NOW PLAYING
Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘CANDYMAN’: While the trailer suggests the reboot Universal Studios wishes this one were, instead of the one it is, co-writer and director Nia DaCosta has made her own kind of “Candyman” — sleek, brooding, methodical, thoughtful. Gorehounds looking for even more splurch than the first “Candyman” delivered back in 1992 will have to wait for something else. A generation ago, that film relocated author Clive Barker’s bee-infested spirit of vengeance, born in his 1985 short story
“The Forbidden,” from the grim council houses of Liverpool, England, to the notorious Cabrini-Green high-rises of Chicago. Tony Todd’s embodiment of the title character meant actual, forceful Black representation in a genre generally more concerned with killing off Black people, where you could find them, as quickly as possible. Still, the racial dynamics were just queasy enough to make “Candyman” an uneasy sort of hit. The ’92 “Candyman” got to its first murder (in flashback) in the first five minutes, long before the University of ChicagoIllinois graduate student played by Virginia Madsen ventured into the Black gang-controlled housing projects in the service of her thesis on urban folklore and the Candyman legend. The new “Candyman” has a few things in common with the first one. It too is crafty and well-acted. But the racial lens is new. 1:31. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘THE CARD COUNTER’:
Disappointing news first: It sometimes feels like two ideas welded, uncertainly, together. One is bluntly polemical, dealing with America’s geopolitical sins in the years following Sept. 11. The other idea is a compelling simmer of a character study. Here’s the heartening news: As the title character — a professional gambler with a lot behind him, and not much impulse to dredge it up — Oscar Isaac makes for a magnetic sphinx indeed. His is not the only good performance. But it’s the crucial one. William Tell is the name the Isaac character uses, Bill for short. In the movie’s present, Bill recently has wrapped up eight years in prison. In Iraq, assigned to the infamous Abu Ghraib detention center, he worked under the tutelage of a private contractor (Willem Dafoe) given free rein to conduct his “enhanced” interrogations. (The setting, more a matter of allusion than statement, is real; the characters are fictional.) Bill was a dutiful soldier and took the fall. The brass, including Dafoe’s character, went free. After all that, a highly routinized life spent at the poker and blackjack tables in one casino after another is life enough for this man. “I stick to modest goals,” Bill tells La Linda, played by Tiffany Haddish. This equally sphinxy character wants Bill to join her stable of card players, staked by backers. There’s the promise of rich rewards — and, as Bill notes, the threat of steep debts if the cards fall the wrong way. 1:49. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips
‘CINDERELLA’: Classic stories and fairy tales continue to make the content rounds, whether that’s because recognizable names are easier to sell or perhaps because these old tales still have some life left in their lessons. Often these centuries-old stories work best when the time period is fully updated
(e.g., Amy Heckerling’s “Clueless”) or the modern lessons are subversively subsumed into the archaic era’s traditional customs and practices (e.g., Autumn de Wilde’s “Emma”).
However, the new musical “Cinderella,” starring pop sensation Camila Cabello and written and directed by Kay Cannon, tries to have it both ways, pairing contemporary post-feminist tenets and anachronistic slang and pop songs with the ballgowns and social norms of Renaissance-era Europe. Confined to the basement with her talking mice, she sketches fashion designs and sews ballgowns with the hopes of one day selling her dresses and becoming a businesswoman (are retail markets even a thing in this village?). The intent is to avoid a Cinderella whose entire fate hangs on marriage to a wealthy prince, so instead they’ve made her a rise-and-grind girlboss hustler, whose values clash with those of her evil stepmother Vivian (Idina Menzel) and stepsisters (Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer) who want to marry for money. 1:53. 1 ½ stars. Streaming on Amazon Prime. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
‘FREE GUY’: The latest blockbuster to bring video games to the big screen is the bold, brash and selfaware
(literally) “Free Guy,” a film that trains its sights on those oft disposable “nonplayer characters” that populate the edges of the video game world. Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is one such character, living and working in the world of Free City, where every day he gets the same coffee, works as a bank teller and happily hits the deck when a player barges in to rob the bank several times a day. Guy and his pal Buddy (Lil Rel) are more than content to be background players in someone else’s narrative, as they’ve been programmed to be. But Guy has a nagging feeling that there’s more out there, and one day, when a comely player known as Molotov Girl (Jodie Comer) saunters past humming Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” a new feeling is awakened within him: love, lust, infatuation, you name it. That shouldn’t be in Guy’s code, and when he starts stepping outside the expectations of a nonplayer character in order to pursue this mysterious player, it causes an uproar that turns him into a star known as “Blue Shirt Guy” in the world outside the
game. 1:55. 2 stars. — Katie Walsh
“QUEENPINS’: “Queenpins” has its moments, mostly when Kirby Howell-Baptiste is on the screen. As a sort-of-truecrime comedy, spinning a yarn of middle-class larceny and extreme, deeply unlawful couponing, it’s likely to offend no one but the most grimly law-abiding consumers among us. But like the people it’s about, you want more. Writer-directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly let Kristen Bell make the introductions and tell the story. She plays Connie, onetime Olympic medalist in speed-walking, now a Phoenix resident stuck in a cul-de-sac of a marriage to an IRS officer (Joel McHale). Much of the couple’s savings went to unsuccessful fertility treatments, and what was designed to be the baby’s room is now a bittersweet storage area for detergent, Doritos, Wheat
Chex — everything Connie has acquired by her avid coupon usage. “Queenpins” is about how Connie and her best friend and fellow coupon fan Jojo, played by
Howell-Baptiste, make the leap into their own sunny corner of the criminal underworld. 1:50. 2 stars. Streaming on Paramount+ Sept. 30. — Michael Phillips
‘SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS’:
“Shang-Chi” follows a young Asian American man, Shaun (Simu Liu), as he learns to face his past and embrace his destiny as the superhero Shang-Chi. Shaun’s family has a long and mystical history, one he eventually has to explain to his best friend Katy (Awkwafina), on a transatlantic flight to Macau, after the two fight off a machete-limbed supersoldier on a San Francisco city bus. Dropping his Americanized name, Shang-Chi tells Katy about his father, Xu Wenwu
(Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a centuries-old warlord and leader of the shadowy crime organization the Ten Rings. 2:12. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘WORTH’: If it feels like you’ve been seeing a lot of Michael Keaton lately, that’s because he happens to be everywhere at the moment. Now, you can catch Keaton in the new Netflix film “Worth” as
Ken Feinberg, a lawyer who took on the impossible task of figuring out how to properly compensate the families of Sept. 11 victims. The film was released about a week before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000. This is the rare movie about 9/11 that barely covers the attacks themselves and instead focuses on the messy aftermath. 1:58. 2 ½ stars. Streaming on Netflix. — Joshua Axelrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.