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The Fantastic Four: First Steps (PG-13) This retro reboot of the Marvel superhero series stars Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the astronauts who acquire superpowers in the 1960s. Also with Natasha Lyonne, Paul Walter Hauser, Ralph Ineson, Sarah Niles, and Julia Garner. (Opens Friday)
The Home (R) Pete Davidson stars in this horror film as a janitor who discovers sinister secrets at the nursing home where he’s newly employed. Also with Bruce Altman, Ethan Phillips, Marilee Talkington, Linder Sutton, and John Glover. (Opens Friday)
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Ballerina (R) Ana de Armas does a star turn in this spinoff from the John Wick series as a trained assassin who goes rogue when she sees a chance to avenge herself on the people who killed her father when she was a child. In doing so, she incurs the wrath of the Director (Anjelica Huston), who sends John himself (Keanu Reeves) to stop her. The series still sucks at world-building, and director Len Wiseman tries to turn this into another installment of his Underworld series by filming lots of raves with strobe lights popping. The action sequences remain strong as ever, though, with one fight sequence having our ballerina trying to detonate grenades in close quarters without hurting herself and a flamethrower duel that’s an exercise in wretched excess. De Armas’ feminine grace injects some freshness into the series. Also with Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, Victoria Comte, David Castañeda, Waris Ahluwalia, Juliet Doherty, Ian McShane, and the late Lance Reddick.
Eddington (R) Ari Aster appears to have gone somewhat deranged from the COVID pandemic. His satirical Western stars Joaquin Phoenix as a New Mexico sheriff who clashes with his small town’s mayor (Pedro Pascal) over masking policy and the George Floyd protests. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff, too, including white supremacists killing cops while wearing Black Lives Matter gear, Native American activists from the reservation bordering the town, and a Christian cult leader (Austin Butler) who definitely thinks that the Epstein report is being buried. Aster has his finger on the pulse of a divided America, but he seems unsure of what he wants to say about it — this movie suffers from the same bloat as his previous post-pandemic film Beau Is Afraid. This is an excellent 90-minute movie that’s unfortunately buried in a 148-minute running time. Also with Emma Stone, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Cameron Mann, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Amélie Hoeferle, Luke Grimes, William Belleau, and Clifton Collins Jr.
F1: The Movie (PG-13) The best auto-racing film ever made, especially if you see it in a theater with good speakers. Director Joseph Kosinski made you feel the speed and torque of the fighter planes in Top Gun: Maverick, and he uses those same skills to tell the story of a washed-up Formula One racer (Brad Pitt) who’s given one last shot to compete at that level by a desperate former racing teammate (Javier Bardem). The roar of the race cars is so intense that you may walk out exhausted from all the sound energy hitting your body. The subplots about our grizzled veteran mentoring a cocky young teammate (Damson Idris) and romancing the team’s technical director (Kerry Condon) don’t pull their weight, but the script delves deep into racing strategy, and the sound engineering and the cameras mounted on vehicles will make you feel like you’re there on race day. Also with Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Luciano Bacheta, Sarah Niles, Will Merrick, Callie Cooke, Samson Kayo, and Shea Whigham.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (R) You can’t make me scared of a killer who dresses like the Gorton’s fisherman. I just can’t do it. For this sequel to the 1990s horror franchise, a new group of young people (Chase Sui Wonders, Madelyn Cline, Jonah Hauer-King, Sarah Pidgeon, and Tyriq Withers) inadvertently causes a fatal car accident outside the North Carolina port town. When they fail to own up to it, the slasher in the slicker starts picking them off one by one, and they have to consult the survivors of the previous attacks (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr.) for advice. Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (Do Revenge) takes over this series, but nothing works — not the murder scenes, not the attempts to incorporate comedy into the film, not the final solution, not the callbacks to the previous movies, and not even the final girl’s bisexuality. The failure here is total. Also with Billy Campbell, Austin Nichols, Gabbriette Bechtel, Joshua Orpin, Brandy Norwood, and Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Jurassic World: Rebirth (PG-13) More like stillbirth, actually. The series has a new director and a bunch of new stars, and yet it’s still tedious enough to make the last three movies seem like roller-coaster rides by comparison. Scarlett Johansson plays a private contractor who helps get a team of scientists into a dinosaur-populated island for biological samples that could be turned into life-saving medications, only to run into a family stranded there after their boat is sunk by other dinosaurs. Director Gareth Edwards (The Creator) makes the dinosaurs look real enough, but neither the characters nor the action set pieces are memorable in any way. Also with Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Manuel García-Rulfo, David Iacono, Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda, Bechir Sylvain, Niamh Finlay, Ed Skrein, and Rupert Friend.
