OPENING
After All (NR) This drama stars Erika Christensen as a woman who returns to her hometown to care for her elderly mother (Penelope Ann Miller). Also with Kiara Muhammad, Zach Gilford, Sierra McCormick, Mike O’Malley, and David James Elliott. (Opens Friday)
The Astronaut (NR) Kate Mara stars in this science-fiction thriller as an astronaut who has possibly carried an alien organism back to Earth. Also with Laurence Fishburne, Gabriel Luna, Ivana Milicevic, and Macy Gray. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Ballad of a Small Player (R) Based on Lawrence Osborne’s novel, this thriller stars Colin Farrell as a professional gambler struggling to survive in Macau. Also with Fala Chen, Alex Jennings, Deanie Ip, Anthony Wong, and Tilda Swinton. (Opens Wednesday in Dallas)
Bison (NR) This Indian sports film stars Dhruv Vikram as a young man from a violent village who struggles to succeed as a professional kabaddi player. Also with Anupama Parameswaran, Lai, Pasupathy, Rajisha Vijayan, Hari Krishnan, and Azhagam Perumal. (Opens Friday)
Black Phone 2 (R) Mason Thames reprises his role from the 2021 original as the traumatized boy who’s haunted by the spirit of the murdered pedophile serial killer (Ethan Hawke). Also with Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, Miguel Mora, Anna Lore, and Demián Bichir. (Opens Friday)
Boss (NR) This Korean action-comedy is about three mobsters who vie to replace the outgoing mob boss (Lee Sung-min). Also with Jo Woo-jin, Jung Kyung-ho, Park Ji-hwan, Lee Kyu-hyung, Hwang Woo-seul-hye, Jung Yoo-jin, Oh Dal-su, and Jung Sang-hoon. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Chain Reactions (NR) Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary interviews horror filmmakers and authors about the impact of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Starring Stephen King, Patton Oswalt, Karyn Kusama, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and Takashi Miike. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Deemak (NR) This Pakistani horror film is about a family experiencing paranormal disturbances in their home. Starring Faysal Quraishi, Sonya Hussyn, Samina Peerzada, Bushra Ansari, Saman Ansari, and Jawed Sheikh. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Dude (NR) Pradeep Ranganathan stars in this Tamil-language romantic action-comedy. Also with Mamitha Baiju, Neha Shetty, R. Sarathkumar, Hridhu Haroon, and Rohini. (Opens Friday)
Exorcism Chronicles: The Beginning (R) This Korean anime film is about an excommunicated Catholic priest (voiced by Choi Han) who must team up with a Buddhist monk (voiced by Nam Doh-hyeong) to battle an evil spirit. Additional voices by Kim Yeon-woo and Chung Yu-chung. (Opens Friday)
Good Fortune (R) Aziz Ansari’s directing debut shows some flashes of promise before falling apart near the end. The standup comic stars as a downtrodden service worker who’s visited by a bumbling guardian angel (Keanu Reeves). The angel then allows him to experience the life of the venture capitalist (Seth Rogen) who recently fired him, except that our guy likes being rich so much that he doesn’t want to go back. The comedy is put together pretty well and offers some trenchant comments on the gig economy, and the lead actors are all on their game. Unfortunately, the film stumbles when it tries to find purpose in the lives of the minimum-wage earners. Ansari has the talent to keep at this, he just needs to give a bit more thought to his material. Also with Keke Palmer, Felipe Garcia Martinez, Matt Rogers, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Sandra Oh. (Opens Friday)
Grow (PG) This British kids’ movie stars Priya-Rose Brookwell as a girl who decides to help her parents win their local pumpkin growing contest. Also with Nick Frost, Golda Rosheuvel, Jeremy Swift, Tim McInnerny, and Jane Horrocks. (Opens Friday)
K-Ramp (NR) Kiran Abbavaram stars in this Indian thriller as a man pulled into a life of crime. Also with Yukti Thareja, Sai Kumar. Muralidhar Goud, and Vennela Kishore. (Opens Friday)
Mithra Mandali (NR) This Indian romantic comedy is about a group of male friends thrown into chaos when one falls for a politician’s daughter (Niharika NM). Also with Priyadarshi Pulikonda, VTV Ganesh, Satya, Rag Mayur, and Vennela Kishore. (Opens Friday)
Pets on a Train (PG) This English-dubbed version of a French animated film is about a group of animals who must save the passengers on a runaway train. Voices by Damien Ferrette, Hervé Jolly, Kaycie Chase, Frantz Confiac, Emmanuel Garijo, and Nicolas Marié. (Opens Friday)
Re-Election (PG-13) Adam Saunders stars in his own comedy as a middle-aged loser who re-enrolls in high school to run for class president. Also with Bex Taylor-Klaus, Paola Andino, William Ragsdale, Kym Whitley, Patty Guggenheim, and Tony Danza. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Sound of Silence (NR) This Chinese legal drama stars Tan Jianci as a greedy lawyer who sues a group of deaf people to make his reputation. Also with Lan Xiya, Pan Binlong, Wang Ge, and Wang Yanhui. (Opens Friday)
