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‘ANTLERS’: Filmmaker Scott Cooper makes his first foray into the horror genre with the creature feature “Antlers,” co-written with C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca, and produced by monster maestro Guillermo del Toro. Adapted from a short story, “The Quiet Boy,” by Nick Antosca, the setting of “Antlers” has been moved from West Virginia to a foggy small town in Oregon. While the mythology and psychology remains frighteningly vague in Antosca’s story, in the film it’s made more explicit, to largely frustrating results. Our heroine is Julia (Keri Russell), who has returned home to Oregon to live with her brother, Paul (Jesse Plemons), the local sheriff, after the death of their abusive father. As a teacher at the local elementary school, she takes a special interest in one of her students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), a bullied boy who is seemingly suffering from neglect. Lucas writes terrifying fairy tales with accompanying illustrations, depicting the harrowing lives of Big Wolf, Middle Wolf and Little Wolf. Worried about his welfare, and especially interested in saving a kid from an abusive situation, Julia follows Lucas around town and visits his home looking for his father, Frank (Scott Haze), and younger brother. In poking around trying to save a vulnerable kid, she unwittingly unleashes an ancient evil, which had only been precariously kept at bay by young Lucas’ efforts.
1:39. 2 stars. — Katie Walsh, Tribune news service
‘DUNE’: On screen, Frank Herbert’s Baron Harkonnen-sized 1965 novel “Dune” best suits a director operating in a pre-“Star Wars” mode of storytelling. The patient, densely embroidered narrative invests heavily in themes of environmental, ecological and colonialist exploitation. Earnest sentiments such as “When you take a life, you take your own” go against the grain of most successful Hollywood-financed science-fiction forays. Even in a post“Star Wars” smash such as “Avatar,” still the biggest hit in the universe, the point — setting aside the anguish over genocidal imperialist conquerors — is how many enemies a noble warrior can kill under pressure, in a hurry, so that we feel good and (per “Star Wars”) wouldn’t mind putting quarters in the same game again right away. “Dune” defies all that. So does its latest screen adaptation, a lot of which I love. 2:35. 3 stars. Streaming on HBO Max. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘THE FRENCH DISPATCH’: The great Hollywood film composer David Raksin said it: “None of my music should ever be played for the first time, since it only confuses people.” I’ve read several colleagues (who traveled the festival circuit earlier this year) say something similar about Wes Anderson’s new film, “The French Dispatch” — that it doesn’t benefit from a second viewing, it requires one, so elaborate is its visual construction and production detail. That’s another way of saying there’s a lot going on, and you won’t catch it all the first time. But in his fastidious, exacting, extraordinarily blinkered creation, writer-director Anderson this time has driven straight into a cul-de-sac, stranding every sort of good and great actor in the cinematic equivalent of a design meeting. 1:48. 2 stars.
— Michael Phillips
‘HALLOWEEN KILLS’: O Haddonfield! My Haddonfield! Why, in the name of fictitious Illinois towns, have you resorted to hapless mob violence, like the pitchfork crowd in “Frankenstein” or the January Sixers that came along after “Halloween Kills” was filmed? And why is “Halloween Kills” such a drag, as well as a clear step down from director and co-writer David Gordon Green’s 2018 “Halloween” reboot? Three years ago, that reboot made for a pretty good, hugely profitable reminder that Jamie Lee Curtis can open a movie, and serial killer Michael Meyers can still clog up a small town’s drainage system with the blood of his victims. The movie served as a solid showcase for Curtis, and it delivered in its climax, even if wobbled some en route. The new film’s a comparative mess — jaded, structurally awkward and overpacked. 1:46. 1 ½ stars. Streaming on Peacock.
— Michael Phillips
‘THE HARDER THEY FALL’: “I’m lightning with the blam-blams,” brags the quick-draw ace played by RJ Cyler in the violent, jokey, starry Western “The Harder They Fall.” The ace’s name is Jim Beckwourth, based on a real 19th-century figure, as are many of the outlaws populating British co-writer, director and musician Jeymes Samuel’s larkish bloodbath. The scale, the tone and the splatter go great with Samuel’s soundtrack. It’s loaded with dubstep, reggae,
Ennio Morricone-adjacent orchestral swells and artists such as Jay-Z, who also co-produced. (Samuel goes by The Bullitts in the music half of his career.) For all the mashups and mayhem, there’s a hint of scrambled reality in the film, with a half-century’s worth of Black figures corralled into the same time period and the same narrative for imagination’s sake. In the words of the film’s opening titles: “These. People. Existed.” 2:10. 3 stars. Streaming on Netflix Nov. 3. — Michael Phillips
‘LAST NIGHT IN SOHO’: Nostalgia can offer history a brighter, more exciting and decidedly rose-colored sheen. This is the question filmmaker Edgar Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns pick up in “Last Night in Soho,” a neon-drenched, blood-soaked trip through the swinging ’60s of Soho, London, as experienced through modern eyes. In this giallo-inspired psychological slasher film, Wright and Wilson-Cairns explore the psychic connection between the past and present, investigating the spirits that haunt the spaces we occupy. It’s a colorful, hallucinatory throwback, and a wild ride through the mind. 1:56. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘NO TIME TO DIE’: As Robert Graves wrote when he was ridding himself of stultifying English conventions, a generation before Sir Ian Fleming created James Bond: Goodbye to all that. Watching the final Daniel Craig iteration of 007 settle his affairs and get right with his emotions in “No Time to Die,” the most plainly divided of all the Bond movies — nostalgicretro, depressive-ashen, frisky-jokey, apocalyptic sentiment al—one can’t help but think a dozen hyphenated things at once. Let’s start with: Goodgreat job, Mr. Craig. As bittersweet farewells go, this one’s quite good. 2:43. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips ‘PASSING’: The closing shot of “Passing,” Rebecca Hall’s sleek and transfixing adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, peers down from a great height at a courtyard on a cold December night, a vision partially obscured by falling snow and set to the graceful tinkling of piano chords. The image has a hushed, frozen-in-time loveliness that feels faintly unreal. You almost expect the camera to pull back and reveal that this piercingly sad story has been unfolding inside a snow globe, trapping its characters in exquisite clothes, repetitive motions and the slow-shifting mores of a society that has left them scant room to breathe.
That society is 1920s
New York, a world that Larsen rendered in deft, economical strokes but which emerges here in a blur of cloche hats and flapper dresses, and also in the blasts of jazz and snatches of gossip swirling around a crowded dance floor. Against this backdrop, Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and her doctor husband, Brian (Andre Holland), are the very picture of Black uppermiddle-class propriety. They have two young sons, a stately Harlem brownstone and a stable marriage, though not too stable to be knocked off-balance by Clare Bellew (Ruth Negga), an old friend whose sudden reappearance in Irene’s life dredges up long-hidden anxieties and closely guarded secrets. 1:38. Not ranked. Streaming on Netflix Nov. 10. — Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.