Chile Pages

ABOMINABLE

This is an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale written and directed by Jill Culton, about a large four-legged creature with snow-white fur, gorgeous sky-blue eyes, and a goofy grin. The creature, who gets nicknamed Everest (after the place where it wants to return), parks on the roof of a small apartment building in China and sees a billboard of his home. There he is discovered by Yi (voiced by Chloe Bennet), a plucky tween who’s saving money to embark on a journey that her late father had envisioned for his family. Once she establishes a bond with Everest, she learns of the shady interests that had been keeping him caged. Along with her young friends, Yi gets swept up by Everest on an epic, colorful journey home. Animated family film, rated PG, 97 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Glenn Kenny/The New York Times)

THE ADDAMS FAMILY

The new animated version of The Addams Family begins with the wedding of Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) before they are chased off by angry villagers. They wind up in New Jersey and make their home in an abandoned asylum where Thing gives Lurch tips on tickling the ivories. The movie is the diversion you would expect, getting laughs from the disparity between the Addams’ congenital gloominess and the planned community, called Assimilation, that’s being developed near their mansion. Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) nervously prepares for his mazurka — a bar mitzvah with a saber instead of a Torah portion — while Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) experiences pangs of teenage rebellion, which means adding the “gateway color” pink to her wardrobe. If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material. Animated comedy, rated PG, 105 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Ben Kenigsberg/New York Times)

BLACK AND BLUE

New Orleans Police Department rookie Alicia West (Naomie Harris) finds herself trapped between two worlds when she witnesses a squad of dirty cops murder a drug dealer. She can’t tell anyone within the force because she is outnumbered by veteran officers, and she can’t turn to her African-American community, as she feels rejected by them after joining the NOPD. She finds a friend in a stranger named Milo (Tyrese Gibson) and attempts to resolve the issue while avoiding the contract on her head. Action, rated R, 108 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

COUNTDOWN

When a young woman (Elizabeth Lail) downloads an app to her phone that claims to predict when its user will die, she is shocked when it informs her that her end is coming in just two days. As she researches the app and discovers that its prognoses are eerily accurate — and when a mysterious figure suddenly begins following her — she scrambles in a race against time to save herself. Horror, rated PG-13, 90 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

THE CURRENT WAR: DIRECTOR’S CUT

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Thomas Edison and Michael Shannon is George Westinghouse in this historical drama about these two inventors and the race to determine whose electrical system would ultimately power society. As Edison and Westinghouse compete to get cities across the United States to use their system, Edison strives to find ways to make his system cheaper while Westinghouse looks for ways to make his safer. Nicholas Hoult plays fellow titan of electricity Nikola Tesla, while Tom Holland plays business magnate Samuel Insull. Drama, not rated, 107 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

DOWNTON ABBEY

Set in the 1910s and 1920s at a fictional English estate, the TV show Downton Abbey centered on the esteemed Crawley family and their domestic servants, as they all attempt to keep the massive estate afloat and shipshape in a rapidly modernizing England. Now, the movie arrives as a feature-length coda to the series. The extraordinary ensemble cast — along with the steady hand of creator and writer Julian Fellowes — almost entirely return for the film, which finds the characters in 1927, with the events of the series finale receding into the past. The quotidian life on the estate continues as usual, until the family receives a letter informing them that the royal family is stopping in for an overnight visit. This news has everyone in a tizzy, although the staffers downstairs are affected far more profoundly than the family upstairs, since they are the ones who must cook, clean, and organize. That is the extent of the central plot, and the movie is well-served by its simplicity; Fellowes devotes himself to sprinkling the story with small moments that are delightful, letting each character warm the hearts of everyone who spent years getting to know them. Drama, rated PG, 122 minutes, Violet Crown. (Robert Ker)

FANTASTIC FUNGI

Brie Larson narrates this documentary that shows us the inside world of mushrooms, molds, and other fungi. Director Louie Schwartzberg takes viewers on a time-lapse journey that describes the ancient history of these organisms and their power in the present to heal and to sustain life. Some of the most-renowned mycologists in the world also offer their thoughts on the potential of fungi to help humans across a wide variety of uses. Documentary, not rated, 81 minutes, The Screen. (Not reviewed)