Telusu Kada (NR) This Telugu-language romantic comedy stars Siddhu Jonnalagadda, Raashii Khanna, Srinidhi Shetty, Harsha Chemudu, and Ravi Mariya. (Opens Friday)
Truth & Treason (PG-13) This Christian historical drama stars Ewan Horrocks as a teenager in Nazi Germany who publishes leaflets opposing Hitler’s regime. Also with Rupert Evans, Ferdinand McKay, Daf Thomas, Nye Occomore, Sean Mahon, Joanna Christie, and Sylvie Varcoe. (Opens Friday)
Urchin (R) Harris Dickinson co-stars in his own directorial debut about a London drug addict (Frank Dillane) whose attempt at recovery turns into a surreal nightmare. Also with Michael Colgan, Diane Axford, Lacey Bond, Oriana White, and Amr Waked. (Opens Friday)
NOW PLAYING
The Bad Guys 2 (PG) Better than the first movie, actually. The gang (voiced by Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina, Anthony Ramos, Marc Maron, and Craig Robinson) has trouble landing jobs after getting out of prison, so a rival gang frames them for their own crimes and forces them to commit additional crimes to clear their names. The climactic sequence is a bit drawn out, but until then the movie has a nice time mocking tech billionaires who want to go into space and the tropes of heist movies, as well as a nice interlude at a lucha libre wrestling event. Mark this down as an above-average animated kids’ film. Additional voices by Danielle Brooks, Maria Bakalova, Zazie Beetz, Jaime Camil, Richard Ayoade, Lilly Singh, Alex Borstein, Omid Djalili, and Natasha Lyonne.
The Conjuring: Last Rites (R) Ed and Lorraine Warren finally retire, and it’s at least two movies too late. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga take their last turn as the paranormal investigating couple, looking into a haunted mirror in Pennsylvania. Or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen, but our investigators take forever to actually get to the site. The movie wastes so much time on their backstory, as well as their adult daughter (Mia Tomlinson) getting married and having her own psychic visions. That doesn’t work, and neither does the scary stuff. Also with Orion Smith, Madison Lawlor, Ben Hardy, Steve Coulter, Beau Gadsdon, Kila Lord Cassidy, Elliot Cowan, Rebecca Calder, Peter Wight, Madison Wolfe, Frances O’Connor, Mackenzie Foy, Lili Taylor, and an uncredited James Wan.
Demon Slayer — Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Infinity Castle (R) The latest installment of the anime saga has a new look and the same issues. The demon Muzan Kibutsuji (voiced by Toshihiko Seki and Greg Chun) lures the demon slayers into his castle, an impressive looking, Christopher Nolan-influenced fortress where floors and walls are constantly shifting and the crevices between dimensions peek through. This would be a great backdrop for a thriller with horror elements, but as with too many of these adventures, the fight sequences are interrupted by gauzy and overly lengthy flashbacks. Anime fans will be used to this, but this squanders a chance to rope in newcomers to the epic. Additional voices by Natsuki Hanae, Zach Aguilar, Akari Kitō, Abby Trott, Hiro Shimono, Aleks Le, Yoshitugu Matsuoka, Bryce Papenbrook, Reina Ueda, Brianna Knickerbocker, Yuichi Nakamura, and Channing Tatum.
Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie (G) Strictly for fans of the kids’ TV show, I’m afraid. Laila Lockhart Kraner reprises her starring role as a girl whose dollhouse full of cat dolls is stolen by a crazed collector (Kristen Wiig). Despite the celebrities doing the voices of the cat dolls, the separation of them doesn’t lead to interesting subplots, and the songs sung by the cast are less than inspired. All the sparkly stuff on the screen will entertain small children, but even the star seems like she’s outgrown this material. Also with Gloria Estefan. Additional voices by Kyle Mooney, Melissa Villaseñor, Ego Nwodim, Thomas Lennon, Fortune Feimster, and Jason Mantzoukas.
Good Boy (PG) A most unusual horror film that’s told from the dog’s point of view. A Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever named Indy portrays a similarly named dog who moves to a remote cabin with his master (Shane Jensen), who is dying of cancer. At its worst, this movie provides a proof of concept that such a premise is viable. At its best, the movie provides scares beyond what Hollywood can do. Director Ben Leonberg (who is Indy’s owner in real life) provides atmosphere with the cabin lit by lamps powered by electric generator, and the monster haunting Indy is good for some scares. The story, too, is about a pet’s fears stemming from the impending loss of his human. It’s a rare movie from a dog’s POV that follows you home afterward. Also with Arielle Friedman, Stuart Rudin, and Larry Fessenden.
