NOW IN THEATERS
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. 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. (Ben Kenigsberg/The New York Times)
CHARLIE’S ANGELS The 1970s TV show Charlie’s Angels, which birthed a pair of films in the 2000s, returns for another reboot co-written and directed by Elizabeth Banks. The premise remains roughly the same, with three private investigators (here played by Ella Balinska, Naomi Scott, and Kristen Stewart) solving crimes for the mysterious Charlie (represented by assistants played by Banks, Djimon Hounsou, and Patrick Stewart). The sexploitation of the ‘70s show is replaced by high-concept feminism, with these “Angels” part of a network of highly skilled women who are called into action to save the world. Action-comedy, rated PG-13, 118 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6, Regal Stadium 14, and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
DOCTOR SLEEP Grown up and battling ghosts and alcoholism, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) is struggling to compartmentalize his demons when he runs into a girl (Kyliegh Curran) with more “shine” than is good for her. Perhaps not surprisingly, his bid to save her takes him back to the Overlook Hotel, the site of his daily nightmares. Inspired as much by Kubrick’s revisionist film as by either of Stephen
King’s books — 1977’s classic The Shining and its sequel, 2013’s Doctor Sleep — this film by horror wunderkind Mike Flanagan returns to the Overlook in ways both literal and figurative. Part homage to Kubrick’s moody atmospherics, and part hyper-literal superhero story, Doctor Sleep is stylish, engrossing, at times frustratingly illogical, and ultimately less than profoundly unsettling. Which is, in a word, a disappointment. Horror, rated R, 151 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
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. The ensemble cast almost entirely returns for the film, which finds the characters in 1927, with the events of the series finale receding into the past. 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. That is the extent of the central plot, and the movie is wellserved by its simplicity; creator and writer Julian 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, Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Robert Ker)
FORD V FERRARI At France’s 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1966, a team of American engineers led by designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) are dispatched by Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to do the impossible: design and assemble a Ford capable of beating the dominant Ferrari racing team. Shelby enlists British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), and the slightly eccentric, highly competitive men try to make it work. Director James Mangold captured this dramatization of the resulting preparation and race. Drama, rated PG-13, 152 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
THE GOOD LIAR Ian McKellen plays con artist Roy Courtnay, a man who targets vulnerable people and manipulates them into giving him access to their finances. When he meets Betty McLeish (Helen Mirren) online, he can scarcely believe his good fortune: She is a widow with a sizeable bank account. As he enters her life and digs his claws deeper, he is startled to find himself caring for her. She, too, begins to cotton on to his plans, turning what should be an easy swindle into an elaborate match of wits. Drama, rated R, 109 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Not reviewed)
HARRIET The image most of us have of Harriet Tubman is of the noble older woman wearing a headscarf and somewhat inscrutable expression. With Harriet, she becomes a vital, fearless, spiritually driven hero. Co-written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, the film begins in 1849, when Tubman — born Araminta “Minty” Ross — is still living in Dorchester County. Although legally she and her siblings were supposed to be freed, her owners are keeping her as a veritable prisoner. Tubman decides to risk escape, eluding slave catchers, collaborationists, and hounds literally at her heels. Once in Philadelphia, she meets William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Marie Buchanon (Janelle Monáe), who introduce Tubman to a hitherto unknown world of black prosperity and political agency. Peppered with tense action sequences and propelled by a gorgeous musical score by Terence Blanchard, Harriet is the kind of instructional, no-nonsense biopic that may not take many artistic risks or sophisticated stylistic departures but manages to benefit from that lack of pretension. Biopic, rated PG-13, 125 minutes, Regal Stadium 14 and Violet Crown. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)
JOJO RABBIT Writer and director Taika Waititi presents a twee version of World War II-era Berlin in Jojo Rabbit that is seen through the eyes of a child. Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is an only child whose father, he thinks, is off fighting the war for Germany. He lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), in a middle-class section of Berlin. His only real friend is imaginary: a fatherly Adolf Hitler with a tendency to fly off the handle whenever Jews are mentioned. Tenyear-old Jojo is one of the Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth, and decorates his room with swastikas and posters of the Führer. The comedy is fast-paced, at times approaching slapstick. It takes its time to find its emotional core and, as it does, the humor settles down and the drama mostly takes over, edging, at times, into rank sentimentalism. Jojo Rabbit may strain your credulity, but never at the expense of its young protagonists, who shine throughout. Comedy, rated PG-13, 108 minutes, Violet Crown. (Michael Abatemarco)
JOKER In Joker, director Todd Phillips takes a grim, shallow, and distractingly derivative homage to 1970s movies to an even more grisly, nihilistic level. 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 nurses 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 Martin 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 Stadium 14. (Ann Hornaday/The Washington Post)
LAST CHRISTMAS Director Paul Feig films a script co-written by Emma Thompson (who also co-stars) about a London woman named Kate (Emilia Clarke) who continuously makes bad decisions in life. Her choice to accept a holiday job as a department-store elf initially seems to follow that pattern, until she meets Tom (Henry Golding). After that, it’s a matter of believing her good fortune and not screwing it up. Taken at face value, Last Christmas is a charming enough entry into the holiday rom-com canon. Clarke and Golding are likable together, if not electric. Feig manages a tone that’s heavy on chuckles and light on belly laughs. Still, it eventually reveals itself as a warmhearted story of trauma, survivors’ guilt, and reinvention. Somehow, Kate and Tom’s story still finds a way to play out in painfully predictable fashion. Romantic comedy, rated PG-13, 102 minutes, Regal Santa Fe 6 and Regal Stadium 14. (Thomas Floyd/The Washington Post)