GEMINI MAN

Ang Lee directs this science fiction action film in which an assassin for a CIA-like organization named Henry (Will Smith) is on the cusp of retirement when it’s decided that he knows too much. A military-industrial biotech tycoon named Clay (Clive Owen) has the perfect weapon to send against Henry: a clone of Henry’s younger self (also Smith, using de-aging technology). Soon, Henry is caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with experience — as well as compatriots played by Mary

Elizabeth Winstead and Benedict Wong — on his side. Science fiction, rated PG-13, 117 minutes, screens in 2D only at Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)

HUSTLERS

In a year of spectacular comebacks, none is as purely, sensationally pleasurable as Jennifer Lopez’s commanding lead performance in this sexually charged caper flick that bumps, grinds, and pays giddy homage to sisterhood and shameless venality with equally admiring brio. She plays Ramona, a dancer at a Manhattan strip club who in 2007 takes a newbie named Destiny (Constance Wu) under her protective wing. Ramona not only tutors her charge in how to perform a proper pole dance but, eventually, in how to fleece privileged white guys whose impunity and vanity make them as vulnerable as the most naïve rubes from the sticks. Adapted by writer-director Lorene Scafaria from a New York magazine article about a similar scam perpetrated by a group of dancers at the New York club Scores, Hustlers is a funny, naughty, enormously entertaining kick in the pants, promising to be an East Coast Showgirls, only to wind up a girls-rule Goodfellas. Drama, rated R, 109 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6. (Ann Hornaday/ The Washington Post)

JOKER

In Joker, director Todd Phillips takes a grim, shallow, and distractingly derivative homage to 1970s movies to an even more grisly, nihilistic level, throwing out nods to Martin Scorsese’s filmography. Arthur Fleck is an aspiring stand-up comedian whose day job is working as a clown. Portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in a florid, Pagliacci-like turn as sad-clown-turned-mad-clown, Fleck is a pathetic man-child who lives with his mother (Frances Conroy) and nursing a deluded ambition to appear on a late-night show hosted by a comic named Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). The fact that Franklin is played by De Niro is just one of many nods to Scorsese, in this case to the brilliant King of Comedy (1982). Joker is so monotonously grandiose and full of its own pretensions that it winds up feeling puny and predictable. Like the antihero at its center, it’s a movie trying so hard to be capital-b Big that it can’t help looking small. Drama, rated R, 121 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)

JUDY

In Judy, Renée Zellweger plays a few variations on Judy Garland near the end of her life: worried mother, needy lover, disaster, legend. The woman who remains out of sight, though, is the sadder, scarier Judy who threw a butcher knife at one of her children and threatened to jump out a window in front of another. Even so, Zellweger is solid in a movie that derives its force from its central mythic figure and your own Yellow Brick Road memories. Judy is based on Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, which had a well-received Broadway run in 2012 and skitters between late-career Judy ripping her heart out in a London hotel and at the theater where she will become the talk of the town. The movie, directed by Rupert Goold, is a gentler, squarer mash note to the Great Woman that’s part maternal melodrama, part martyr story. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is cautious and too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away. Biopic, rated PG-13, 118 minutes, Violet Crown. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)

THE LIGHTHOUSE

A horror movie about inner and outer darkness, this film begins with two lighthouse workers, Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Winslow (Robert Pattinson), arriving on a small, desolate island. Over many solitary days and nights, they work, eat, drink, and dig at each other, establishing a bristling antagonism born of temperament and boredom or maybe just narrative convenience. Wake likes to yammer, but the men aren’t ready conversationalists. In time, their minds and tongues are loosened by alcohol and perhaps a simple human need for companionship. The wind howls, the camera prowls, the sea roars, and director Robert Eggers flexes his estimable filmmaking technique as an air of mystery rapidly thickens. With control and precision, expressionist lighting and an oldfashioned square film frame that adds to the claustrophobia, Eggers seamlessly blurs the lines between physical space and head space. He has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations. Horror, rated R, 109 minutes, Violet Crown. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)

