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Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘BEING THE RICARDOS’: Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos” opens with confusion and ends with a fizzle, two appropriate bookends for this messy biopic about Lucille Ball that never lands on exactly what it is that it wants to say about the legendary TV woman and her famous TV marriage. Folks have already looked askance at star Nicole Kidman in a mask of frozen-looking makeup, playing the famously expressive Lucy, and at Javier Bardem taking on the role of the sleek Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, but the acting is not the problem, not by a long shot. In fact, the actors are the best part of this otherwise poorly executed film, which actively works against whatever insights it may have wanted to impart about Lucy, Desi and their influential TV show. 2:05. 1 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
‘C’MON C’MON’: Joaquin Phoenix has never been more engaging than he is in “C’mon C’mon.” The four-time Oscar nominee (and one-time winner) is at his warmest and most personable — characteristics not usually associated with the actor — in Mike Mills’ bighearted drama, in which he plays a radio journalist working on a project about the way children see the world. Phoenix has been a steady presence in American film since he starred in “Space Camp” 35 years ago, but in “C’mon C’mon,” he shows a range and level of humanity that he has rarely showed before. His performance isn’t a revelation, but rather a reconfirmation that he’s one of the very best talents working in movies today. And “C’mon C’mon” is a lovely showcase for him.
Mills, with just his fourth film (and first since 2016’s “20th Century Women”), paints an affectionate, poetic portrait of youth and wisdom, in a world where everybody is just trying to figure things out for themselves. Adults don’t have the answers any more than kids do, but they’re grown so they get to make most of the decisions. And hopefully the ones they make are correct. 1:49. 3 ½ stars. — Adam Graham, Detroit News
‘ENCANTO’: The latest Disney Animation film, “Encanto,” sweeps audiences away to a colorful, enchanted world of Colombian magical realism, introducing the Madrigal family, who have each been granted extraordinary gifts, except one, our heroine, Mirabel (Stefanie Beatriz), who has yet to discover her own personal magic. The Madrigal family magic was borne out of extreme trauma and pain, when matriarch Abuela Alma (Maria Cecilia Botero) lost her husband while fleeing violence in their village. In desperation, she cried out for protection for herself and her infant triplets, and a magical candle raised mountains around a charmed casita, where she’s raised her family since. Each Madrigal receives a gift in a coming of age ceremony, whether it’s super strength, high-powered hearing, talking to animals, spinning flowers out of thin air, shape-shifting, future divining, weather controlling or food healing. The only exception to the magical rule so far is the sweet, smart Mirabel, who never received her gift, and has since felt like the family outcast, bending over backward to earn her place among them. As she starts to see cracks in the foundation of their beloved casita, Mirabel probes deeper in to the family’s magic and ultimately realizes that all of her family members are caught in the trap of perfectionism, believing that they have to use their gifts in the ways others want them to, without remaining authentic to themselves and their desires. 1:39. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘HOUSE OF GUCCI’: For director Ridley Scott, “House of Gucci” is an entertaining if dramatically thin return to the factbased machinations of the rich, famous and weaselly. Sometimes they’re criminal underworld tales, such as “American Gangster” (2007); other times, as with the 2017 Getty kidnapping account “All the Money in the World,” they’re criminality-adjacent, more about the ruthlessness of the crazy-rich. This movie’s a bit of both. It’s bit-of-both in other ways, too, swinging from straight-faced drama to opera buffa extravagance. Lady Gaga, representing the former, co-stars with, among others, Jared Leto (the latter). However, Gaga’s the star and driver in “House of Gucci.” The high-gloss and even higher-fashion festival of backstabbing stars Gaga as the woman whose controversial business practices after marrying into the Gucci fashion dynasty included hiring a hit man to deal with her pesky, cheating husband. 2:37. 2 ½ stars. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘LICORICE PIZZA’: Gary Valentine is almost famous. This enterprising hustler parlays his demi-fame into a kind of accidental-on-purpose mystique, that of a 15-year-old LA whiz kid, with one foot in the Industry as a child actor and the other in whatever he’s cooking up at the moment. “Licorice Pizza,” writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s gloriously hazy hangout of a movie, starts from the premise of this San Fernando Valley high schooler putting his idea of “the moves” on 25-yearold Alana. She works as a photographer’s assistant. He first spies her when he’s in line for picture day. Their queasy age difference makes Gary’s ardor, in Alana’s eyes, a foolish delusion. Yet Alana — as played, indelibly, by Alana Haim of the Grammy-nominated sisters band Haim — finds herself weirdly charmed by this boy/man. Pretty soon she’s hanging out with his friends, accompanying him as an adult chaperon on a movie promotional trip to New York, all the while yearning for her own niche in life with actual adults. 2:13. 3 ½ stars. — Michael Phillips
‘THE POWER OF THE DOG’: The gorgeous Otago region of New Zealand makes for one hell of a 1925 Montana in “The Power of the Dog,” the first feature written and directed by Jane Campion since “Bright Star” 12 years ago. This adaptation of the 1967 Thomas Savage novel is worth seeing, and arguing with, for several reasons. It’s a chamber Western, focused on four main characters, and those warring personalities are played by the exactly right quartet of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The environment these forlorn souls call home works like a spacious dream of the Old West, shortly after it has given way to 20th century notions of progress. For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly. Campion, cinematographer Ari Wegner, the entire design team knew what they wanted. And got it. 2:06. 3 stars. Streaming on Netflix. — Michael Phillips
‘WEST SIDE STORY’: Purists can relax and put their smelling salts away. The vibrant new “West Side Story” hasn’t been updated, or relocated. It’s still a resident of Upper West Side Manhattan in the late 1950s, in the vicinity of what used to be called Lincoln Square and San Juan Hill. But director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have made sharp, often arresting sense of original librettist Arthur Laurents’ material, born on Broadway in 1957. Jerome Robbins’ dances helped make the Broadway musical a prestige success; the score by Leonard Bernstein and a newcomer named Stephen Sondheim didn’t hurt, either. The 1961 movie, dutiful, square and pretty dull as cinema though full of performance felicities, took care of the smash-hit part of the show’s reputation. Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ’61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion. 2:36. 3 ½ stars.
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.