judge, and Johnny Knoxville. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Things Like This (NR) Max Talisman writes, directs, and stars in this gay romance as a man who falls in love with another man who has the same name (Joey Pollari). Also with Charlie Tahan, Jackie Cruz, Margaret Berkowitz, Cara Buono, and Eric Roberts. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
23: Iravai Moodu (NR) This Indian historical drama about the real-life series of terrorist attacks that hit the country in the 1990s stars Thagubothu Ramesh, Pawon Ramesh, Praneeth, Tanmayee, and Jhansi. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Unko Sweater (NR) This Nepalese comedy stars Maotse Gurung, Bipin Karki, Miruna Magar, Sunil Pokharel, and Wilson Bikram Rai. (Opens Friday)
Vulcanizadora (NR) Joel Potrykus writes, directs, and stars in this drama as one of two friends taking a dangerous trek through a Michigan forest. Also with Joshua Burge, Melissa Blanchard, and Jaz Edwards. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
NOW PLAYING
The Accountant 2 (R) Ben Affleck reprises his role as an autistic accountant who launders money for dictators and terrorists. In this sequel, he has to team up with his estranged brother (Jon Bernthal) and a Treasury Department official (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) to solve the murder of his former boss (J.K. Simmons). It’s not that the action sequences are dull, it’s that the character bits in between are also dull. The comedy doesn’t work, the main character can’t evolve, and the plot about human trafficking has been done to death. Most of the story takes place in Los Angeles, but the bad guys do travel to Fort Worth to kill a witness. Also with Daniella Pineda, Robert Morgan, Grant Harvey, Alberto Manquero, Michael Tourek, and Yael Ocasio.
The Amateur (PG-13) Rami Malek is miscast in this action-thriller, and that’s sort of the point. He stars as a CIA intelligence analyst who seeks revenge after his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered in a terrorist attack. Based on Robert Littell’s novel (which got made into a Hollywood spy thriller back in 1981), the story specifically takes as its protagonist a man who can’t look a bad guy in the eye and then pull the trigger on him. Even though the action hero is highly intelligent and highly motivated, the movie knows that it takes more than that to make a viable operative. Unfortunately, the movie around our unconventional hero is too conventional, and his eluding of his own agents in European backwaters isn’t handled creatively enough. Also with Laurence Fishburne, Julianne Nicholson, Holt McCallany, Danny Sapani, Adrian Martinez, Evan Milton, Barbara Probst, Marc Rissmann, Jon Bernthal, and Michael Stuhlbarg.
The Ancestral Home (NR) Phuong My Chi stars in this Vietnamese supernatural comedy as a social-media influencer who encounters her late brother’s ghost (Huynh Lap) while visiting her family’s home. Also with Hanh Thuy, Dao Anh Tuan, Huynh Dong, Kieu Linh, Le Nam, Jayvee Mai The Hiep, and Puka.
Clown in a Cornfield (R) Katie Douglas from Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia makes a lively slasher-flick final girl in this horror movie based on Adam Cesare’s novel. She portrays a Philadelphia native who moves to a Missouri small town after a family tragedy, only to find multiple serial killers dressed as the same clown butchering all her new teenage friends. Director Eli Craig (Tucker & Dale vs. Evil) could have done better with the look of the film and with the murders, but the identity of the killers is a pretty funny joke, and there’s a gay subplot in here that you wouldn’t ordinarily find in a slasher flick. Douglas holds the thing together as someone who’s hurt and sarcastic and trying to adapt to her new surroundings. Also with Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Alexandre Martin Deakin, Bradley Sawatzky, Catherine Wreford, Kevin Durand, and Will Sasso.
Fight or Flight (R) Premise 10, Execution 3. Josh Hartnett stars in this action-comedy as an alcoholic ex-Secret Service agent who’s employed to arrest some superhacker on a Bangkok-to-Los Angeles flight. The hitches are that he has no idea what the fugitive looks like, and that most of the other passengers on the flight are contract killers hunting the same person. First-time film director James Madigan wants to capture the craziness of this setup, but only infrequently gets there, even though the protagonist gets high on toad venom and starts cutting up bad guys with a chainsaw. This lands somewhere between Bullet Train and Snakes on a Plane, and it’s much closer to the latter than the former. Also with Katee Sackhoff, Charithra Chandan, Julian Kostov, JuJu Chan Szeto, Danny Ashok, Hughie O’Donnell, Willem van der Vegt, Jyuddah Jaymes, Sanjeev Kohli, Declan Baxter, Sarah Lam, and Marko Zaror.
