OPENING
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. (Opens Friday)
Bhool Chuk Maaf (NR) This Indian science fiction-comedy stars Rajkummar Rao as a man who becomes trapped in a time loop just before his wedding. Also with Sanjay Mishra, Wamiqa Gabbi, Zakir Hussain, Raghubir Yadav, and Seema Pahwa. (Opens Friday)
Clown in a Cornfield (R) Adapted from Adam Cesare’s novel, this horror film is about a dying Midwestern town that’s terrorized by a clown from a former tourist attraction. Starring Katie Douglas, Aaron Abrams, Carson MacCormac, Vincent Muller, Cassandra Potenza, Kevin Durand, and Will Sasso. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Fight or Flight (R) Josh Hartnett stars in this action-comedy as a hit man on an airplane who discovers that both he and his mark are targets of other contract killers on the plane. Also with Katee Sackhoff, Charithra Chandan, Julian Kostov, JuJu Chan Szeto, Danny Ashok, Hughie O’Donnell, Willem van der Vegt, Jyuddah Jaymes, and Marko Zaror. (Opens Friday)
A Gilded Game (NR) Hao Ou stars in this Chinese thriller as a business-school graduate who discovers sinister secrets when he interns at a big brokerage firm. Also with Andy Lau, Morning Chang, Kent Cheng, Jasper Liu, Lily TIen, Yi Huang, James Filbird, and Andrey Lazarev. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
Juliet & Romeo (PG-13) Clara Rugaard and Jamie Ward star in this original musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Also with Rebel Wilson, Jason Isaacs, Dan Fogler, Rupert Everett, Rupert Graves, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Tayla Parx, Ledisi, and Derek Jacobi. (Opens Friday)
Lilly (PG-13) Patricia Clarkson stars in this biography as the late Lilly Ledbetter, who led the fight for equal pay for women in the workplace. Also with Thomas Sadoski, Josh McDermitt, Deirdre Lovejoy, Joshua Mikel, Philip Ledbetter, Rhoda Griffis, and John Benjamin Hickey. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Money Kisses (NR) This Vietnamese comedy stars Thien An and Thu Trang as sisters who hope to avoid financial ruin by marrying billionaires. Also with Le Xuan Tien, Ma Ran Do, and Tien Luat. (Opens Friday)
Shadow Force (R) Kerry Washington and Omar Sy star in this action-thriller as a divorced couple who must protect their son (Jahleel Kamara) from a unit of private soldiers sent to kill them. Also with Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mark Strong, Ed Quinn, Marshall Cook, Natalia Reyes, Marvin Jones III, Jénel Stevens, and Method Man. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
#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. (Opens Friday)
Stand Your Ground (NR) Daniel Stisen stars in this action-thriller as a Special Forces veteran who uses the Stand Your Ground law to wipe out the crime family responsible for his wife’s murder. Also with Peter Stormare, Megan Lockhurst, Adam Basil, Akie Kotabe, Christopher Godwin, and Eric Roberts. (Opens Friday at AMC Grapevine Mills)
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. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
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. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday at AMC Parks at Arlington)
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. (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.
HIT: The Third Case (NR) The third film in the series stars Nani as an Indian homicide detective trying to stop a group of serial killers working together. Also with Srinidhi Shetty, Surya Srinivas, Adil Pala, Rao Ramesh, and Brahmaji.
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.
Retro (NR) This Tamil-language action-comedy stars Suriya as a gangster who promises his wife (Pooja Hegde) that he’ll go straight. Also with Jayaram, Joju George, Karunakaran, Prakash Raj, Singampuli, Nassar, Shriya Saran, and Santhosh Narayanan.
Rosario (R) Embarrassing and inept. Emeraude Toubia stars as a Wall Street broker who must tend to her grandmother’s body after the old woman dies during a snowstorm in New York City. She’s forced to reckon with a decades-old curse that her abuela had been keeping at bay for much of her life. The movie has a fair amount of material about Palo Mayombé and the practitioners of this mix of Catholicism and African tribal religions, but first-time director Felipe Vargas fails to generate any scares, and the acting is poor. Also with David Dastmalchian, Paul Ben-Victor, Diana Lein, Nick Ballard, and José Zúñiga.
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.
Snow White (PG) If this Disney live-action remake is too flawed to drown out the noise around it, it’s good enough to obscure that noise for a long stretch. Rachel Zegler plays the orphaned princess whose wicked stepmother (Gal Gadot) orders her killed for the crime of being more beautiful. Despite a darker color palette that distinguishes this from other Disney remakes, this film’s initial dramatic setup is flat, and the CGI dwarves are a huge distraction. Even so, the movie kicks into life with the villain’s aria “All Is Fair” and the romantic interest (Andrew Burnap) busting Snow White on her royal privilege in “Princess Problems,” and Zegler herself brings the appropriate energy in an expanded version of “Whistle While You Work.” If only the story of Snow White taking her kingdom back worked on any level, we could call this a success. Also with Hadley Fraser, Lorena Andrea, Emilia Faucher, Ansu Kabia, George Appleby, and Samuel Baxter. Voices by Patrick Page, Jeremy Swift, George Salazar, Andrew Barth Feldman, Martin Klebba, Jason Kravits, Andy Grotelueschen, and Titus Burgess.
The Surfer (R) Interesting, but muddled. Nicolas Cage stars in this thriller as an American businessman who wants to buy up the Australian beachside house where he grew up so he can take his teenage son (Finn LIttle) surfing. However, he encounters violence from the locals, who are led by a CEO (Julian McMahon) who’s all into men’s rights. Director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin start making you wonder whether the protagonist is actually a homeless man or whether the surfers are engaging in a massive act of gaslighting. It’s a promising idea, but it doesn’t lead anywhere interesting, and making the main character into some suffering Job soon becomes the point of the film rather than saying something new about toxic masculinity. Also with Rahel Romahn, Alexander Bertrand, Michael Abercromby, Rory O’Keeffe, Nic Cassim, and Justin Rosniak.
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.
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.
Dallas Exclusives
It Feeds (NR) This horror film stars Ashley Greene as a psychiatrist who must protect her daughter (Ellie O’Brien) after a demonic entity breaks into her home office. Also with Shawn Ashmore, Juno Rinaldi, Mark Taylor, Scott Baker, and Dave Dewar.
