OPENING
The Banished (NR) This Australian horror film stars Meg Eloise-Clarke as a woman searching the outback for her missing brother. Also with Gautier de Fontaine, Vicky Gard, Cassandra Hughes, Tony Hughes, and Leighton Cardno. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
A Cool Fish 2 (NR) Yu Zhang and Ren Suxi reprise their roles as Chinese exes who are reunited when they’re dragged into a criminal plot in Bangkok. Also with Pan Binlong, Marisa Anita, Guo Yiqian, Ma Yinyin, Jane Nathamon Ngamkanok, and Areeya Pholphuttrakul. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (R) Adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, this drama stars Lexi Venter as a white girl growing up in Rhodesia during the last days of British colonization. Also with Embeth Davidtz, Tessa Jubber, Carel Nel, and Albert Pretorius. (Opens Friday)
Ekka (NR) Yuva Rajkumar star in this Kannada-language crime thriller as a man tracking down his friend in Bengaluru’s underworld. Also with Sampada Hulivana, Atul Kulkarni, Rahul Dev Shetty, and Sanjana Anand. (Opens Friday)
Finally Dawn (NR) Lily James stars in this drama as a 1950s Roman socialite who auditions for a role in an Italian film on a whim. Also with Rachel Sennott, Joe Keery, Alba Rohrwacher, Sofia Panizzi, Carmen Pommella, and Willem Dafoe. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Guns & Moses (NR) This thriller stars Mark Feuerstein as a small-town rabbi who takes up arms after his community is attacked. Also with Neal McDonough, Dermot Mulroney, Alona Tal, Christopher Lloyd, Mercedes Mason, Jake Busey, Paulo Costanzo, Leigh Taylor-Young, and Lois Chiles. (Opens Friday)
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. (Opens Friday)
Junior (NR) This Indian film stars Kireeti Reddy as a young man seeking to reconcile his difficult relationship with his father. Also with Genelia Deshmukh, Sreelala, V. Ravichandran, Rao Ramesh, Sudharani, and Achyuth Kumar. (Opens Friday)
Kothapallilo Okappudu (NR) This Telugu-language comedy stars Ravindra Vijay as a talent scout whose difficulties with the language lead to various misunderstandings. Also with Manoj Chandra, Usha Bonela, Monika T, Bongu Sathi, and Shining Phani. (Opens Friday)
Saiyaara (NR) This Indian romantic film stars Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda. (Opens Friday)
Smurfs (PG) This new animated adventure has Smurfette (voiced by Rihanna) leading a rescue mission after Papa Smurf (voiced by John Goodman) is kidnapped. Additional voices by Octavia Spencer, Nick Offerman, James Corden, Dan Levy, Amy Sedaris, Natasha Lyonne, Sandra Oh, Jimmy Kimmel, Nick Kroll, Hannah Waddingham, Alex Winter, Maya Erskine, Billie Lourd, and Kurt Russell. (Opens Friday)
Sorry, Baby (R) Eva Victor stars in their own comedy as a graduate student who deals with the fallout of a rape by her professor (Louis Cancelmi). Also with Naomi Ackie, John Carroll Lynch, Kelly McCormack, E.R. Fightmaster, Hettienne Park, and Lucas Hedges. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Tanvi the Great (NR) This Indian drama stars Shubhangi Dutt as a young woman with a spectrum disorder who determines to join her family’s line of military servicemembers. Also with Anupam Kher, Jackie Shroff, Boman Irani, Arvind Swami, Pallavi Joshi, Karan Tacker, and Iain Glen. (Opens Friday)
NOW PLAYING
Abraham’s Boys (R) Looks particularly bad next to other recent movies about vampires. Based on Joe Hill’s short story sequel to Dracula, this takes place in California in the 1910s, where Dr. Van Helsing (Titus Welliver) has moved with his family to escape his past. However, his wife Mina Harker (Jocelin Donahue) starts behaving oddly, so he has to teach his two sons to deal with the vampires that have reached their home thanks to the nearby railroad. Writer-director Natasha Kermani turns this into a stupefying exercise full of arid chatter about Van Helsing’s dysfunctional raising of his children, without enough scary stuff to make it all worth sitting through. The long-serving character actor Welliver deserved a better lead role than this. Also with Brady Hepner, Judah Mackey, Aurora Perrineau, Fayna Sanchez, and Jonathan Howard.
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.
Elio (PG) Deserves to be mentioned alongside Pixar’s other Latin-themed films Coco and Encanto, even if it’s the least of those. The Elio of the title is an orphaned 11-year-old boy (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) who’s obsessed with space aliens and spends hours drawing large signs that beg the little green men to come and get him. The movie’s good with the sort of alienation that drives people to give up on Earth and pin their hopes on more evolved alien beings, and Pixar’s trademark visual splendor is in full evidence when Elio is actually abducted by aliens who mistake him for Earth’s leader. It’s all cut with Pixar’s trademark sense of humor, too, but the film starts to lose its shape in its final third when Elio has to travel between Earth and space to avert an intergalactic war. The movie comes frustratingly close to greatness, but it’s better than the live-action remakes that Hollywood has in theaters now. Additional voices by Zoe Saldaña, Brad Garrett, Remy Edgerly, Jameela Jamil, Matthias Schweighöfer, Ana de la Reguera, Atsuko Okatsuka, Shirley Henderson, Brandon Moon, and Kate Mulgrew.