The King of Kings (PG) Leaden in both visual and narrative terms, this animated Christian film has the story of Jesus Christ (voiced by Oscar Isaac) being narrated by Charles Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) for some reason. Neither the telling of the Passion story nor the framing story in Victorian England are interesting in itself, and the intersections of the two don’t work. The opportunities for great visuals from the animation are there, but the filmmakers don’t take any of them. It’s hard to tell what the purpose of all this is. Painters and other visual artists have done much better at making Christian art. Additional voices by Uma Thurman, Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan, Jim Cummings, Fred Tatasciore, Roman Griffin Davis, and Forest Whitaker.
A Minecraft Movie (PG) The charm that has won the video game millions of followers around the world is little in evidence in this film version. Jack Black stars as the ruler of the Overworld, who has to prevent the queen of the Nether (voiced by Rachel House) from taking over, with the help of a group of visitors from Idaho (Jason Momoa, Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Hansen) who have accidentally been pulled into the Minecraft world. Director Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) finds a nice comic groove in Idaho, but once everybody goes into the game, his sense of pacing and timing deserts him. The writers frantically move these characters back and forth to make up for the fact that the game famously has no story, and the actors scream their lines. Making an intellectual property into a good movie requires a filmmaker with peculiar talents, and this movie doesn’t find one. Also with Jennifer Coolidge, Bret McKenzie, Matt Berry, Jemaine Clement, and an uncredited Kate McKinnon.
Raid 2 (NR) Not a remake of the Indonesian martial-arts film, this Indian crime thriller stars Ajay Devgn as a revenue officer tracking white-collar crime. Also with Riteish Deshmukh, Vaani Kapoor, Rajat Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Supriya Pathak, Tamannaah Bhatia, Jacqueline Fernandez, and Yo Yo Honey Singh.
Shadow Force (R) Writer-director Joe Carnahan can’t seem to settle on what kind of action film this is supposed to be. Kerry Washington and Omar Sy portray a couple who are separated and in hiding because they were private soldiers who broke the rules by falling in love and having a son (Jahleel Kamara). When their comrades come after them, they have to reunite to protect him. Even if the comic interludes were better integrated with the action, Carnahan still doesn’t know how to be funny, and the plot that gets our main characters to this point is all over the place. Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph turns up as their best friend, but the role is something that a thousand other actresses could easily play. The action itself isn’t up to scratch, either. Also with Mark Strong, Ed Quinn, Marshall Cook, Natalia Reyes, Marvin Jones III, Jénel Stevens, and Method Man.
#Single (NR) This Telugu-language comedy stars Sree Vishnu as a bachelor who’s determined to stay single despite two women being in love with him. Also with Ketika Sharma, Ivana, VTV Ganesh, Kalpa Latha, and Vennela Kishore.
Sinners (R) Ryan Coogler’s foray into Jordan Peele territory is wild and wildly original, even when it doesn’t make sense. Michael B. Jordan plays identical twins who return from Chicago to their Mississippi hometown in the 1930s to open a blues joint with their cousin (Miles Caton) who happens to be an otherworldly musician. Jordan gives two bracing performances as brothers with different jobs and temperaments, the Mississippi town is more layered than we usually see in Hollywood movies, and there’s a great sequence with the blues musician delivering a song so powerful that it opens a rift in time and space as well as attracting vampires. Coogler winds up with a few too many ideas in his intellectual stew, but it frames Delta blues in a wholly unexpected way and emerges as a worthy vampire movie. What other movie can say that? Also with Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Li Jun Li, Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirke, Jayme Lawson, Saul Williams, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Peter Dreimanis, Omar Miller, Yao, Delroy Lindo, and Buddy Guy.
Subham (NR) This Indian horror-comedy is about three couples who are haunted by a supernatural force after one of them becomes obsessed with a reality TV show. Starring Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Shriya Kontham, Charan Peri, Shalini Kondepudi, Harshith Malgireddy, Shravani, Vamshidhar Goud, and Gavireddy Srinivas.
