A QUIET PLACE

(Angela M. Davis, a real-life celeb instructor whose motivational speeches have inspired Beyoncé and Oprah on the bike). What if we all just woke up one day and decided to be confident? Renee (Schumer) is crippled by low self-esteem. She’s obsessed with beauty — and her own perceived lack of it. When she takes a tumble from her SoulCycle bike, the head injury makes her think she’s hot stuff. She scores her dream job and gets the guy, thanks to a simple attitude adjustment. It’s a powerful depiction of just what that kind of mentality shift can do. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

LITTLE PINK HOUSE

Not rated, 98 minutes. Niantic. “Little Pink House” is the story about a nurse, Susette Kelo, and the battle to save her and her neighbors’ homes from eminent domain in the Fort Trumbull section of New London. The fight went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. The movie stars Catherine Keener as Kelo.

LIFE OF THE PARTY

H1/2 PG-13, 115 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Few movie stars of the moment are as likable on screen as Melissa McCarthy. She has Tom Hanks’ innate niceness, John Belushi’s physicality, Robin Williams’ ability to switch from laughter to tears. As Paul Feig discovered in “Bridesmaids” and Judd Apatow learned in “This is 40,” put McCarthy in your movie for even one scene and she’ll steal it away. Why, then, have her own movies been so bad? A case in point is “Life of the Party,” the third film McCarthy has written with her husband, Ben Falcone, who directs her. McCarthy plays Deanna, a housewife who, dumped by her husband of 24 years (Matt Walsh), decides to go back to college — the very same one her daughter, Maddie (Molly Gordon), attends. It’s a perfect premise for McCarthy, a near-copy of Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 classic “Back to School,” only with a heart-ofgold female at its center rather than a male boor. “Life of the Party” ought to afford McCarthy ample opportunity for the aforementioned laughs, tears and physical pratfalls, but those moments are scarce. As with previous McCarthy-Falcone outings, this one suffers from vague writing and poorly-structured jokes that stretch even McCarthy’s abundant talent to the breaking point. For starters, how does popular senior Maddie feel about her overbearing, fashion-challenged mom? Slight mortification turns instantly to loving acceptance, which is neither believable nor amenable to comedy. — Rafer Guzmán, Newsday PG-13, 90 minutes. Stonington, Westbrook. Actually, in space, someone can hear you scream. And now they’re here. They’re the alien invaders of “A Quiet Place,” giant insect predators that hunt by sound. Ferocious and voracious, they’ve already eaten most of our planet, city by city. And now they’re in your little town. That’s the idea behind this great scary movie from real-life couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt. They co-star as a couple of New York farmers, with three cute kids, a nice spread upstate — and a horde of hungry, grasshopper-like things trying to get into their house. The busy Krasinski also directed, and helped produce and script. He has created a smart, surprising little shocker. Because sound has become the most dangerous thing on earth, the family stays as silent as it can. So does the film, giving it a fresh, unearthly feel. This may be a sci-fi fantasy about giant man-eating bugs, but it’s grounded in human facts and folly. Little here is safe. Nothing is predictable. It’s surprising how effectively the silence increases the scares, too. “A Quiet Place” cleverly reminds us of just how unearthly nothing can be. You sit and watch, on the edge of your seat, straining to hear. Wait! Wait, what’s that? Oh, right. Your heart, pounding. — Stephen Witty, New York Daily News

RBG

PG, 97 minutes. Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas. The notion of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the diminutive and soft-spoken Supreme Court justice, as a judicial “rock star,” at least in the eyes of progressives who love her sharply worded dissents to opinions rendered by the increasingly conservative court, may seem a strange one. But the lively and thorough profile painted of her by the documentary “RBG,” in which she is described in just those terms, makes a persuasive argument for that characterization. Now 85, Ginsburg is viewed by liberals, anxious about her advanced age and the rightward drift of the court, as a champion of the left, a bastion of resistance whose absence will be a loss for progress. Ginsburg, for her part, says she has no immediate plans to retire. And, when asked whether she regrets not having stepped down while President Barack Obama still had the chance to nominate a replacement, she says only that she has always believed that she should stay on as long as she is able. And is she able? What about the infamous footage of her seeming to drift off during the 2015 State of the Union address? Cue the shots of Ginsburg doing push-ups. Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West mark the 25th anniversary of Ginsburg’s high court confirmation hearing by including excerpts from that 1993 Senate grilling, along with snippets of a 2017 panel discussion moderated by Nina Totenberg of NPR and more recent interviews. These rather conventional documentary components are supplemented by talkinghead interviews with colleagues and friends, footage of her working out with her personal trainer and, most interestingly, archival audio from some of the cases that Ginsburg argued, as an attorney, before the Supreme Court.

Rather than focusing on personality, the bulk of “RBG” has to do with its subject’s lifelong fight against gender discrimination. — Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

SHOW DOGS

PG, 92 minutes. Through today only at Waterford. Still playing at Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Max, a macho, solitary Rottweiler police dog, is ordered to go undercover as a primped show dog in a prestigious dog whow, along with his human partner, to avert a disaster from happening. A review wasn’t available by deadline.

SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY

PG-13, 143 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” begins with the Star Wars franchise’s signature tag line, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” But it seems like only yesterday that the title character met his end in “The Force Awakens,” the first installment in yet another trilogy that feels like it’s trying desperately to take another bite of the original apple — one that only looks shinier and juicier, by comparison, the more chomps are taken out it. As far as “Solo” is concerned, this dutiful excavation of Han Solo’s early years performs all the necessary feats of fan service that viewers have come to expect from seemingly endless iterations of the series. The grouchy but somehow sexy curmudgeon that Harrison Ford created in the 1977 film and its sequels is shown here as a young man, living by his wits on Corellia, a planet where young people are routinely thrown into lives of Dickensian poverty and exploitation. What he wants to do more than anything else is fly, and as “Solo” opens, he’s in the process of stealing a precious fuel called coaxium, which he plans to sell on the black market to buy a ship of his own. As rendered by the moodily attractive Alden Ehrenreich, who could have played a young Henry Hill in “Goodfellas,” this Solo bears only a glancing resemblance to the gruff, irreverent flyboy whom Ford portrayed so winningly. Ehrenreich is a gifted actor and possesses a rakishly appealing persona, but the character’s inner darkness is only hinted at, as the story line of “Solo” progresses, and the betrayals and heartbreaks he endures come into focus. For the most part, “Solo” is a conglomeration of set pieces we’ve seen before — from familiar chase scenes and a battle sequence reminiscent of World War I trench warfare to a train heist followed by a decadent cocktail party thrown at an art-deco-inspired space yacht — with some tasty callbacks to Star Wars legend and lore thrown in to delight lifelong aficionados. Thus we witness a meet-cute between Solo and one of his most beloved sidekicks, with whom he is imprisoned in the muck and mire of an underground cell on the “mud planet” Mimban. And we watch as he meets the true love of his life, an object of instant attraction that he lays eyes on after a highstakes card game with a gambler named Lando Calrissian, portrayed in a playful turn by a perfectly cast Donald Glover. — Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post