Him (R) This unlikely hybrid of football drama and horror film stars Tyriq Withers as a highly touted prospect just out of college who receives an invitation to work out at a remote desert compound with his football idol (Marlon Wayans). The younger man soon starts noticing that his mentor is resorting to weird practices to extend his own playing career. The movie starts out well as an anti-football satire, and Wayans’ comedy experience serves him well as a villain who keeps his charge off balance. Unfortunately, director/co-writer Justin Tipping (Kicks) loses control of his signifiers well before the contract-signing ceremony that includes human sacrifices. This movie is overheated and undercooked. Also with Julia Fox, Jim Jefferies, Maurice Greene, Don Benjamin, Guapdad 4000, Naomi Grossman, Tierra Whack, and Tim Heidecker.
A House of Dynamite (R) Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller stars Rebecca Ferguson as a White House staffer dealing with the threat posed by a single nuclear missile launched by an unknown enemy. Also with Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Brian Tee, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Kaitlyn Dever.
Kantara: Chapter 1 (NR) Confusingly, this is a sequel to the 2022 Indian film, with Rishab Shetty playing a different role in a story about pre-colonial tribes rising up against a tyrant (Jayaram). Also with Rukmini Vasanth, Gulshan Devaiah, Pramod Shetty, Rakesh Poojari, and Prakash Thuminad.
Kiss of the Spider Woman (R) A new non-binary star is minted in Tonatiuh, who walks off with this movie based on the Tony-winning Broadway musical. He portrays a gay man in Argentina in 1983 who’s imprisoned and tasked with snitching on his communist cellmate (Diego Luna) about his cell of revolutionaries. Instead, he tells the plot of his favorite musical film, in which they appear as characters alongside the film’s star (Jennifer Lopez). Writer-director Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Beauty and the Beast) leans into the fakeness of the film within the film and could have taken a few more chances with the filming of the dance sequences. The newcomer Tonatiuh handles the singing and dancing well, and is even better at embodying the heroism of a man who wants to be a woman and who takes a bullet for the man he loves. He’s how this highly imperfect film meets our moment. Also with Bruno Bichir, Josefina Scaglione, Aline Mayagoitia, Alejandro Balbis, and Federico Salles.
Light of the World (PG) This animated film tells the story of Jesus (voiced by Ian Hanlin) from the viewpoint of John (voiced by Benjamin Jacobson). Additional voices by David Kaye, Jesse Inocalla, Sam Darkoh, Ceara Morgana, Dylan Leonard, Mark Oliver, and Vincent Tong.
The Long Walk (R) Stephen King’s ageless wonder of a novel becomes a powerfully tragic film. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson play two young men in a dystopian future America who enter a contest where 50 males walk along a predetermined highway route and are executed when they can walk no more, with the last kid walking receiving a fortune. The most Hunger Games-ian of King’s books is adapted by Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence, who follows the author’s relentless focus on what a forced march like this does to the human body. Amid a landscape of cruelty inflicted on young men, the friendship that forms between the two main characters (who still know that one of them is destined to wind up dead) shines like a beacon of humanity. Their performances turn this into nothing less than this generation’s The Shawshank Redemption. Also with Judy Greer, Ben Wang, Charlie Plummer, Tut Nyuot, Garrett Wareing, Joshua Odjick, Jordan Gonzalez, Roman Griffin Davis, Josh Hamilton, and Mark Hamill.
One Battle After Another (R) One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s more purely enjoyable movies stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a former anti-ICE revolutionary who has to save his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) from a supersoldier (Sean Penn) who has reason to think the girl is his own biological daughter and kill her to destroy evidence of his sexual preference for Black women. The story is loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and set in the present day, which brings out the antic, puckish side of Anderson’s filmmaking. The film has nerve-frying action sequences, including an inventive car chase in the California desert with the cars appearing and disappearing from view because of the hilly terrain. The film also gets great performances from the newcomer Infiniti, DiCaprio as a father who realizes he’s not doing so good as a parent because he’s drunk and stoned all the time, and Penn as a villain brimming with hatred for this girl he has never met. It’s not as tidy as I’d like, but it’s great anyway. Also with Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Shayna McHayle, Kevin Tighe, D.W. Moffett, and Tony Goldwyn.