Thunderbolts* (PG-13) Several shades darker than your typical Marvel superhero movie, which is part of what distinguishes it from the pack. When the CIA director (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tries to take complete control of the U.S. government, a group of mercenaries in her employ (Florence Pugh, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan) band together to stop her. The villain’s secret weapon is a mentally ill drug addict (Lewis Pullman) who can trap people in their worst nightmares. The film is wobbly on the subject of toxic masculinity and occasionally plays like a derivative of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but it sometimes achieves a power of its own. Pugh delivers a precisely pitched performance in the lead, and Louis-Dreyfus makes a terrific foil to her as someone who hides her lust for power behind her precious wisecracks. The Marvel series is morphing into something new, which is better than repeating itself. Also with Geraldine Viswanathan, Olga Kurylenko, Chris Bauer, Violet McGraw, and Wendell Pierce.
Tourist Family (NR) This Telugu-language comedy is about a Sri Lankan family who pose as tourists in India to escape their country’s economic crisis. Starring M. Sasikumar, Simran, Mithun Jai Sankar, Kamalesh, Yogi Babu, Ramesh Thilak, Bagavathi Perumal, Elango Kumaravel, and M.S. Bhaskar.
Until Dawn (R) Pretty much everything goes wrong in this horror movie adapted from the video game of the same name. Ella Rubin stars as a young woman tracking the disappearance of her sister (Maia Mitchell) when she and her friends become stuck in a time loop where they relive the same night over and over in a ghost town, being killed off by different monsters each night. The setting of a town that’s inside a crater because of a coal mine cave-in is a golden opportunity for some great production design, but this cheap-ass film can’t pull it off. The video game’s undercurrent of guilt gets lost, as does its use of Native American wendigos, and the acting by much of the cast is just bad. Happy Death Day treated this concept with a lot more inventiveness and humor. Also with Michael Cimino, Odessa A’zion, Yoo Ji-young, Belmont Cameli, and Peter Stormare.
Warfare (R) Too focused for its own good, this war film sets out to change the way war is depicted in a movie, and fails. Set in 2006, the film is about a platoon of Navy SEALs in Iraq who become trapped in a house after the locals figure out where they are. This is based on a real-life incident lived through by Ray Mendoza, who co-directs the movie with Alex Garland (Civil War). The movie does some good work building anticipation as the Navy SEALs await the attack, but it’s so hellbent on removing anything extraneous to the action that it falls flat utterly as a piece of storytelling. The characters are interchangeable and the action itself doesn’t do anything that other war movies haven’t already accomplished. Starring Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Joseph Quinn, Alex Brockdorff, Aaron Mackenzie, Finn Bennett, Michael Gandolfini, and Charles Melton.
Watch the Skies (PG-13) Inez Dahl Torhaug stars in this Swedish drama as a troubled teenager who joins a UFO cult. Also with Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey, Eva Melander, Isabelle Kyed, Niklas Kvarnbo Jönsson, Håkan Ehn, Mathias Lithner, Oscar Töringe, and Joakim Sällquist.
Dallas Exclusives
Daydreamers (NR) This Vietnamese horror film is about a cluster of vampires living in seclusion to avoid detection. Starring Tran Ngoc Vang, Thuan Nguyen, Chi Pu, and Trinh Thao.
Sharp Corner (NR) Ben Foster stars in this drama as a homeowner who becomes obsessed with saving the lives of everyone who gets into car accidents on a dangerous section of road in front of his house. Also with Cobie Smulders, Gavin Drea, Jonathan Watton, Reid Price, Alexandra Castillo, Wayne Burns, Dan Lett, and Gita Miller.
Sherlock Holmes: Mare of the Night (NR) Les Best stars in this film as the great detective, who is haunted by a case he failed to solve. Also with Jonathan Cato Rich, Benjamin Regan, Taylor Ann King, Bryan Spellman, and Michelle Masker.
Stelios (NR) This Greek biographical drama stars Christos Mastoras as Stelios Kazantzidis, the singer who went from being a child refugee to music stardom. Also with Klelia Renesi, Asimenia Voulioti, Agoritsa Oikonomou, Dimitris Kapouranis, Anna Symeonidou, Giorgos Gallos, Yorgos Karamihos, Nikos Psarras, Diamantis Karanastasis, and Giorgos Giannopoulos.
Words of War (R) Maxine Peak stars in this biography of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist murdered for reporting on Vladimir Putin’s regime. Also with Jason Isaacs, Ben Miles, Ellie Bamber, Alec Newman, Harry Lawtey, Oliver Maltman, and Ciarán Hinds.