LINDA RONSTADT: THE SOUND OF MY VOICE

With the recent announcement that Linda Ronstadt would be a 2019 Kennedy Center honoree, this affectionate documentary makes for a timely opportunity to recall why the 73-year-old singer (who retired from performing in 2009 because of Parkinson’s disease) is getting the award, as evidenced by the many performance clips and the expected parade of laudatory reminiscences from the likes of Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Bonnie Raitt, and J.D. Souther. The film also reminds us how outspoken Ronstadt was, and is, about her liberal views. If there’s one drawback to The

Sound of My Voice, it’s that Ronstadt herself declined to sit down with the film’s directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, for interviews that might have showcased more of such frank talk. Instead, she merely narrates the film, delivering a somewhat unspontaneous sounding, disembodied voice-over that carries us from her childhood in Tucson to her stellar career in Los Angeles. Documentary, rated PG-13, 95 minutes, The Screen. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)

MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL

Disney’s revisionist Maleficent took the Sleeping Beauty story that inspired the studio’s own 1959 animated classic and turned it upside down. In that live-action retelling, the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) became both hero and villain. Jolie delivered a deliciously complex, even sympathetic portrait of a fairy scorned so badly by a faithless lover that the betrayal twisted her morals. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil picks up where the first film left off: in the land known as the Moors, a CGI paradise now ruled by the former Sleeping Beauty, Aurora (Elle Fanning), and overrun with mythical critters straight out of Tolkien Lite. Aurora’s love interest (Harris Dickinson) is still in the picture, and, as the film opens, this anodyne Prince has just proposed marriage to Aurora. Later, the nuptials entail a meeting of the in-laws over dinner, a social requirement attended by Queen Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer) and King John (Robert Lindsay) and Maleficent, who virtually raised Aurora. It’s a big and busy film, characterized by a focus on fighting and weaponry. But the worse sin is that it’s boring; unlike the first film, there’s no one to care about. Fantasy action, rated PG, 118 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)

WESTERN STARS

Western Stars, a new documentary co-directed by and starring Bruce Springsteen, swaggers across the landscape like a cinematic epic, but it’s basically a concert flick, with some extras. As fans already know, Western Stars is also the latest album from the Bard of Asbury Park — his 19th. The lyrics are about the American West, the historical one and the mythic counterpart fashioned by such filmmakers as John Ford. After deciding not to perform Western Stars on tour, Springsteen arranged to play it live for a select audience — and a camera crew — in the barn on his New Jersey estate. It’s a real barn, more than 100 years old, but big enough for 40 musicians and perhaps that many spectators. The singer looks lean, assured, and about two decades younger than his actual 70 years. There are some nice moments with longtime lieutenant (and spouse) Patti Scialfa, who provides rhythm guitar and backup vocals (with help from four other singers). Yet what will really separate the faithful from casual viewers of Western Stars are not the songs but the in-between moments. Springsteen’s musings might work as lyrics, but without a boost from a melody they sound simplistic and self-evident. At their best, these vignettes rise to the level of rock videos. More often, they look like TV ads for pickup trucks. Concert film, rated PG, 83 minutes, Violet Crown. (Mark Jenkins/The Washington Post)

ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP

Has it really been an entire decade since Zombieland, in which Woody Harrelson joined forces with Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin to crack wise while the skulls of the undead exploded around them? Apparently it has, though part of the charm of this undemanding sequel (directed, like the first one, by Ruben Fleischer) is that it treats 10 years like 10 minutes. In the postapocalyptic world, there’s no history, and the filmmakers wisely refrain from calibrating too many jokes to the present-day world beyond the screen. Like the first episode, but even more so, this chapter is aware that zombies are a pop-culture cliché and is content to goof on that fact. There’s nothing here to rival the thing with Bill Murray in Zombieland, but the performers commit to the silliness in a spirit of wellcompensated affability. The film doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either. Comedy, rated R, 99 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (A.O. Scott/New York Times)