Perfect Blue (NR) Satoshi Kon’s animated film still feels as fresh and new as it did when it first came out in 1999. The story is about a J-pop singer (voiced by Junko Iwao) who is stalked by a violent fan while she tries to transition from music to acting. The film’s visuals remain dazzling and the script still has things to say about the unrealistic expectations that fans put on entertainers. This was Kon’s debut as a director, and it is an important milestone in his all-too-brief career as an anime filmmaker. Additional voices by Rika Matsumoto, Shinpachi Tsuji, Masaaki Ōkura, Yōsuke Akimoto, Hideyuki Hori, Emi Shinohara, and Shin’ichirō Miki.
Roofman (R) Derek Cianfrance’s charming but oh-so-slight caper film stars Channing Tatum as an escaped convict who spends more than a year hiding from a manhunt by living in a Toys ‘R’ Us store in Charlotte. The film has some good material about how the protagonist keeps tabs on the goings-on in the store and avoids detection by the customers and employees, and Tatum does some good work when his character falls in love with a downtrodden toy saleswoman and single mother (Kirsten Dunst). Still, the film is unwilling to explore the darker implications of its story and its main character, and the stacked supporting cast looks way overqualified for what they’re given to do. For good and bad, thiss movie feels like something that the filmmaker tossed off. Also with LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Ben Mendelsohn, Tony Revolori, Melonie Diaz, Uzo Aduba, Molly Price, Emory Cohen, Lily Collias, Punkie Johnson, Jimmy O. Yang, and Peter Dinklage.
The Smashing Machine (R) An audition tape, not a movie. Dwayne Johnson portrays Mark Kerr, the real-life ultimate fighting champion in the late 1990s who goes into a tailspin following his first professional loss. The prosthetics team makes The Rock look unlike himself, and the actor alters his speaking rhythms and modulates his voice to sound unlike himself. Writer-director Benny Safdie is out to make something other than a traditional sports film, but he doesn’t establish what this is, as neither Mark’s struggles with his opioid addiction nor his domestic troubles with his live-in girlfriend (Emily Blunt) are given enough treatment to carry the film. If this springboards Johnson to better dramatic roles, then great. This doesn’t work on its own, though. Also with Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, Oleksandr Usyk, Satoshi Ishii, Yoko Hamamura, and Mark Kerr.
Soul on Fire (PG) Based on a real-life story, this Christian drama stars Joel Courtney as a young man who starts a business and a family despite suffering severe burns as a child. Also with John Corbett, Stephanie Szostak, Masey McLain, James McCracken, and William H. Macy.
The Strangers: Chapter 2 (R) It says something that the best sequence here is not when the heroine (Madelaine Petsch) is attacked by the Strangers, but rather by a warthog. After the events of the original movie, she is still being hunted by the Strangers, and the movie turns into a survival thriller as she hides in the wilderness from the killers. However, the set pieces that don’t involve the warthog are dull, and the main character goes from being really clever to being really stupid and back without any logic. When she kills the warthog, the movie passes up the chance to make her into a less fearful fighter on her own behalf, and the attempts at giving the killers backstory are little less than disastrous. Also with Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Richard Brake, Pedro Leandro, Ella Bruccoleri, and Lily Knight.
Tron: Ares (PG-13) The best of the Tron movies, for what that’s worth. The third film stars Jared Leto as a computer-engineered super-soldier who’s sent by his tech CEO creator (Evan Peters) to kill a rival CEO (Greta Lee). Norwegian director Joachim Rønning manages to conjure up some genuinely cool-looking action sequences both in cyberspace and in the real world, and nostalgists for 1980s tech will love the scene when the soldier goes into the world from the original movie and meets Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges). Unhappily, the movie misses its chances to either comment on the evolution of technology or make its human characters’ emotional longings feel real. The series continues to be an aesthetic rather than a story. Also with Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj, Cameron Monaghan, Sarah Desjardins, and Gillian Anderson.
Dallas Exclusives
Beast of War (R) This Australian thriller is about a group of American soldiers shipwrecked at sea and preyed on by sharks. Starring Mark Coles Smith, Joel Nankervis, Sam Delich, Lee Tiger Halley, Sam Parsonson, Maximilian Johnson, and Steve Le Marquand.
Deathstalker (NR) Daniel Bernhardt stars in this remake of the 1983 medieval fantasy film. Also with Christina Orjalo, Paul Lazenby, Nina Bergman, Nicholas Rice, and Jon Ambrose. Voice by Patton Oswalt.
Fairyland (R) This drama stars Emilia Jones (CODA) as a young woman growing up in 1980s San Francisco with her gay father (Scoot McNairy). Also with Maria Bakalova, Nessa Dougherty, Cody Fern, Bella Murphy, Adam Lambert, and Geena Davis.
The Oval Portrait (NR) Based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, this horror film is about a picture that haunts those who come into possession of it. Starring Simon Phillips, Paul Thomas, Louisa Capulet, Colby Frost, and Michael Swatton.