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 his 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.
How to Train Your Dragon (PG) Chalk up another live-action remake of an animated kids’ movie that I can’t see the point of. Mason Thames (The Black Phone) stars in this remake of the 2010 animated film as the Viking who discovers that his tribe have been slaughtering dragons for no good reason. Toothless the Dragon is now generated by CGI and never once convinces us that he’s a real animal, and none of the human actors (not even Gerard Butler, reprising his voice role from the original as the Viking chief) put forward a case that this needed to be fleshed out with human actors. The only good addition here is the joke about the origin of Hiccup’s Viking helmet. Also with Nico Parker, Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn, Murray McArthur, Peter Serafinowicz, Ruth Codd, Naomi Wirthner, and Nick Frost. (Opens Friday)
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 city-wide 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.
Lilo & Stitch (PG) Beyond the technical skill of integrating a CGI-generated Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders) with live actors and scenery, this remake follows the animated original so closely that you wonder what the point is. Maia Kealoha portrays the little Hawaiian girl being raised by her older sister (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) when the chaotically destructive space alien crash lands near her and she adopts the alien from the local animal rescue. Director Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On) makes it all seamless, but the familiar story beats aren’t any more moving now than they were in the 2002 original. The additions of Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen as the aliens trying to capture Stitch bring surprisingly little. Also with Tia Carrere, Courtney B. Vance, Amy Hill, Kaipo Dudoit, Jason Scott Lee, and Hannah Waddingham.
Maalik (NR) Rajkummar Rao stars in this Indian action-thriller as a criminal who rises to power in organized crime. Also with Prosenjit Chatterjee, Manushi Chhillar, Huma Qureshi, Swanand Kirkire, Anshumaan Pushkar, and Saurabh Shukla.
Materialists (R) Celine Song proves to be one of America’s most promising filmmakers with this film that appears to be a plush New York dating comedy but is actually much more hard-headed. Dakota Johnson portrays a professional matchmaker at a Manhattan agency who finds her own romantic life torn between a handsome private equity manager (Pedro Pascal) and her ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans) who’s a broke theater actor. This movie is as painfully conscious of money as any Jane Austen novel, and all of the leads give fine performances fueled by quiet desperation about their money or lack thereof. They’re set up for success by Song (Past Lives), who delivers some of the most exquisite movie dialogue you’ll ever hear as well as some funny jokes. When the heroine does choose love over money, it feels like a weighty decision informed by everything that has gone before. She refuses to treat this movie like a fun little throwaway, which is what makes this great. Also with Zoe Winters, Marin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, Emmy Wheeler, Louisa Jacobson, Eddie Cahill, Sawyer Spielberg, and John Magaro.
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) in order 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 that is 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.
The Phoenician Scheme (PG-13) Arid. Wes Anderson’s latest film stars Benicio del Toro as an incredibly unethical business mogul who dodges attempts on his life and bankruptcy while trying to pass on his business empire to an estranged daughter (Mia Threapleton) before she enters a convent. The apple-pie order of Anderson’s other films is here, but not the human emotion that distinguishes his best work. The filmmaker does try for relevance by having his business mogul use shady business tactics like Donald Trump’s, but that doesn’t add up to a coherent or a funny movie. Also with Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bryan Cranston, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Alex Jennings, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, Steve Park, F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Murray.
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.
Sitaare Zameen Par (NR) A remake of the Spanish film Champions, this Indian sports film stars Aamir Khan as a basketball coach who must take over a team of autistic players as punishment for a DUI. Also with Genelia Deshmukh, Aroush Datta, Gopi Krishnan Varma, Vedant Sharmaa, Naman Misra, Rishi Shahani, Rishabh Jain, and Dolly Ahluwalia.
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.
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.
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.
Dallas Exclusives
Bang (R) Jack Kesy stars in this action-thriller as a hitman who becomes a target when he tries to go straight. Also with Kane Kosugi, Tristin Mays, Steve Bastoni, Bear Williams, Tofan Pirani, and Peter Weller.
Daniela Forever (R) This science-fiction thriller by Nacho Vigalondo (Colossal) stars Henry Golding as a widower who joins a sleep study in hopes of contacting his dead wife through his dreams. Also with Beatrice Grannò, Aura Garrido, Rubén Ochandiano, Cindy Claes, Nathalie Poza, Godeliv van den Brandt, and Frank Feys.
Sovereign (R) Nick Offerman and Jacob Tremblay star in this thriller as a father and son who are members of an anti-government separatist group in a standoff with police. Also with Dennis Quaid, Terry J. Nelson, Kezia DaCosta, Ruby Wolf, Brandon Stewart, Martha Plimpton, Thomas Mann, and Megan Mullally.