Karate Kid: Legends (PG-13) The latest young talent to hit the series is Ben Wang as a teenage Beijing kung fu student who’s uprooted to New York City. The main plot should have been the one where he uses his skills to train the pizzeria owner down the block (Joshua Jackson) to come out of retirement as a prizefighter, but the film barely expends any effort transitioning to another plot where the boy has to learn from both Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) and Daniel-san (Ralph Macchio) to defend himself from karatekas in a citywide martial-arts tournament. The movie’s attempt to find a unified field theory for martial arts may not work, but it’s still preferable to the xenophobia of the Ip Man series, and Wang (from TV’s American Born Chinese) has charisma to burn. He could carry his own installment of the series, if he was given a better story to work with. Also with Ming-Na Wen, Sadie Stanley, Wyatt Oleff, Aramis Knight, Ge Yankei, Marco Zhang, and William Zabka.
M3GAN 2.0 (PG-13) Too much, way too much. Allison Williams returns in this sequel to the 2023 hit as the inventor who must resurrect her killer robot doll (Amie Donald, with voice by Jenna Davis) to stop a more powerful killer robot (Ivanna Sakhno) who’s gone rogue after being developed by the U.S. government. Writer-director Gerard Johnstone has so many ideas about AI rising up to kill us that his sequel comes out overstuffed, overambitious, and overextended, with satire of libertarian billionaires and clueless feds jostling side by side with M3GAN’s transition to hero and emotional support for the inventor’s niece (Violet McGraw). It all leads to vast expanses of clotted exposition and sentimental crap about family. The Ukrainian newcomer Sakhno makes a good doll-like enemy, but this is well below the original’s concentrated power. Also with Brian Jordan Alvarez, Jen van Epps, Aristotle Athari, Timm Sharp, and Jemaine Clement.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (PG-13) This may not be Tom Cruise’s last outing as Ethan Hunt, but it does feel like a farewell to a franchise’s defining star. He has to reunite with his team members to capture the AI currently destroying the world. The result is unfortunately quite a disjointed movie in which Ethan appears to traverse the globe at the speed of light while awkward montages take in all the stars who have graced this series through the decades. The movie’s nostalgia kick does bring back Rolf Saxon as the CIA tech guy whom we haven’t seen since Ethan robbed his office in the original movie, and the stunts feature Cruise hanging off the wing of a biplane as well as a sequence in a sunken submarine that’s excellent suspense. It’s a better goodbye than Jason Bourne got. Also with Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Janet McTeer, Tramell Tillman, Mark Gatiss, Greg Tarzan Davis, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Katy O’Brian, Cary Elwes, and Angela Bassett.
Superman (PG-13) The best Superman movie from this century. David Corenswet takes over the title role as Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) leads a social-media crusade to have Superman treated as an illegal alien. Luthor is reimagined for our time as a libertarian billionaire who feels small and insignificant against the Man of Steel’s superpowers, and a highly dysfunctional trio of superheroes calling themselves the Justice Gang (Nathan Fillion, Edi Gathegi, and Isabela Merced) makes a funny foil to Superman. Writer-director James Gunn doesn’t make the most memorable action set pieces here, but he is willing to use fight sequences in an unorthodox way, like when Clark Kent and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) have an earnest conversation about their relationship while the Justice Gang silently battles a kaiju in the distance. The surprising subplots and the grounding in current events makes this welcome. Also with Skylar Gisondo, Wendell Pierce, Beck Bennett, María Gabriela de Faría, Sara Sampaio, Zlatko Buric, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Mikaela Hoover, Sean Gunn, Frank Grillo, Anthony Carrigan, Alan Tudyk, Michael Rooker, Pom Klementieff, Angela Sarafyan, Bradley Cooper, and uncredited cameos by Milly Alcock and John Cena.
28 Years Later (R) The third installment of the series is a memorial to those who have died from the plague in real life, which turns out to be not quite enough to carry it. Alfie Williams portrays a 12-year-old boy growing up on an island off Britain’s coast where the people have remained uninfected, but when he hears about a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who has survived on the big island, he takes his mother (Jodie Comer) to him to find out why she’s getting unexplained headaches and nosebleeds. The young Williams’ performance is good enough to make this work as a coming-of-age story. I just wish it worked better as a zombie movie or as a setup for the next film in the series. This movie reunites director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, and it may be time for a fresh set of eyes on this series. Also with Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Edvin Ryding, Stella Gonet, Chi Lewis-Parry, and Jack O’Connell.