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 old-fashioned 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, Jean Cocteau Cinema. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)
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 liveaction retelling, the evil sorceress Maleficent (Angelina Jolie) became both hero and villain. 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. 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, 2D only at Regal Santa Fe 6. (Michael O’Sullivan/ The Washington Post)
MIDWAY In this vividly choreographed and mostly historically accurate telling of the 1942 Battle of Midway — a pivotal Naval battle precipitated by Japan’s attack, just six months earlier, on Pearl Harbor — the violence is strictly PG-13 level. But the action, particularly the aerial combat, is impressively choreographed. And the Japanese, while clearly the enemy, are shown to be capable of great bravery as well as cruelty. Director Roland Emmerich opens his tale with a focus on Naval intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson), who argued that Japan’s next secret target, after Pearl Harbor and the Coral Sea, would not be the South Pacific, but a tiny, previously insignificant atoll in the North Pacific. There are so many featured players and marquee names (Aaron Eckhart, Nick Jonas, Mandy Moore) that many of the film’s human elements are given short shrift. It tells a story that’s vividly and viscerally rendered, with all the entertainment value of a big, old-fashioned war movie, cutting back and forth between the home front and front line. But the kiss-kiss never really registers with quite the same impact as the bangbang. Drama, rated PG-13, 138 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
PAIN AND GLORY As he grows older, Pedro Almodovar grows more reflective. Pain and Glory is not strictly autobiographical, but it is strewn with deeply personal breadcrumbs to lead us through significant passages of the great director’s life. The central character is Salvador Mallo, a famous Spanish filmmaker played by Antonio Banderas, who won Best Actor at Cannes for this performance. As if to emphasize the artifice of his construction and create a little breathing space from real life, Almodovar has built his story around two time periods and three major coincidences. The time frame shifts between memories of his character’s childhood, where his mother is portrayed by Penelope Cruz, and the present, when Julieta Serrano takes over the role. If the mood of this movie is more somber than earlier Almodovar classics, his color scheme is as riotously rich as ever. The screen is drenched in glorious primary hues which provide a rich contrast to the complexity of the story structure. As he casts an eye back over his life and career, the septuagenarian director may have lost some of his youthful exuberance, but he hasn’t lost his touch. Drama, rated R, 113 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts and Violet Crown. (Jonathan Richards)
PARASITE Director Bong Joon Ho creates specific spaces and faces that are in service to universal ideas about human dignity, class, and life itself. That’s a good way of telegraphing the larger catastrophe represented by the cramped, gloomy, and altogether disordered basement apartment where Kim Ki-taek (the great Song Kang Ho) benignly reigns. A sedentary lump, Ki-taek doesn’t have a lot obviously going for him. Fortunes change after the son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo Shik), lands a lucrative job as an Englishlanguage tutor for the teenage daughter, Da-hye (Jung Ziso), of the wealthy Park family. The other Kims soon secure their positions as art tutor, housekeeper, and chauffeur. The Parks make it easy (no background checks). Yet they’re not gullible, as Ki-taek believes, but are instead defined by cultivated helplessness, the near-infantilization that money affords. In outsourcing their lives, all the cooking and cleaning and caring for their children, the Parks are as parasitical as their humorously opportunistic interlopers. The cost of that comfort and those pretty rooms comes at a terrible price. Drama, rated R, 132 minutes, in Korean with subtitles, Violet Crown. (Manohla Dargis/The New York Times)
PLAYING WITH FIRE John Cena heads a cast that includes Keegan-Michael Key and John Leguizamo in this comedy set in the world of wildlands firefighting. The three men play rugged, if buffoonish, firefighters who are quickly in over their heads when tasked with rescuing and taking care of a trio of boisterous young kids. Comedy, rated PG, 96 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
THE REPORT It’s hard to imagine a less sexy subject for a movie than the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2014 report on the CIA’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation program — even if you abbreviate that mouthful as the “torture report,” and even if you cast Adam Driver as the guy who was then-committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein’s dogged lead investigator. It’s a tough sell, even if you add Annette Bening as the California senator, and even if you throw in Jon Hamm and Maura Tierney for good measure, as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough and a (probably fictionalized) CIA official. This may be the world’s first movie micro-targeted to several thousand of the people who live and/or work in Washington, and no one else. Drama, rated R, 118 minutes, Center for Contemporary Arts. (Michael O’Sullivan/The Washington Post)
TERMINATOR: DARK FATE James Cameron, creator of the Terminator franchise, contributes to his first film in the series since the 1991 installment Terminator 2: Judgment Day , co-writing and producing while Tim Miller directs. Linda Hamilton, the heroine of the first two films, also returns to the series for the first time since 1991. She once more plays Sarah Connor, who must join forces with the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a cyborg named Grace (Mackenzie Davis) to protect a young girl (Natalia Reyes) from a highly advanced robot (Gabriel Luna) from the future. Science fiction, rated R, 128 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (Not reviewed)
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 post-apocalyptic 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. The film doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely braindead either. Comedy, rated R, 99 minutes, Regal Stadium 14. (A.O. Scott/The New York Times)